{"id":28687,"date":"2025-01-10T05:30:32","date_gmt":"2025-01-10T10:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=28687"},"modified":"2025-01-10T10:32:18","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T15:32:18","slug":"beat-21st-century-crimson-men-part-3-of-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/10\/beat-21st-century-crimson-men-part-3-of-3\/","title":{"rendered":"BEAT: 21st Century Crimson Men (Part 3 of 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Speaking of surprises, what, if anything, has surprised or impressed you the most about putting this project together? <\/b><\/p>\n

There was one thing that really surprised me. I didn\u2019t know Steve Vai; I had met him once or twice in passing over a few decades. Here\u2019s a guy I never knew; he\u2019s a giant guitar god, and he could be anything he wanted to be. He could be a real jerk if he wanted to be.<\/p>\n

But he\u2019s a very hard working guy, and his attitude is perfect. I\u2019m thoroughly, happily surprised with the way he is as a person and as a player. He\u2019s so highly professional and down to earth. There\u2019s not a drama there; there\u2019s no ego thing going on. It\u2019s not all about him. It\u2019s really, \u201cI want to be in this. I want to be a team player.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other thing is our producer, Scrote. He decided, \u201cIf we\u2019re going to take this on, we really have to have the right kind of company to do this.\u201d So he formed a production company with Miles Copeland, who managed the Police and managed to change the world. He has a history of being great at a lot of things, and he hand-picked the right crew to do this properly. So, for me, BEAT is actually on a higher level in lots of ways; not just the quality of musicianship and the material. I especially love being in something that doesn\u2019t have any obvious problems written all over it. This is a good team.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Back in the \u201880s when Discipline became King Crimson, was the idea to wipe the slate clean and sound completely different than previous lineups?<\/b><\/p>\n

That was absolutely<\/i> the goal from the beginning. And that\u2019s probably why Robert [initially] didn\u2019t want to call it King Crimson; he didn\u2019t want any association; he had a very strong vision of what he wanted it to be. And we said, \u201cWe\u2019ll follow your vision on this, and happily do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Tony and I had complained more than once about the name Discipline. We said, \u201cWe don\u2019t really love that name. Maybe it has a different connotation for you, but being Americans, for us it\u2019s kind of an unfriendly name. Can we name it something else?\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a few weeks into rehearsing when the material was starting to flow, and Robert came in and said, \u201cWhatever we call this band, it has the spirit of King Crimson.\u201d And I said, \u201cWell, then, why don\u2019t we call<\/i> it King Crimson?\u201d To me personally, I respected that band second only to the Beatles. And I thought, \u201cThis is a higher level of music, and I would be proud to be in a band called King Crimson.\u201d<\/p>\n

I really take great pride in King Crimson. It meant a lot to me, and it drew a different line in the sand for me personally as to what I could and couldn\u2019t do, how I had to behave and what I could and should write. At the same time, I was starting to put out my solo record. So anything that seemed not right for King Crimson, I had another perfect place to put it.<\/p>\n

When I first heard the <\/b>Discipline<\/b><\/i> LP, I remember thinking that there was really no precedent for what King Crimson was doing. Did you have a sense at the time that the four of you were really blazing new paths?<\/b><\/p>\n

I thought there was nothing at all like it. For one thing, every one of us had new technologies at our fingertips that no one else had used. Both Robert and I had guitar synthesizers. Bill was the first person silly enough to try to make electronic drums work. And then Tony Levin walked in with this thing called the Chapman stick, something you\u2019d never even seen before.<\/p>\n

So I knew the musical language of what we were doing was going to be different, no matter what. And it was a time period when there was a lot of freedom and creativity. At least in our line of the music business, but maybe not in the mainstream. But it was a time when you really felt like you could do those kinds of things, and King Crimson were definitely the people to do it.<\/p>\n

Someone told me once, \u201cYou guys have a license to kill.\u201d And I think that\u2019s true, because we could do whatever we wanted. We weren\u2019t trying to be the next big thing; we weren\u2019t trying to write hit songs or be on the radio or anything. We were just trying to create something no one had ever heard.<\/p>\n

When these concert dates for BEAT were announced, tickets for many of the shows sold out almost immediately. Did that surprise you? <\/b><\/p>\n

It did. The team putting all this together was saying, \u201cWe want to go in small; we don\u2019t want to try to play bigger places. We\u2019d rather play a smaller place and pack it out.\u201d Normally, that would have been my philosophy, too, but we were feeling like, \u201cWait a minute. I think you\u2019re going to find out there\u2019s a lot of pent-up desire to see this. It\u2019s not been done for decades.\u201d My wife, who manages me, would say, \u201cThis is going to be more than you think. If you don\u2019t know the history of Crimson and the fan base and things like that, you\u2019ve got to take that more in consideration.\u201d<\/p>\n

You have people who did get to see some of it back then, but mostly you have a brand new audience, and then on top of that, you have the Tool [fans] coming; that\u2019s a huge audience. And then you have Steve Vai\u2019s audience. So I felt like, \u201cThere\u2019s no way this is going to lose.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was still surprising that it happened. The explosion part of it, I wasn\u2019t ready for. I thought it would be a slow buildup and gradually everything would present itself. We [originally] thought we\u2019d do 30 or 40 shows. We\u2019re now doing 65 and we\u2019re covering a whole lot of area.<\/p>\n

BEAT strikes me as an opportunity for that music to get some of the recognition that it didn\u2019t get the first time around\u2026<\/b><\/p>\n

Absolutely. And that\u2019s another reason to do it. That\u2019s another thing I thought: \u201cThat music, those records deserve a second chance. They are pretty timeless. They sound brand new. They sound fresh.\u201d There\u2019s still nothing like it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part Two… Speaking of surprises, what, if anything, has surprised or impressed you the most about putting this project together? There was one thing that really surprised me. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28694,"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-28687","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\/28687","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=28687"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28933,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28687\/revisions\/28933"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}