IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING (B) - The 53-year-old band King Crimson has three drummers, all dwarfed by elaborate drumkits. That's just all you need to know about this snooty prog-rock enemble surrounding its lone remaining founding member, Robert Fripp.
This documentary by Toby Amies offers an intimate, inside view of the band from a few years ago. Amies was apparently recruited by Fripp to be a friendly adversary on the other side of the camera, and we often hear Amies' voice as he interacts with the band members and road crew.
Fripp is universally described as insufferable. And he doesn't mind showing off many of these qualities on camera. He is obsessive about practicing his guitar, and he expects more than perfection from the musicians around him. He prefers to dress primly in tailored suits, and he speaks down to his audience, as if it's patently obvious that he has figured out everything about life and believes that he is never wrong. Yeah, he's that guy.
One can admire Fripp and his artistry, but you don't have to abide him. Fripp, for all I know, is technically brilliant. But King Crimson, as one fan lets on during an interview, is quite the acquired taste. The songs are tough to stomach. They are a mix of heavy metal, jazz noodling, high school poetry, horn skronks and show-off guitar licks. (A typical song is titled "Larks' Tongues in Aspic - Part IV." Dare we call some of this frippery?) To me, the music has always sounded like, to borrow Fripp's own pet phrase, a load of shite.
But you don't have to love, or even like, King Crimson's jams to appreciate what's going on here. This is a story about an iron dictator who runs his band like an abusive husband or father. Several times during the film, band members pause and look over their shoulder while being interviewed, as if Big Brother might be listening in. In fact, Fripp, tooling around in the background of one shot, suddenly jumps into a conversation to show that he's been listening, and he proceeds to chastise both the questioner and the interviewee for both failing to steer the conversation precisely where he thinks it should have gone. Imagine the daily drudgery of trying to please this man.
While we get whiffs of "This Is Spinal Tap" and the Metallica documentary "Some Kind of Monster" (a title that could have worked here, too), Amies, to his credit, isolates the band members and draws out some quality insights. The director has a habit of pushing them to go deeper than their initial answers, and the conversations grow deeper and more thoughtful, even philosophical.
The star of the movie is multi-instrumentalist Bill Rieflin, previously known as a drummer with the likes of Ministry and Pigface back in the day. Halfway through the film it is revealed that Rieflin has been battling cancer for years (he died in 2020), and his commentary is truly thoughtful and touching, at times. Why bother continuing to play in this band (especially for such a prick like Fripp) when he could be checking more things off his bucket list. The simple answer, he says, is because this is just what he does -- he's a musician.
Former members chime in to lend perspective to the rollercoaster ride this band has endured under Fripp's fanaticism. All of them retain respect for the man, no matter how ugly their fallouts were decades ago. Two of them left after the first year of recording and touring. Guitarist-vocalist Adrian Belew -- who mistakenly thought he was an equal partner of Fripp's in the '80s and '90s -- talks about his hair falling out during that era, and he doesn't mince words about getting kicked out of the band, but he still speaks kindly about Fripp. It's as if he and the other victims -- perhaps with the help of years of therapy -- have made peace with their experiences, perhaps lucky to have escaped. Fripp is sort of like the scorpion in the old cautionary tale -- he is who he is, don't expect him to change, and tolerate his perfectionism for as long as you can.
Fripp does seem to have created a cohesive band of fine musicians -- he notes that this is the first iteration of the band not to have someone in it who actively hates him -- and there is no doubt that King Crimson makes a deep connection with its audience. On that level, he is an unqualified success, a visionary who was intent on succeeding at all costs. Or, as Walter Matthau's Willy Clark said of his former partner, Al Lewis, in "The Sunshine Boys": "As an act, nobody could touch him; as a human being, nobody wanted to touch him."
BONUS TRACK
No way we're linking to or embedding any King Crimson songs. Gen X did this sharp post-punk alt-prog better. Here's Steve Albini's Shellac, for example, with "A Minute":
Hell, let's do a second one, also off the album "At Action Park." This one is "Crow," live:
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