By Dennis Polkow
“One day in September 2013,” recalls drummer Pat Mastelotto, “I see my phone light up. Robert is calling.”
Robert is Robert Fripp, guitarist, founder, mentor, and alchemist of all things King Crimson during the 50-plus years and various permutations that the uniquely innovative and influential progressive rock band has been in existence. “Robert says, ‘I’m going to put the band back together, will you do it?’ ‘Yeah, of course.’ The only thing he told me is, ‘There’s going to be seven musicians and three of them are drummers.’ ‘Okay. That sounds like fun.’ He did tell me three band members are American, four are British. And that was it, we hung up the phone so I didn’t even know who was in the band. It was a day or three later that Bill Rieflin called me and then I realized Bill was one of the drummers. I had a feeling Gavin [Harrison] would be one of them because we played together in 2008.” [Health issues eventually sidelined Rieflin, so Jeremy Stacey was brought in as the third Crimson drummer while Rieflin played keyboards when he could. Rieflin passed away from cancer on March 24, 2020.] Bassist Tony Levin, who has been part of every Crimson incarnation since 1981—save the time period when the band reformed and he had a prior tour commitment—was also back, as was saxophonist and early Crimson member Mel Collins for the first time since 1972. Vocalist and guitarist Jakko Jakszyk, like Rieflin, would be new to the Crimson lineup. This three-drummer personnel has been performing ever since the 2013 call-up, in one of the longest King Crimson runs with the same group of players.
So why three drummers?
“I don’t want to pretend that I can read Robert’s mind,” says Mastelotto, “but he said from the very beginning in that phone call that the drummers would be in the front. He saw that as the way to present this. And I think to myself, that’s one way to not have to be in the dark but everybody’s not going to be looking at you, if you know what I mean. Robert is typically offstage or to the side where you can’t really see him. So, I think in a way, this gives him cover. The spectacle is on the floor out there and he has a bird’s-eye view out there. That’s usually my view, the guy in the back, and I can see the whole band and the audience and read the whole room. There are reasons why drums out front are not common, mostly because drums are louder. So, when you put them in the front, you’ve got bass drums and cymbals blowing at a guy 15 feet in front of you.”
“Goosebumps are coming. You can’t stop it. You know, when the hairs stand up because the music feels so good. And I don’t mean just groovy good, something happening harmonically.”
Three drummers offer unusual polyrhythmic possibilities that King Crimson is exploring to the fullest. “We arrive at different drum strategies where we interlock in different ways,” Mastelotto explains. “Maybe we’re not all in the same time signature, so Gavin has the ability to write even just a small chart of a song’s section and write each guy’s part in their particular time zone or signature. And then on another, could we try to not hit on the same beat? We often interlock. Maybe I get the kick drum on one or Gavin gets it on one, and then I get it on two and I get it again on four and things like that.”
Drummers are typically seen as “driving” a band, whether in rock or jazz circles. How does that work when there are three? “Crimson, I’ve got to say, is an odd band in that I don’t think any one person can drive the band,” assesses Mastelotto. “As a drummer, I’ve played as a duo with Bill [Bruford], by myself, and now with three, but I’ve never felt I was ‘leading.’ In any other situation when I am drumming, I’d feel like I’m the conductor in terms of driving the energy. Like the traffic cop, if you will. But never in Crimson. I feel more like we’re four or six or seven or eight—whatever version of the band it is—trains going down the track. If you thought you were the guy on the stagecoach who had control of those six horses, forget about it. They’re all running and you’re running parallel and you want to stay parallel in the arrangement. It’s not really like other bands.”
King Crimson in 2019 (L to R): Robert Fripp (guitar), Jeremy Stacey (drums), Bill Rieflin (keyboards), Tony Levin (bass and backing vocals), Gavin Harrison (drums), Pat Mastelotto (drums), Jakko Jakszyk (guitar and vocals), Mel Collins (winds)
Despite Fripp’s notorious distaste of being out front or of even being seen during King Crimson concerts, isn’t Fripp serving as the de facto conductor, as it were? “Well, he’s definitely Crimson quality control,” says Mastelotto. “There’s no doubt about that. But honestly, Robert will make as many mistakes as anybody. The joke was that, when he and Adrian [Belew] were together, if there was a mistake from a guitar, he would just glare at Adrian. But they knew what was going on, they knew who fluffed. We had an interesting one between the drummers last night. So, we play a song where there’s basically four drum fills. We each take one and we share the other. Now the first time this comes up in the song, we play the first one in a unison fashion and then we each take the last three in turn. The next two times, we each take one, two, and three, and slot number four is filled by a predetermined unison thing. But last night, drummer A played the second of those figures in the position where the other one should be. Nobody notices, it goes by in two seconds. But now we’re coming up on the third repeat and we’re coming up to that bar before. Now, are we going to play what should be here, or skip that, because we already did it previously?”
Fripp (right) “glares” at Adrian Belew, guitarist for three different King Crimson lineups (pictured ca.1981–84), during a break.
Of course, Miles Davis infamously believed there were no mistakes. Does that aesthetic not hold true in the court of the Crimson King? “It’s what follows that determines how bad the bad is,” says Mastelotto. “Gavin is the guy who plays by the book. He plays the part. And as other people go off the chart, which definitely happens, they need to find their way back to the chart. You don’t always get a lot of help with that. In contrast to that, I’m the kind of player that as soon as somebody else comes in the wrong place or starts playing on the wrong side of the beat, a beat early, a bar late, or whatever, I just adapt. I just go. I always want to make the singer or soloist look right. Don’t fight it, just jump on their train and go there. We have two different drummers onstage that think differently so when we do have a bit of an emergency train wreck, it’s kind of, who conducts the band to get back in wherever we were going? And honestly sometimes that’s [bassist] Tony Levin. I’ve had times with the band when Tony is the guy who will be very forceful and play the changes that lead you to the next section. He will musically lead things. In some ways herding drummers is like herding cats. You’ve always got to keep this thing in the same motion.
“Jeremy is a jazzer, a little bit of a lighter player. So the setup with Gavin and I bookending that gives some symmetry, if you will, to the presentation. I’m more the Neanderthal rock drummer guy. Then we had Rieflin and now Stacey playing so musically—they also play keyboards and anything they touch and have this vast musical knowledge. Though the same is true for Gavin, he can play enough piano and bass and can play guitar a little bit. His father was a very good trumpet player, and Gavin is a very well-rounded musician. He’s in love with drums, that’s his passion, but I would imagine he could have succeeded on almost any instrument or any band or context, orchestra or whatever. He’s really musically in tune.”
The original King Crimson lineup, for 1969’s seminal In the Court of the Crimson King (L to R): Robert Fripp (guitars), Ian McDonald (keyboards and winds), Michael Giles (drums), Greg Lake (vocals and bass)
King Crimson is making its Ravinia Festival debut on August 29 with its “Music is Our Friend” tour supported by The Zappa Band, but has a history with Chicago nearly as long as the band history. When the original lineup played at Kinetic Playground in late 1969, original vocalist and bassist Greg Lake—who would soon after go on to co-found Emerson, Lake & Palmer—recalled that the Crimson band truck crashed into the front canopy of their downtown hotel. An overnight fire at the venue ended up charring and melting the band’s new speakers and destroying the group’s mellotron. Lake, who grew up with Fripp in England and had the same guitar teacher (before Fripp asked him to switch to bass for King Crimson), said in his 2017 posthumously published autobiography that the band’s debut album In the Court of the Crimson King was “possibly the best record I ever made.” Bill Bruford, drummer and founding member of Yes, left that band at the height of its popularity in 1972 after repeatedly asking Fripp to join King Crimson. “As soon as I had laid eyes on the band in 1968, I’d wanted to be part of it,” Bruford wrote in his 2009 autobiography, where he also recalls Chicago as being significant to Yes and Crimson. (Bill Bruford’s Earthworks would later make its area debut at Ravinia in 1988.) Mastelotto, who has already passed Bruford’s quarter-century stint as drummer with the band, remembers King Crimson doing a 2008 stint at Park West. “My then-girlfriend—later, my wife—was at that show,” Mastelotto recalls. “It’s kind of a funny story because she had never seen Crimson, I would play her a few records. Once [my girlfriend] saw the band live, she totally got it. She was in tears. The mystery was over. She was like, ‘Virtuosity is sexy.’ She was very emotional with Robert’s music, just like me. Goosebumps are coming. You can’t stop it. You know, when the hairs stand up because the music feels so good. And I don’t mean just groovy good, something happening harmonically.
“I think Robert is going to be noted as one of the great composers, really, of our generation. I don’t hear people talk like that, but look at the material that he’s contributed to the world and how influential it’s been to so many people. I love the band. I loved the band before I was ever a member. It doesn’t seem real that I can be a part of this band. Even from the beginning, it seemed impossible that I could have the opportunity to play with them and then continue to play with them. I’m just a kid from California, you know? You can dream about these things, but so can everybody. So, how does it happen?” ■
Award-winning veteran journalist, critic, author, broadcaster, and educator Dennis Polkow has been covering Chicago-based cultural institutions across various local, national, and international media for more than 35 years. He was a member of the last incarnation of the progressive rock trio Madura in the mid-’70s.