Errors-To: admin at elephant-talk dot com Reply-To: newsletter at elephant-talk dot com Sender: moderator at elephant-talk dot com Precedence: bulk From: moderator at elephant-talk dot com To: newsletter at elephant-talk dot com Subject: Elephant Talk #814 E L E P H A N T T A L K The Internet newsletter for Robert Fripp and King Crimson enthusiasts Number 814 Thursday, 22 March 2001 Today's Topics: A lodestone, indeed! Red 24 bit remaster Poseidon remaster Hackett Blues! Greg Lake touring with Ringo Confirmed Leave Adrian Alone Frame-by-frame box set Personnel Modern-era listening suggestions? HDCD Best 73-75 Era Live Disks? A commentary about Napster and intellectual property. who could replace Adrian if he left? Ian Matthews ne: McDonald What King Crimson Must Do Now ------------------ A D M I N I S T R I V I A --------------------- POSTS: Please send all posts to newsletter at elephant-talk dot com To UNSUBSCRIBE, or to CHANGE ADDRESS: Send a message with a body of HELP to admin at elephant-talk dot com or use the DIY list machine at http://www.elephant-talk.com/list/ To ASK FOR HELP about your ET subscription: Send a message to: help at elephant-talk dot com ET Web: http://www.elephant-talk.com/ Read the ET FAQ before you post a question at http://www.elephant-talk.com/faq.htm Current TOUR DATES info can always be found at http://www.elephant-talk.com/gigs/tourdates.shtml You can read the most recent seven editions of ET at http://www.elephant-talk.com/newsletter.htm THE ET TEAM: Toby Howard (Moderator), Dan Kirkdorffer (Webmaster) Mike Dickson (List Admin), and a cast of thousands. The views expressed herein are those of the individual authors. ET is produced using John Relph's Digest system v3.7b (relph at sgi dot com). ------------------ A I V I R T S I N I M D A --------------------- Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 16:24:09 -0600 From: Tim Church Subject: A lodestone, indeed! Re: Fripp (quoted from his diary, Monday 12th. March, 2001): "Music introduces itself to each generation of listeners through their own generation of players. Once the contact is made, we know for ourselves. Then, we may discover the same contact in the work of other generations, using the taste of our own direct experience as a lodestone & reference point." A lodestone, indeed! This idea has always fascinated me. I am sure we can all think of albums that opened up entire worlds of music (that were previously inaccessible). King Crimson's Discipline album was a lodestone for me. I was 21 years old when Discipline was released upon the world. That time period (1979-1983) had the music of my generation. Back in 1981, my reading of interviews with Fripp, Eno, Hassell, Byrne, Reich, Cage, Miles, and friends gave me a context to place this strange new music into. (I think that the provision of context for music is important. Music does not live in a vacuum. The context that our music lives in... our culture... is like the water in which we swim... like the air in which we speak. It is important.) Back then, the time was right for Discipline (accompanied by Talking Head's "Remain in Light", Byrne and Eno's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", David Byrne's "The Catherine Wheel" and Jon Hassell's "Dream Theory in Malaya", among others). Fripp, Belew, Levin, and Bruford were brimming with new musical energies. There was nothing like this music, ever before. And one could not find four musicians more up to the task of giving it a voice. Tony Levin's bass note choices, Belew's soaring noise-solos, Bruford's off-beat beats... the band's cohesion... this was heavy, heavy stuff! It rocked... it soared... it moved mountains... It still does! Fripp's dense harmonies... and those strange intervals (in his guitar solos) burned their way into my mental musical vocabulary. They enriched my ideas of what was possible (and acceptable) in music. Dissonance suddenly sounded beautiful (and necessary!) Suddenly, the worlds of 20th Century Composers, Jazz, and World Music became accessible to me. From then on, I craved beats of nines, thirteens, and seventeens, against fives, sevens and elevens. I needed tri-tones! As Fripp suggested above, "Discipline" was my entry point into the (rich, and complex) work of previous generations. "Discipline" led me to: Bartok, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Ligeti, and Ives. It led me to Miles, Coltrane, Dolphy, Monk, and Ornette. It led me to Reich, Glass, Riley, and Branca. Back then (with time on my hands) I spent a lot of time in the music book section of the local small town library... trying to grasp the contexts of this other (unpopular) music. We didn't have the web in '81. Information moved slowly (if at all) in small towns. But I was richly rewarded for my investigations. Bartok's "Allegro Molto Cappriccioso" (from String Quartet #2) was pure rock music, the first time I heard it. And so was that thumping section in Stravinky's Rite of Spring. After reading about Fripp's desire of combining the spirits of Hendrix, The Beatles, and Stravinsky, I listened to "Rite of Spring" almost every day during the summer of 1982... curious to understand its strange language. Later, I could hear the echoes of Stravinsky's "Rite" rhythms in Crimson's Lark's Tongues. Fripp's repetitive, interlocking guitar lines (and Frippertronic loops) seemed to be informed by Steve Reich's music... which I had just discovered... but Fripp transformed Reich's ideas into something completely different... using a more-encompassing harmonic palette. "Discipline" combined a lot of powerful forces (from different times and places) into a new hybrid form. And it sent me into vast, uncharted musical territories. I wonder how a 21-year-old might be influenced by Thrak or TCOL today? Where does it send her? Tim Discipline is not an end in itself... ------------------------------ Date: 15 Mar 2001 16:21:27 -0800 From: Francisco Xavier Garcia Nava Subject: Red 24 bit remaster Hi friends!!!!My name is Francisco Xavier Garcia and I live in Mexico City;recently I bought several Crimson stuff and I wanna tell you that Red remaster is really amazing;the sound is clean and the bass solo is one of the best that I have heard;the Wetton voice resemble Greg Lake and I like it a lot. I have two questions:the first,I wanna know if Bill Bruford and Tony Levin will no longer stay in Crimson anymore and the other one is that it could be possible that Robert Fripp might do a remaster of Epitaph,at least of the BBC sessions,because the sound is not very clear and in the bottom of 21th schizoid can be heard a dizzy sound that is not cool. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 00:54:40 EST From: Tommoth at aol dot com Subject: Poseidon remaster "In the Wake of Poseidon" was always my favorite song, so I finally bought the remastered CD. I was surprised and very disappointed to hear that the title song had been shortened by 33 seconds! Why? Compared to Atlantic's noisy vinyl pressings, the CD is, of course, much quieter and has better clarity, but the low end (bass guitar and kick drum) sounds attenuated and lacks the punch of the old vinyl. Have the master tapes degraded over time? I'm keeping my vinyl! ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 21:52:58 +1100 From: "Tony Greig" Subject: Hackett Blues! Hello Crimophiles, Apologies for the presumption regarding the Steve Hackett 'Tokyo Tapes' and the Watcher of the Skies 'Genesis Revisited' I mentioned in my last Et posting. I had heard the music from these recordings before reading about it and thought it was all from the same concert. Cheers, Tony Greig. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 07:13:19 -0500 From: Warren Melnick Subject: Greg Lake touring with Ringo Confirmed I just received an email from David Fishof, whose company David Fishof Presents produces the Ringo tours, confirming that the lineup I sent earlier, including Greg Lake, will be the lineup for this summer's tour. ALl The Best, Warren ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 15:30:43 From: "Jon Benfield" Subject: Leave Adrian Alone I am digusted and embarrassed by the recent questions about Adrian being in the band. (so is Robert, apparently)I feel like that the newsletter is driving away the band that it is supposed to be in support of. Its like the "Da Bears" guys have defected to St. Louis. Well, some people just need to bitch...it's their goal to make evryone as miserable as they are. Toby, let's take some action here...there have been subjects banned from this board that were alot less offensive and more infrequent. "Folks are about as happy as they want to be" - -Abraham Lincon "Ade has already been down with several lyric ideas printed up for my perusal. I didn't discuss with him whether he was up to the job, or not. That's a decision best left for posters to Elephant Talk. A rapid mental survey of all other possible suggested applicants for the job lead me right back to the ideal candidate - Adrian Belew. I'll discuss this with Trey & Pat and see if we can all agree on offering Ade the gig, risking the wrath of the loyal 1973 King Crimson fan base, that is." ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 11:23:37 EST From: Damonevan at aol dot com Subject: Frame-by-frame box set Hi- I've finally discovered King Crimson (after years of being a progressive rock fan) and have realized that the box set Frame-by-Frame would be *perfect* for me. It seems to be OOP, though. Given that it's a pretty comprehensive overview of the band, this doesn't make much sense to me. Does anyone know if this will be re-released at any point? Thanks, - -DJ ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 16:30:53 From: "Cedric Hendrix" Subject: Personnel Greetings All, Just a quick message to all you ETers who believe you know what is best for the almight Crim when it comes to personnel. Please check out Fripp's diary entry for March 15. I think your answer lies there. Now give it a rest, already. Best, Ced ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 11:12:10 -0700 From: "Michael Cox" Subject: Modern-era listening suggestions? Hi all, Like many here probably, I'm an old-time Crimson fan just picking up the threads again. I'd like to dive into some of the newer Crimson but I'd like to be selective because my CD budget is limited. At my house, with 5 active musicians in the family, "music budget" means gear, not CD's. Please don't flame me for my preferences, but I'm one of those old farts who thinks the world ended with LTIA Part 2. Virtually everything I've heard from KC since then is obviously good music but not my personal cup of tea, but I admit I only have the "Concise" CD, with Heartbeat, TOAPP, Frame by Frame etc. all of which material leaves me very cold. I say this not to get flamed but so you'll know what I'm looking for. I heard the song THRAK itself and again, it's off in another John Cage-meets-NIN sort of direction I'm just not interested in. I know I'm probably just begging for some fanboy to tell me to Move On or accuse me of being a Basement Dweller or some other silly Frippoff, but are there specific titles anyone thinks I'd enjoy? I ask not just for myself but for my 13-year old son, who just learned RED on guitar and is now working on LTIA, and who refuses to believe that's all of this material there is. Interestingly enough, my mild likes and dislikes are dramatically magnified in him, to the point where he considers the Stick a very uncool instument. I'd like to alter that opinion. Listening suggestions, anyone? (My 10-year-old drumming daughter thinks Bruford is God - I'm not telling her the Awful Truth yet! ;) Michael ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 13:54:25 -0500 From: "jesscott" Subject: HDCD My brother and I have been looking for the answer to this question in ET recently, but so far it has not popped up unless we missed it: We noticed a HDCD logo on the new KC 24 bit remaster gatefolds. It appears to be on all of them up through RED, except ITCOTCK. We looked through back issues of Sound & Vision magazine from the past year and there is no explanation as to what exactly HDCD is. Obviously it is some kind of higher definition format, but could someone tell us what it is and how it is encoded/decoded? I see that some new components coming out have the logo on them, but the current ones we own don't have it. And why do all of the remasters have the logo on them except the first album? The Smith Brothers ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 20:02:24 -0500 From: Phil Evans Subject: Best 73-75 Era Live Disks? Between the Club & the regular commercial releases there are a fair number of Wetton era KC Live Disks available. - -USA - -Great Deceiver - -Night Watch - - Central Park - - yet to be released Mainz Anyone care to offer opinions on which are the best ones? Thanks! ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 00:46:05 EST From: Fermier at aol dot com Subject: A commentary about Napster and intellectual property. Every reader of Elephant Talk is aware of Robert Fripp's opinions on pirating music and intellectual property rights. In the interest of sparking a discussion about whether the music sharing web site Napster is violating copyrights, I'm posting the following commentary by guitarist Ted Nugent, that was published in the Wall Street Journal on March 13, 2001. What Crimson fans think of the arguments that Mr. Nugent presents? ==================================================== Commentary Want to Hear My Songs? Pay Up. By Ted Nugent. Mr. Nugent is a guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. My younger brother Johnny and I rounded the corner of the vast parking lot outside the concert arena and immediately spotted the greasy hippie with the huge bag slung over his arm. Brothers Nuge looked at each other with a gleam in our rock 'n' roll eyes and stated in unison, like military commandos: "Bogie, 12 o'clock!" We approached the young man at a steady gait, stepping past his three or four customers. Though I had my hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, he looked confused. Still, we figured he had to recognize me, given that he was selling Ted Nugent T-shirts at a sold-out Ted Nugent concert. We surrounded him and told him that he could not sell shirts with my name and photograph on them. It was illegal, unfair and unacceptable. At this point Johnny and I yanked the canvas bag of merchandise and cash from his grasp and departed, returning backstage to hand out the cheap imported booty to friends, crew members and charities. I used some as rags to clean my guns. We relentlessly repeated this across America for years, determined to stop the unjust bootleg merchandising of my copyrighted image. We ran into occasional resistance, but it never deterred me from taking what was rightfully mine. Even on ABC television I faced threats from some punk who thought he was dealing with just another pushover dope-smoking hippie band that he could rip off with impunity. Hell, I hunt grizzly bears with a bow and arrow. Bring it on, greaseballs! I didn't need anyone to explain to me whether selling or giving away other people's products without their permission was the right thing to do. Common sense is alive and well in America if you're not stoned, drunk, greedy or just plain stupid. To think that anyone could even argue that Napster has the right to give away an artist's product is ridiculous. Hey, I have a good idea! I'll just stand outside the local grocery store and offer its food free to the public. It doesn't matter if the owner took the risk, pays all the taxes and overhead, struggles with a bureaucratic land-mine field of regulations and laws, invests his warrior work ethic in bucketsful of sweat day after day, and basically busts his butt to provide a quality service and jobs for the community. Hell, no. I'll just make that decision for him, thank you, and give away his products and hard-earned money. Who does he think he is anyway? The same applies to recording artists. We invest sweat and blood and millions of dollars creating musical products. It takes years of insane sacrifice and grueling tour schedules and intense effort. To think a third party should be allowed to give away our product for zero compensation is brain-dead and un-American. The Recording Industry Association of America attributes a 39% drop in shipments of compact disk singles in 1999 to this Internet downloading system. Full-length CD sales also dropped dramatically. In the short amount of time Napster has been in front of the courts, its users have grown from a few thousand to more than 50 million. Thank God common sense is still operating in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which recently ruled Napster must stop providing unauthorized music. Artists -- or grocers for that matter -- who wish to give away their own merchandise or services as a promotional or marketing scheme can have at it. But on any legal or intellectual level, only that individual can legitimately make the decision. Artists and record companies already give away an enormous amount of free goods. No one outside that business circle should dare to do it for them and expect to get away with it. Facing a runaway freight train of technology, we in the industry are moving to upgrade the quality of music delivery while also protecting copyrights, intellectual property rights and freedom of speech. With the book and motion-picture industries also susceptible to the sort of pirating Napster encourages, these communities will increasingly have to fight with us if they are to protect their futures. There is no reason for allowing intellectual property to enrich lives without payment to the artist or business team. I'm just an ol' guitar player, but surely what is fair is fair. I'll leave the mind-boggling technology to the experts, but if I want bread, I'm going to pay the baker. ============================================== ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 09:27:02 -0600 From: "Lord Bravery" Subject: who could replace Adrian if he left? I recall someone saying (in complete sarcasm) that Ric Ocasek fit the form. Everyone disagreed with that (including me, though I didn't post about it). But, this got me thinking. What band from the eighties (and other decade: in this case the nineties) has a very talented vocalist and guitarist, who has some huge Beatle-esque pretensions, and is slightly exotic in appearence? Two bands come to mind: World Party, and Tears For Fears. Could anmy of you possibly see either Roland Orzabal or Karl Wallinger fill in the Crimson space if Ade ever realizes that the ProjeKcts and ConstruKction lineup changes were a subtle way of kicking out Discipline for full replacements (as everytime Fripp fired a band lineup, there was too much animosity)??? I could quite easily take a Crimson with Roland. What about you? ------------------------------ Date: 17 Mar 2001 15:17:13 EST From: James Dusewicz Subject: Ian Matthews ne: McDonald Iian Matthews was not on Fairport Convention's excellent last album to involve Ashley Hutchings and the late Sandy Denny, LIEGE & LIEF(1969). In fact he was only on a couple of cuts off of Fairport's prior album from that same year, UNHALFBRICKING(1969). The last album he had any real input on was Fairport's second album, the first with Sandy Denny, WHAT WE DID ON OUR HOLIDAY(1968). jim campaigner at usa dot net James Dusewicz ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2001 11:29:20 EST From: Kplnf at aol dot com Subject: What King Crimson Must Do Now What King Crimson Must Do Now 1 In what ever guise or configuration, King Crimson can be identified as an expression of a handful of recurring generative principles: 1.1 The salient role of the guru or assumed guru. 1.12 The operator of displacement. 1.13 The operator of discomfort. 1.14 The operator of discontent. 1.15 The operator of charisma. 1.16 The vulgar metaphysics of the commons. 1.17 Alteration through violence. 1.18 Alteration through education, enlightenment and communication. 1.2 The maintenance of King Crimson must resort to these principles. 2 King Crimson is a band with a guru. 2.1 Knowledge of the precise history falls outside the nature of the present analysis, but the figure of Peter Sinfield must be acknowledged as the intelligence responsible for establishing the outlines of these principles. 2.12 It was Sinfield's task to participate in the market capitalization of adolescent discontent within the historical context of the war in Southeast Asia, civil rights demonstrations, and the widespread use of powerful psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD. 2.13 Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250) served as the focus for Sinfield's meditations during the invention of King Crimson, and the history of this King, the meditation upon that history, and the self-reflexive examination of the activity of that meditation constituted the outlines of the generative principles of King Crimson. 2.14 The features of Frederick's life experiences, his aspirations, disappointments, volatility, appetites, the challenge he represented to orthodox authority, and an exagerated sense of his recondite learning were co-opted as King Crimson motifs, images and soundscapes. 2.2 King Crimson has always been a band with a guru, a fact conspicuously advertised inside the cover of the first album where Peter Sinfield was given equal status with the King Crimson musicians, and listed as the source of "words and illumination." 2.21 After Sinfield's departure many assumed that Robert Fripp assumed this role, and in fact he has and he has not. 2.22 Fripp has admirably discharged the duties of that role, particularly in the avatars of King Crimson that have appeared since the Discipline album. 2.23 Fripp's function in this role was minimized, however, in the '73 team, which to many is considered the difinitive avatar of King Crimson. Where was the guru? 3 The audience. 3.1 The shift of the guru from the musicians to the auditors necessitated a reconfiguration of sound, pattern, and the nature of the catharsis produced by the Music. This manifested as a transformation from the synesthetic percussion figures, brooding soundscapes, apocalypitc lyrics and comic horn articulations of the original band avatar to polyrhytmic structures, abandoned soundscapes, surreal lyrics (reflecting upon the relationships among the audience and the musicians), and a marked reliance upon improvisation. 3.12 The psycho-political catharsis represented and evoked by the Music shifted from an authorized and individualized self-reflection to an audience self-identification that was pregnant with the possibility for populist action. 3.2 When the guru sits on the stage or behind the liner notes, the Music is structured. When the guru sits in the audience, the Music is first fractured, then extemporal. 3.21 It is convienient to conceptualize the joined musician/listener complex in the King Crimson concert hall co-creation as simualtanious emanations of two archetypes: 1) the Crimster; 2) the Crim-Head. The function of the Crimster is to pursue the articulation of the voicings of the co-creation. The function of the Crim-Head is to reverberate and feed back. 3.22 Reverberation invariably invaginates the articulation. (see George Bernard Shaw). 3.3 The guru is a standing wave propagating along the gamut between musicians and audience. 3.4 Reverberation, feed back, and invagination are optimised during the improvisational/extemporal phase or avatar of King Crimson. 4 The exploitation of displacement as a generative instrument is achieved through the production of startling sounds, broken rhythms, and frightening poetic imagry. 4.1 The unfamiliar. 4.2 Lights igniting and extinguishing. 4.3 Lights changing color. 4.4 Lights radiating in alternating directions. 4.5 Changes in sonic textures. 4.6 The beginning and ending of the performance of a composition. 4.7 A well-placed witticism. 4.8 Histrionic manipulation. 5 The exploitation of discomfort as a generative instrument is achieved through the production of painful sounds and feelings of low self-esteem. 5.1 Loud sounds. 5.2 Unpleasantness of any kind. 5.3 The disapproval of the guru (either from the mob audience, the architecture of the concert hall facility, the appearance and sociology of the population at the concert hall, or from the stage). 6 The exploitation of discontent as a generative instrument is achieved through the production of emotions of indignation and anger. 6.1 Subverted justice. 6.2 Political disfranchisement. 6.3 Workplace exploitation. 6.4 Lacunae in religious understanding underscored with gnostic polemics. 6.5 Exhibition of grotesque specimins of orthodoxy, credulous belief systems, pedantry, errors in learning. 6.51 Exhibition of specimins of science corrupted and subverted by capital. 6.6 Contamination and manipulation of the food supply. 6.7 Environment, economic expansion, sprawl. 7 The operator of charisma. (see 2-2.3 above). 8 The vulgar metaphysics of the commons. (passim). 9 The promise of the transformational properties of violence as a possible platform for the alteration of the negative reverberation is exploited coldly and relentlessly. 9.1 The sonic representation of what transpires in a psychopath's basement or tunnel equipped with instruments of dismemberment: circular saws, band saws, table saws, jig saws, hand saws, electric drills, culinary knives, cleavers, pliers, clamps, straps, claw hammers, hatchets, axes, wood chippers.... 9.2 Bald heads and handlebar mustachios. 10 Education, enlightenment and communication serve both promotional and reverbatory functions. 11 As is demonstrated by the phenomenon of King Crimson over the course of its history, the legitimacy, the efficacy and the integrity of the Musical experience is optimized by enhancing audience interest and participation. 11.1 When audience particpation is optimized, extemporization and improvization define the identity of the Musical experience. 11.12 Audience participation is optimized through participatory design, plural design, eclecticism, ad hocism, and the will to colonize beyond the boundary of silence. 12 What King Crimson can do must be done now. What King Crimson can not do must be passed over in silence. --Carter Kaplan ------------------------------ End of Elephant Talk Digest #814 ********************************