I think I have everything they did. Might be one or two I'm missing. I saw them during the Discipline tour with Adrian Belew, Tony Levin and Bill Bruford. Crimson were essential to my musical awakening at 11. 1969 I'm waiting for my older brother to leave for classes or his job or whatever because he had a stereo in his room with the only FM radio in the house. I had a transistor hand held because I was still listening to AM Top 40 stuff but I felt like I had to explore, branch out. My brother would leave and I would go to his room and turn on the stereo and listen to WABX--a true underground station in those days. I'd hear all kinds of stuff--Eddie Harris's "Compared to What" and like that. Even the groups I was familiar with on AM were playing stuff in FM I'd never heard before. That was when I first heard "When I Was Young" and I thought, "That's the Animals???" That was never played on AM that I remember.
So one day my brother leaves and I turn on his stereo and ABX starts playing "In the Court of the Crimson King." That blew me away. First of all, it was like 9 minutes!!! Nobody does 9 minute songs!!! Then it had all these changes and a period of silence and then it got loud again with Michael Giles going nuts on the drums! I was hooked! So on my 12th birthday, my mom asks what I want for a present and I said I wanted this King Crimson album and so she drove me down to this record store and I bought it. I played the damn grooves off the thing. I know every note of every song on that album--even all of "Moonchild."
I started smoking pot by then and then went onto psychotropics in my early teens listening to White Noise, Beefheart, ELP, Switched-On Bach, Hawkwind, Renaissance, Yes, Moody Blues you name it. Those were great times--those early days of musical exploration. This was all before I even got to high school when I began exploring blues, jazz, early Kraftwerk and avant-gard. Those were great times for me. But throughout, I remained a total Crimson fan. I bought every album as they came out.
My favorite cut, I suppose, is off "Earthbound"--a live one-off album that Fripp disowns. It is pretty bad--cutting into the middles of songs and cutting out before the song ends--but the last piece is intact--"Groon." This was a bop jazz piece that Charlie Parker wouldn't have disowned with some great sax by Mel Collins and drums by Ian Wallace. There are several versions of "Groon" available but this one has the drums treated through a synthesizer part of the way through the drum solo and then ends with a weird ear-splitting lick played by Fripp. It's really kind of an inexplicable ending but that's why I like it. My rocker friends just shrug over it not knowing what to make of it but when I play it for my jazz musician friends, they all love it and some even wanted me to burn them copies of the CD so there you go.
