Tue Oct 07 2014

Saw King Crimson last night. Pretty incredible. After the show, hanging out with the gang and having a drink, I tried to avoid commenting on it, as I wanted to let it sink in for a while. But I did make some remarks that were really, really hard on the sound folks. In fact, I’m not sure how much of the problem was the mix, and how much was simply the room, so I’m feeling a little bit guilty having gone off about them like that. But the sound was pretty atrocious in my corner of the audience. So I had to work more than I wanted to, to hear what was going on. It was worth the effort. This is a really great incarnation of the band. I’ll be interested to see if it goes further. Robert has been publicly noncommittal about future plans. As cool as it was, you sort of had the sense that they were just getting going. Great to hear some of the older and more obscure stuff; Sailor’s Tale, The Letters, Pictures of a City. I had been doing my best not to read much about the previous shows so that I could be surprised, and all 3 of those did, as well as One More Red Nightmare! No Discipline-era stuff.

This struck me as grown up music. Not old. Definitely not nostalgic. But music played by grownups for grownups. I tried to compare it to going to the symphony, but that would require too many qualifications – I’ve been to way too many concerts where the orchestra is just phoning it in. These guys were definitely not doing that. I’ll have to ponder this observation a little more.

The three drummer front was actually my favorite thing of all. A really strange idea that totally worked for me. The three clearly did a lot of work. During Pictures of a City was the first place I actually grasped what was happening. A tom-tom roll cascade began with Pat on stage right, and whizzed across the stage through Bill and ended with Gavin on stage left. I actually laughed out loud. I think some of my audience neighbors thought that was a weird thing for me to do during that song, but screw them. I was delighted. Once I saw that, I started to pay closer attention and it was pretty great. The multiple drummers weren’t really additive. It wasn’t like drums but 3 times as loud. To me it felt like it gave each of the players an incredible amount of space to work. And the listening was audible. At one point I had my eyes closed, just taking it in. When I opened them up, I realized that only Bill was drumming, and the other 2 were tacit. I had no idea. I didn’t hear the absence of 2 drummers.

Joked in a text with Bill that the frontline made the backline look like chumps who hadn’t done their homework. Total hyperbole, of course, but it really felt to me that what the drummers were doing was actually revolutionary.