Simon Heyworth, Mastering Engineer of Terror, and I have begun remastering the three studio albums of the 1972-74 Crimson. Today it's LTIA & Part One is up and running. Actually, more like "The Lark Descending" with its quiet set-ups and then the El Crumpo power riffs. Crumpo! Now Scottish voices, with a judge pronouncing "and hang by the neck upon a gibbet until you are DEAD", the downbeat coinciding with the death sentence's final indictment. Yow! This is astonishing work from young men.
Trey Gunn told me that, when he was at college, a pal of his put on this album and Trey thought it was too scary to listen to. I'm not sure what I would have made of this had I been 18 in 1973 and this little sucker had stomped out upon my psyche. Probably, terrified. And now from the terror of "Larks'" into "Book Of Saturday". How could these young men cover & maintain the emotional distance between "Larks'" and "BofS"? "BofS" continues to exert its magic upon me even today. It somehow manages to hold a place outside the flow of time and, this morning, seems to be young men expressing the thoughts of old men.
In "BofS" the action begins with voice & bass close to centre positions, and guitar accompaniment on the right. The left speaker is empty long enough for an audient to wonder if the mixer fell asleep on the pan knobs. Then, the backwards guitar comes in: it's another Crimson set up! The left speaker was left empty long enough for us to sense emptiness, a space opened and held open; then our patience is rewarded & in comes the backwards guitar moving against time.
12.06
"Exiles": has David Cross on flute and John Wetton on piano.
13.13
"Talking Drum" is really a weedy sounding track to ears which accompanied it around the world live over a period of 24 years. But JW's crunchy bass sound makes up for some of it.
The same is mostly true of "Larks' Two". This was closely copied as accompaniment music to the simulated squirtlings in "Emmanuelle" (France 1974). The instincts of the French "composers" were sound, however.
"Larks' Two", as a piece of writing, addresses the paradox of being simultaneously within the conditioned & unconditioned worlds. This partly explains the depictions of contradiction, forms of resolution, longing, loss, anger & despair, evolution, arrival & respite. The (musical) metaphor of physical union is particularly obvious (surely?) during the ascending sections (10/8 with an opening bar of 11/8 to throw the beat off & introduce a dual downbeat). "The Nascent Soul's Journey Into Light" might be a more literally descriptive title but I wouldn't have had the courage to use that in 1972; and probably not today either.
Coincidentally, I have just come across this on a backfile of ET:
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 15:18:19 -0500Alf wrote:
<I've been contantly listening to TCOL during the last few days trying to find what is wrong with it.>
Interesting hobby!
Personally, though I consider KC one of my favorite bands, I think you can find SOMETHING wrong with almost any of their albums if you look hard enough. (For me Red is about the closest they came to a 'flawless' album, but that's just my opinion!)
<I have arrived to the conclusion that most of the music is great, but the performance in itself is not. There is a sort of fear behind it, like if certain songs are a real challenge to play. That is what it is! And the players knew this at the time, but were struggling to get it right. I am positive that if KC would record TCOL today, after the tour, it would be as amazing as LTIA, where you notice self confidence.>
I would have almost went along with your feelings a bit had you not compared it to Larks' Tongues in Aspic. For me LTIA, more so than any other KC album, shows EVERY sign of not being rehearsed or performed live any more than TCOL. Wetton's singing on a lot of LTIA to me has always sounded pretty weak and not overly in tune. The same critiques seems to be true especially with the performance of Larks' 2 on the studio album. To me it's always been very ponderous and uninspired sounding along with too slow! Larks' 1, on the other hand, I think is a great track that they never really topped live, but the rest of the album surely was played much better live than the original recordings. Back to your criticism of TCOL though, I'm sure it will be better live, but this isn't unique to this particular album. I would say its pretty much true of all of KC's studio albums.
Essentially, I agree with Grant. The LTIA team toured prior to recording the album (at Command in early 1973) but the material was still too ambitious for these young players to have absorbed & mastered. Alternatively expressed, it was too soon for the music to have absorbed and mastered these young players. And John was still becoming the front singer he continues to be today, rather than merely a world class Bass Beast of Terror.
Crimson music continues to require time, air, fertilisation by audience, and repeated execution by the players before it matures as music, as music being played, as music playing players, and as music available to being heard. At which point the studio recording acquires a greater, but different, value.
16.03
"Sharks' Lungs In Lemsip" is now re-vibrated for a new generation of ears.
If anyone already has a copy of this, in any format, which gives them satisfaction my advice is this: save your hard-earned pay and keep listening to what you've got. But for this pecuniary saving you'll have to pay in currency of another kind: forgoing the opportunity to bleat & whine at "being forced" to buy yet another copy of LTIA.
So, now on to "Braless And Slightly Slack".
17.18
Side One is now vibrant and running. Recorded at Air Studios, Oxford Street, in early 1974 with engineer George Chkiantz.
George was about to become a father and, one critical night, was on paternal standby and very "electric" - to the extent that while editing tape with a razor blade he began to wipe sound from fractions of the tape on either side of the edit as he held it. This meant George had to cut further into the tape to reach recorded sound each time. And then wiped a bit more. At this point George knew it was time to go home.
JW is powering "The Great Deceiver" along, which includes a rare example of RF lyric writing, drawing on a visit to the Vatican when Crim were Romanising in 1973.
17.27
Now "We'll Let You Know" live from Glasgow in a venue now demolished. It was once Green's Playhouse and featured customised carpets with "It's Great - It's Green's!" embroidered on them. Al Jolson had a sell out week here in the 1920s, I was told, so successful that he bought the promoter a Rolls.
17.30
"The Night Watch". The intro is from the live show at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the main song part from Air. This is another Crim song from this period which manages to hold open a piece of time. The guitar solo is an early recorded example of "aspirational octaves" and complete in one take. John didn't like the solo on its first pass: I persuaded him to listen some more. A personal classic solo.
17.35
"Trio": also live from the Concertgebouw. This is one example of how music downloads while 3 (or 4) young men are standing to attention. "The Sheltering Sky" was like this, although without an audience (we learnt TSS from playing back the cassette). Andrew Keeling would do a good job of arranging "Trio" for trio / quartet. Time is standing still once more today.
17.41
"The Mincer": live from Zurich. JW overdubbed vocals in the studio. Only a European front line - electric piano, mellotron & guitar - could play like this. And, probably, only a European rhythm section could play like this. Then, the tape runs out (on the original multi-track).
18.14
We're fine tuning "We'll Let You Know": it's just a tad bit more hissy than is acceptable to contemporary ears, even forgiving ears which accept that analogue live multi-tracks multiply hiss.
18.34
Now on to Side Two.
19.09
"Fracture" is vibrated. "Starless" for tomorrow. Now, I'm off to meet Toyah for dinner with Al Murray.
"Honour necessity."
