Neal and Jack and Me and Me
Progressive rock in the 80s, and the frustrating near-genius of Beat, forty years on.
I would politely ask Robert Fripp and the good people of DGM to not copyright strike me for using the cover art for Beat.
Sink or swim, do or die, pick your idiom; the need for change was universal for progressive rock in the 1980s. The great prog bands of the 1970s fall surprisingly neatly into this paradigm – the formula of old progressive rock, with virtuosic performances with Rickenbacker basses and string-like Mellotrons, long songs that contain multiple winding parts, convoluted and fantastical lyrics, and an air of smug superiority, had gotten old. Album and ticket sales were drying up, and the capacity for creativity for many prog bands had dwindled. Either progressive rock would have to, true to its name, progress, or it would die.
King Crimson are a musical enigma. Outside of guitarist Robert Fripp, the band has never had a consistent line-up for more than a few albums. Indeed, King Crimson is far more a working philosophy; an aesthetic, than a group of people who form a band. Thus, the many iterations of King Crimson have embraced a wide variety of musical styles and influences. The King Crimson that made their first four albums, including In the Court of the Crimson King was a menacing combination of jazz, folk, and psychedelia. The Wetton era retained the jazz but moved in a decidedly heavy metal direction, and King Crimson during the 90s heartedly embraced industrial and even nu metal.
After years immersed in the New York music scene of the late 70s, where Fripp worked with artists like Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Talking Heads, and Blondie, the reformed King Crimson of the 80s hence embraced new wave, but was still distinctly King Crimson. The new line-up’s first album, 1981’s Discipline. is sonically more accessible than anything released under the King Crimson moniker before, yet it retained monstrous musicianship between Fripp, guitarist-vocalist Adrian Belew, bassist Tony Levin, and drummer Bill Bruford, whose polyrhythmic attack stunned listeners then and today. Discipline proved that progressive rock could adapt to the post-punk era and be complex, cerebral, and plain weird while also somehow being funky and danceable. Discipline is a landmark album that deserves its own essay, for another time.
Impressively, the follow-up album, Beat, is the first King Crimson album where the band line-up – Fripp, Belew, Levin, and Bruford – stayed the same between two albums. In a way, the instability of King Crimson’s many line-ups made each new release unpredictable; could Fripp, Michael Giles, Greg Lake, and Peter Sinfield follow up In the Court of the Crimson King without Ian MacDonald, and with Giles’ and Lake’s foot already one foot out the door? (They could not.) Could Fripp, Bruford, and John Wetton retain and refine the power of Larks’ Tongue in Aspic on Red without David Cross? (They did.) Without any changes in personnel, the main question of King Crimson during the recording of Beat was, would the magic that made Discipline such an emphatic later career revival remain on Beat?
As aforementioned, Discipline is sonically more accessible than any previous King Crimson album, but manages to be avant within the confines of new wave music. Even Discipline’s lush ballad “Matte Kudasai” is still clearly art rock despite its mellow atmosphere. However, parts of Beat at least initially feel like an attempt by the band to create a commercial record. The longing wails, romantic lyrics, and lax melodies of “Heartbeat” and“Two Hands” are disharmoniously out of place for a band that rejected pop conventions altogether in the 70s and even on Discipline. Beat proved alienating at the time (and even today – the consensus generally is that Discipline is a much better album than Beat) in a way that Discipline never was, as if King Crimson had sold out.
Now, forty years after its release, Beat is unquestionably a flawed album, certainly in comparison to Discipline and otherwise. This flaw however, is not that Beat has nauseating pop songs. Three of a Perfect Pair has four pop songs, and three of those are among King Crimson’s best songs overall. If one wants to focus on pure genre, Three of a Perfect Pair has just as much if not more pop rock than Beat does, yet few acknowledge this because the pop songs on Three of a Perfect Pair are mostly better than those on Beat, and the second half of Three of a Perfect Pair contains the most unnervingly experimental work in King Crimson’s entire discography.
Beat’s problem lies not in genre semantics or its aetherly production, but in songwriting. There are King Crimson albums I dislike more than Beat; the 70s albums in between In the Court of the Crimson King and Larks’ Tongue in Aspic are good only for falling asleep too, but this is a far more frustrating album than any of those because it is, to ape Lenin, so “rich in ideas” that are wasted on half-baked songlets and instrumentals.
Instrumentals have long been a staple of King Crimson’s career, and like Discipline, Beat has two instrumentals, “Sartori in Tangier” and “The Howler,” but neither of these are nearly as memorable as the instrumentals on Discipline. The intro of “Sartori in Tangier,” performed by Tony Levin on a chapman stick, is nothing short of ominous, but the rest of the song is surprisingly flowery in comparison. It’s nice, but at only 3:34 minutes in length, I can’t help but feel like it should go on for much longer. “Requiem” meanwhile is full of anxiety, almost like a disjointed, jazzy explosion of interband anger and frustration. If anything, “Requiem” overstays its welcome by at least a minute. King Crimson would have been well-advised to have put the two songs together, melding the stormcloud-esque intro of “Sartori” that falls away into the chaos of requiem, only to terminate with a reprise of the brighter parts of “Sartori.” Instead of one great instrumental, we got two good but flawed ones.
The most frustrating song on the album is “Waiting Man,” which has all the pieces for brilliance… but just isn’t! It ends far too quickly. I know this because “Waiting Man” is on the 1984 live album Absent Lovers, arguably the definitive King Crimson album of the 80s. That version of “Waiting Man,” a good two minutes longer, is much superior. The studio version has some great ideas that are crammed into 4 minutes, giving none of those musical ideas the room to blossom into something spectacular. On the Absent Lovers version, the gamelan-inspired synth rhythm played by Belew and Bruford are given time to hypnotize the listener, and Fripp and Levin make their entrance later on, rather than the four being packaged together uncomfortably. Belew then makes his vocal entry much later into the song, and his vocals are surrounded by new instrumental passages that add to the feeling of a journeyman longing to return to his lover at home. When Belew ends the song with his cry of “You can wait, and I wait, and I wait/And home I am” on Absent Lovers, it feels like the character has returned home from a journey, a feeling one does not get from the Beat version.
The two plushiest songs, “Heartbeat” and “Two Hands” are complete, but unsatisfying listens. Though I reject reactionarily dismissing King Crimson’s pop songs, “Two Hands” is a frankly lame ballad. Outside of some decent guitar work in the middle of the song, there’s nothing worth salvaging from that song. Adrian Belew’s vocal performance on “Heartbeat” is among his best, but the accompanying music lacks the needed urgency – if Belew is in love that hard, then why doesn’t the music reflect the intensity of that feeling? “Heartbeat” is sonically too safe for what it’s trying to convey, too lacking in bite.
As I’ve hopefully conveyed, this album still contains sporadic genius throughout. Of course, the musicianship is spectacular even if the songwriting isn’t always. Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, and Bill Bruford are among the best musicians in rock, and they have a great synergy together. Despite King Crimson presenting itself as a music-first art band, seeing footage of them performing in the 80s illustrates just how much fun they had playing with each other, whether it be Belew and Fripp dueling on the guitar, Bruford and Levin holding down the rhythm section, Belew and Bruford creating enchanting polyrhythms, or Belew and Levin sharing vocal duties, they’re always looking like they’re having a good time together with big, goofy smiles, even if their sheer musicianship put them into creative conflict.
The opening track, “Neal and Jack and Me,” is stunning. With it’s interweaving guitar patterns courtesy of Fripp and Belew – live versions of the song which include Fripp playing an extended solo are incredible, – a thumping chapman stick bassline, a soulful vocal delivery by Belew and vaguely homoerotic lyrics that allude to Jack Kerouac (hence the album’s name) and Neal Cassady, it’s definitely the best song on the album and arguably the best King Crimson song of the 80s. “Neal and Jack and Me” bridges prog-pop accessibility with their ferocious musicianship and Belew’s eccentric lyrics in a way no other song from this album does. “Neurotica” is the most Crimson-esque song here, with a ferocious jazz attack on the drums by Bill Bruford, Adrian Belew doing a manic impression of a newspaper hawker, and the air raid siren-sounding guitars, all making for an anxious experience only King Crimson could do.
As an afterthought, the Spotify version includes a previously unreleased instrumental, “Absent Lovers,” which is a cross between their 80s style of prog-y new wave and hard rock. Tony Levin’s playing on this song is particularly awesome. Unlike the other instrumentals, it’s a complete song that ends naturally, rather than too quickly or too late, nor is it merely a masturbatory display of musicianship. I wish it was on Beat, because it’s a fantastic closing track.