King Crimson played in 7/8 just to avoid sounding popular
Lyricist Peter Sinfield summed up early King Crimson simply: if a song sounded at all popular, it was out. The London band piled on odd chords and odd time signatures, and still opened for the Rolling Stones before an estimated 500,000 people in Hyde Park just months after forming.
The seed was an August 1967 advert from Dorset brothers Michael and Peter Giles seeking a singing organist. Robert Fripp, a guitarist who neither sang nor played organ, answered anyway. Their trio made one album without a breakthrough, then added Ian McDonald on keyboards and woodwinds, who brought Sinfield along after telling him his band was hopeless but his words were great. With Greg Lake on vocals and bass, King Crimson formed on 30 November 1968.
Sinfield came up with the name in a panicked moment and said a crimson king was any ruler whose reign saw social unrest; Fripp linked it to Beelzebub instead. He also ran the stage lights and was credited with words and illumination. McDonald, inspired by the Moody Blues, pushed the band to buy a Mellotron, which became central to their sound. The October 1969 debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, was a quick success, and Pete Townshend called it an uncanny masterpiece; its opener, 21st Century Schizoid Man, attacked the Vietnam War and has been called proto-metal.
The first line-up lasted barely a year. McDonald and Giles wanted a lighter style while Fripp drove toward darker, more intense music, and the originals played their last show on 14 December 1969. McDonald later co-founded Foreigner. Fripp stayed as the only constant member through decades of reinventions: a 1970s trio with Bill Bruford and John Wetton, a 1981 return featuring Americans Adrian Belew and Tony Levin, a 1994 double trio, and finally a touring band with three drummers at the front.
That last version spent seven years reworking the whole catalogue before the band stopped for good after a Japanese tour in December 2021, when Fripp said it had moved from sound to silence.
Source: King Crimson
