In The Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 - The Hardest Working Prog-Rockers Prog-Rock On
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A-minus
If you are a King Crimson fan, then, I’ve already done my job, just letting you know this documentary exists.
If you are not a King Crimson fan, but love music or are interested in the process of making music, then, you should consider watching this documentary anyway.
If you are in that second group - and especially if you were born after 1990 - you might, for the first, 30 minutes or so, wonder why you’re watching a group of very prickly musicians (the youngest of whom is 60), talking about, or, in some cases, trying to resist talking about why they do what they do.
Such is the history of one of the legendary progressive (prog) rock bands of the late ‘60s.
Robert Fripp: Prog rock’s international man of mystery.
But that’s when you’ll meet a Norwegian nun, Sister Dana Benedicta, from Notre-Dame de Grâce, Oslo. (well given that this is about King Crimson, I’ll be precise: she appears 33 minutes and two seconds in). Sister Dana talks about why she likes the music, and the spiritual lessons she gleans from listening to King Crimson. (She also gives us a hint at how to get more quickly into Heaven).
The documentary In The Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50, directed by Toby Amies, is exactly what you might imagine if you’ve listened to even 60 seconds of the band’s music.
It’s about a lot of things all at once. It’s about the band’s history as one of the defining prog-rock bands, and the reconciling of its volatile history as band-members left and the lineup was reconfigured many times.
It’s about being on the road in your sixties. It’s about the discipline of making music, contemplating mortality. And, of course, it’s a deep dive into the mind of its leader and mastermind, the hard driving task-master and unintentional Zen master Robert Fripp.
Amies has packed a lot into the documentary’s lean 86-minute running time. He filmed the current version of King Crimson as the band prepared to go on a European tour, in rehearsals and on the road. He collected comments and observations from long-time fans.
He hasn’t sanitized it. The documentary includes some spikey exchanges with various band members, including Fripp, but also lead singer Jakko Jaksyk who at first seems uncomfortable talking about his place in the band. There are also more emotional moments, including original Crimson member Ian McDonald talking about why he left and apologizing to Robert Fripp for the friction and for the hurt that caused.
As well, Amies holds the camera on Fripp at one point for almost two minutes of silence, while he wrestles with an emotional memory, and then composes himself enough so he can speak again.
Poignantly Amies devotes time to following musician Bill Rieflin, who was working with the band in spite of a serious cancer diagnosis that required absences for aggressive chemotherapy treatments and surgery. Rieflin, who died in 2020 before the tour, and who generally kept his diagnosis quiet, is straightforward with Amies. He speaks with a remarkable lack of self-pity, and a deep commitment to his music that amounts to a philosophy of how to consider living, whether in the face of imminent death or not.
That commitment to music is shared with everyone in the King Crimson ecosystem, from musicians to road crew, there’s a deep respect for the end product, and the focus and craft that it takes to play the kind of music that leader Robert Fripp is aiming to make.
Fripp is the source of all of things Crimson.: its sound, its mission, its devotion to precision - the reason some former band members of the original 1960s band dropped out.
He’s the one who replaced lead singer Adrian Belew of the ‘80s incarnation of the band, without consultation. Belew appears in the doc and still has both good feelings about his time in Crimson, while he carries some misgivings about the experience of being dumped.
Belew says “Robert has a way of creating a situation in which music is going to occur that you couldn’t otherwise do. And to me that was worth everything.”
For his part, Fripp, who demands as much if not more of himself than he asks of everyone, rehearses for hours every day. He considers it a set-back if he has to skip a day while on tour.
For a lot of the documentary he at times, can come across as a humourless task master at times. It might be easy to miss the humour and humanity behind it all. And there is much of both of those in him.
By the time we come to the end of the film, Amies gives us a sense of what it’s all about for Robert Fripp, and perhaps the reasons he continues to reassemble King Crimson, and take the band on tour.
He believes in making music with craft, precision and purity. in his words, “to be in the presence of music when it moves into the room,” and then, “to be in the presence of an audience when music enters a space’ is everything.
For long term King Crimson fans, this will not come as a surprise. For contemporary music fans that commitment to transcendence may be a revelation.
In The Court Of The Crimson King: King Crimson at 50, written and directed by Toby Amies, starring Robert Fripp, Bill Rieflin, and band and crew members of King Crimson Available on VOD.