“If I had known the grief that was coming my way, I would have stayed in real estate!”: Robert Fripp on facing the backlash to King Crimson’s Red
Robert Fripp has been reflecting on King Crimson’s most misunderstood album, 1974’s Red.
The seventh album from the band followed successful records like 1969’s In the Court of the Crimson King, 1973’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, and Starless and Bible Black, which landed in early 1974. But tensions were bubbling among the band as they began to make Red, and though much more broadly appreciated in retrospect, it became their lowest charting album upon release.
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The line up at the time consisted of drummer Bill Bruford, vocalist and bassist John Wetton, and Fripp, with violinist David Cross having been voted out of the group. The band ultimately split at the end of 1974 after the launch of Red, and despite its rocky release, it’s regarded by many as a formative proto-metal treasure.
Speaking to Guitar World in its new print edition, Fripp says that “the strength of Red is that the power is in the music”. Looking back on its conception, he explains, “It was very, very open. But it’s a very difficult and uncomfortable place to be.
“If someone comes in with a pretty well-written piece of music and says, ‘Let’s play this’, then it’s relatively safe and straightforward. But the problem is, when you know what you’re doing, if you know where you’re going, you might get there, and that’s not an interesting place to be. Where you wish to arrive is where you could never possibly know you might be going. But that is a very difficult tension to hold together.”
Fripp also has a pretty accepting stance on Red, and that has seemingly come with time: “I would’ve stayed as an estate agent in Wimborne, Dorset, if I had known the grief that was coming my way. I would have stayed in real estate!” He jokes. “My approach has been, if you read your press, you read all of it. And if you read all my press, there have been — by and large — as many people who hated it as who enjoyed it.”
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