{"id":28686,"date":"2025-01-09T05:30:59","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T10:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=28686"},"modified":"2025-01-10T10:31:50","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T15:31:50","slug":"beat-21st-century-crimson-men-part-2-of-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/09\/beat-21st-century-crimson-men-part-2-of-3\/","title":{"rendered":"BEAT: 21st Century Crimson Men (Part 2 of 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n

The \u201880s lineup of King Crimson was radically different from what had come before; it had its own distinct sound and sensibility. How closely will BEAT follow the sound, character and structure of those arrangements?<\/b><\/p>\n

Well, I\u2019m in charge of picking the arrangements and the songs. And I think some of them have essentials that have to be followed. There\u2019s not much reason to fool with certain things; they are what they are, and people will want to hear them that way. It will never be exactly<\/i> like the record, because I don\u2019t want Steve Vai or Danny Carey to play<\/i> exactly like the record. I want them to be themselves. And I think that\u2019s what the audiences want.<\/p>\n

But I think having Steve Vai in the band, for example, there\u2019s a lot of places where I see that we could gradually develop outward from there on our own. I mean, I want to see him playing Steve Vai stuff, and I want to hear that myself. He sends me a video almost every day showing me where he is in his journey of finding everything, and I can see that he\u2019s getting more and more comfortable with all of it. And I\u2019m coaching him a little bit, saying, \u201cThat part right there, you don\u2019t have to play it like Robert [did]. You can do your own sounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

I feel it may be close to the original stuff a bit more at the beginning, but we have 65 shows. And we\u2019re not a cover band; we\u2019re gonna develop it. The idea is to celebrate the music, but it\u2019s also to push it forward in our own ways and make it more in sync with what is happening now.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Personally, though, I have gone back and taken great lengths to find some of the sounds that I had back then, which are now pretty hard to find. And I\u2019ve changed my own gear to be half modern and half vintage. A big part of that [\u201880s Crimson] sound was two things in the guitar world. There was the running dual guitar, things that were clean sounding on songs like \u201cThree of a Perfect Pair\u201d and \u201cFrame by Frame.\u201d And then there were the different things that each of us did in our own way. Robert with his type of soloing, and me with all my crazy sounds and my soloing.<\/p>\n

And then there were the synthesizer parts on songs like \u201cThe Sheltering Sky.\u201d The essence of that sound has a lot to do with the [Roland] GR300 guitar synth of that era. Roland has released two new synthesizers that can do some of that, and Steve will be using some of the new stuff. I\u2019ve heard what he\u2019s doing with it, and it\u2019s very good. But I\u2019m going to use my original<\/i> GR 300.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve seen anybody play a GR300 in decades!<\/b><\/p>\n

No, you haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Both you and Steve Vai are veterans of Frank Zappa\u2019s band, which in the music world is a shorthand for \u201cThey can do anything.\u201d Still, Steve sounds nothing at all like Robert Fripp. In BEAT, will you have the same musical role that you had in \u201880s King Crimson, or does Steve\u2019s participation alter that equation?<\/b><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it does. There are one or two places where I\u2019ve said it would be better if I played Robert\u2019s part, for whatever reason. In \u201cSleepless,\u201d for example, it\u2019s easier for me to play his guitar line than to play the sweeping synth stuff while I\u2019m singing.<\/p>\n

But mostly, no. I went out to Steve\u2019s studio and we worked for hours on sorting those things out; I\u2019d sit with him and talk about songs: \u201cThis is this; you do this, and I do that.\u201d A lot of times he thought Robert [had been] doing something I was doing! That\u2019s typical, because it\u2019s hard to listen to those records and know what\u2019s going on. But we straightened it out pretty quickly.<\/p>\n

A lot to do with this particular band is to highlight the songwriting, because that\u2019s my side of it more than anything else. I had some hand in some of the heavy instrumentals, but that was more Robert\u2019s territory in that band. And so we decided, \u201cLet\u2019s pull out a lot of songs, some of which were hardly \u2013 if ever \u2013 done [live] by King Crimson.\u201d So my plan is to do things that people will expect \u2013 the essentials \u2013 but then surprise them with some things that they maybe never got to hear. And then we\u2019ll open it up from there, so you\u2019ll think, \u201cWow, these guys are taking this somewhere!\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201880s lineup would sometimes play 1974\u2019s \u201cRed.\u201d Are you going to consider dipping back farther into the catalog, or will you focus tightly on that \u201880s period? <\/b><\/p>\n

When we first started in the \u201880s, we went out and played some shows just to start breaking in the new material. And we realized we didn\u2019t have enough material to even do a concert! At that point, Robert was very stiff about introducing anything from the past. But he finally said, \u201cLet\u2019s learn these two: \u2018Larks\u2019 Tongues in Aspic\u2019 and \u2018Red.\u2019\u201d And we played those for the next four years. So I consider \u201cRed\u201d to be part of that<\/i> repertoire, of that band.<\/p>\n

And, yes, we are doing it. Steve was happy with doing it, but he didn\u2019t think that we should do more [from the back catalog] than that. Everybody loves that one, and it\u2019ll be a big shot in the arm to hear it. But that\u2019s as far as we need to go, because there\u2019s more material on those three records than we could possibly play in one concert anyway!<\/p>\n

In revisiting the material from <\/b>Discipline<\/b><\/i>, <\/b>Beat<\/b><\/i> and <\/b>Three of a Perfect Pair<\/b><\/i>, have you made any new discoveries about those pieces?<\/b><\/p>\n

I knew what Bill [Bruford] was doing because I\u2019m [also] a drummer, and he was my favorite drummer at the time anyway. But the surprising thing to me was how many things I discovered that the other guys were doing. I was so busy taking care of my roles, writing the material and then touring; it was all just a race against time. And so I didn\u2019t always have the time to check out: \u201cWow. Tony Levin is playing one of our \u2018guitar\u2019 parts right there!\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s more to do with what Robert and Tony were doing that surprises me now. And it\u2019s always amazing. When I look back at our live shows, I think, \u201cOh, my gosh, how did I do that?\u201d But I\u2019m not trying to do it note-for-note the same way now anyway. But I feel like I\u2019ve got a leg up in the sense that I do know some of it and I will be attacking it in that way. And yet playing with the new [gear] that I have available now, there are so many exciting guitar things that I want to apply to that music.<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a>\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One… The \u201880s lineup of King Crimson was radically different from what had come before; it had its own distinct sound and sensibility. How closely will BEAT […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28697,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,44,54,56],"tags":[130,5566,5583,1250,5348,2246],"class_list":["post-28686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-live-shows","category-post-rock","category-prog","tag-adrian-belew","tag-beat","tag-danny-carey","tag-king-crimson","tag-steve-vai","tag-tony-levin","cat-41-id","cat-44-id","cat-54-id","cat-56-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28686"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28932,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28686\/revisions\/28932"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}