A Regal Location

Song 312: This week on the playlist you’ll find The Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson, written by Ian McDonald and Peter Sinfield. Not long after I arrived at Northwestern in the fall of 1969, King Crimson arrived on the radio with their first album, for which this was essentially the title track. The LP sounded totally different from anything that had come along before, incorporating elements of classical music and jazz in ways that no one had ever thought of, so it attracted a lot of attention, and justifiably so. The Who’s Pete Townshend called the record “an uncanny masterpiece” and during the year that followed its release, plenty of listeners made it quite clear how significant they felt the album was. At that point in my career, feeling the need to transition away from the top-40 style that I had previously evolved from my HS listening choices, I searched for a more serious and original personal singer/songwriter approach, and King Crimson’s debut came along at just the right time, showing me a way to blend in some of the classical influences that I had learned in my younger days, having played violin for the orchestra. Over the next couple of years, I would put that classical influence to good use in composing tracks such as Shake the Dust, Ghost of a Chance, Fly So Free and a few others. While In the Court of the Crimson King seemed to open up new possibilities, very few records in the progressive rock genre would come close to reaching the high bar King Crimson had set on their debut, with Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon being the one notable exception. If you’d like to get some idea of the direction I took after being inspired by this influence, you can hear Shake the Dust here.