king crimson - earthbound

In the wake of Tuesday's masterful gig at the Hackney Empire I dug out Earthbound. This was recorded live in early 1972, and was the last tour that Mel Collins had done as a member of King Crimson, before now.

 

First off - what a bloody awful racket. Recorded onto cassettes at the mixing desk, this is rather lo-fi Crimson. Now, poor recording quality doesn't necessarily mean a poor album, if the music's good. 

 

But, mostly, it isn't.

 

The title track of the album kind of sums up what's wrong - all the band, bar Fripp, attempt a bluesy jam. Fripp sits on his stool and attempts to drag them back to gnarly angular rock by playing horrid noises on his guitar. Bassist Boz, saxophonist Mel Collins and drummer Ian Wallace defiantly ignore these attempts until Mr Grumpy just shuts up. The tension in the group is clear for everyone to hear.

 

There are some good points - arguably the heaviest "21st Century Schizoid Man" I’ve ever heard flattens everything in it's path, with Mel providing some genuinely frightening sax playing. The guitar parts are ferocious too, Fripp's anger and unhappiness clearly channeled into the monstrous riffs. 

 

The incomplete version of "The Sailor's Tale" is half impressive - Ian Wallace's drumming is superb - but half disappointing - the savage slashing guitar solo of the original is abandoned in favour of a far less successful approach. And then we have "Groon" - whilst sloshing the VCS3 synth over the drum solo might have seemed avant garde (maybe) back in 1972, now it's wearisome and irritating. Something that might have made for a fun diversion in a concert setting comes across as noisily unmusical and headache inducing on record. The distortion caused by the poor recording quality doesn't help either.

 

As the more recent DGM releases of other concerts by this band have shown, they could, and frequently did, perform some cracking gigs. So quite why Fripp issued Earthbound at all is rather baffling. He clearly didn’t like jazzy, bluesy freeform jams he put within the album's none-more-black sleeve. Perhaps the Unhappy Gigster wanted to somehow document the audible break up of the band. Though why he then had to inflict it on his bespectacled, hirsute and very earnest record buying audience is something of a mystery.

Mel, Ian and Boz remained in the USA at the end of this tour and together they backed bluesman extraordinaire Alexis Korner for some time afterwards. Light years from the complexities of Crimson.

 

Fripp returned to the UK, downheartedly considering his position as a musician. But then he recorded “The Heavenly Music Corporation” with Eno and felt inspired again. Music that only King Crimson could play came flying by his ears so he set about forming the Larks’ Tongues quintet – and that’s another story entirely.