Thirty Years On, King Crimson’s Discipline Retains Its Power

King Crimson, Discipline. Released September 22, 1981.

In the Jewish community, a boy comes of age at his bar mitzvah, which typically occurs at age 13. For me, that was 1976. Disco was at its height and bad fashion was the only fashion there was. But at 13, I didn’t care so much about the rather desolate cultural landscape into which I was thrust. At 15, however, I did begin to care. In just those two years, the insipid simplicity of disco was replaced by the inspired simplicity of New Wave. But simplicity was not where my head was at. I’d begun doing certain things recreationally and my brain was excited by more complex and sophisticated music.

By 1979, I was firmly a fan of “progressive rock,” most specifically the music of bands such as Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Yes, Pink Floyd, ELP, The Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Genesis, and Rush. These bands would more or less align themselves with the credo that appeared in the liner notes of Gentle Giant’s second album, from 1971: “It is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of becoming very unpopular.” Applying instrumentation not typically found in rock music (such as violin, cello, and flute), technology (such as synthesizers and various new gizmos), lengthy compositions, and album-length concepts, progressive rock was never radio-friendly, though some groups like Yes, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Rush did manage to become quite popular, often through a somewhat more accessible tune edited for radio that managed to slip through the programming gatekeepers.

Unfortunately, 1979 was not a great time to enter this genre. Gentle Giant was working on its final album, continuing a recent trend of ever more commercial-sounding releases. King Crimson had disbanded in 1974. Yes lost its singer and keyboardist following a creative nadir of an album called Tormato. Pink Floyd was riding high with The Wall, but significant personnel changes were on the horizon, as they were with The Moody Blues and Jethro Tull. ELP was gone. Rush was doing well on the radio, which to some extent cut into their prog cred, and an exciting new band called U.K., comprising two ex-members of King Crimson, broke up after only two albums and two tours.

So it was that I turned my back and ears on the current music scene and instead became obsessed with the music of 1967-75. To this day, my younger colleagues consider me “the ‘70s guy.” Even when entering college in the fall of 1981, I was decidedly anti-anything that had to do with ‘80s music or fashion. There was, however, one thing that helped me bridge the gap between the past and the present: the sudden and surprising reappearance of King Crimson.

Unbeknownst to me, guitarist Robert Fripp, the group’s leader and only constant during its initial run from 1969-74, had approached drummer Bill Bruford, who had been in the last incarnation of the band, which lasted from 1972-74 (and on U.K.’s first album, as well as being the original drummer of Yes and serving short tour stints with Genesis and Gong), with the idea of doing a project together. Fripp, who had been working with the likes of David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno, and Daryl Hall, wanted a somewhat funkier drum sound, with less emphasis on cymbals. Bruford had just gotten a Simmons electronic drum kit. Together, they began to sketch out a sound.

Bassist Tony Levin, who had played on Fripp’s first solo album and was a mainstay of Gabriel’s band, was recruited, as was Adrian Belew, an innovative guitarist who had brought interesting sounds to Frank Zappa and the Talking Heads. These two additions were notable in that they were the first Americans to be members of King Crimson (though the band was not yet called that), and they brought with them a host of electronic goodies: Levin the Chapman Stick, and Belew an assortment of pedals and gizmos that enabled him to mimic the sounds of wild animals. Not only that, but never before had another guitarist slung his axe alongside Fripp, an acknowledged master of the instrument.

Fripp dubbed the band Discipline and they began gigging as such. Eventually, Fripp concluded that this band was, in fact, the reincarnation of King Crimson. The name was minimally more marketable (though the band had its cult following, it had been seven years since they last were heard from), but more significantly, it raised the expectations for the outfit.

From my dorm at college, I heard that a new King Crimson album – titled Discipline – was afoot and even more exciting, the band was set to play at the college that spring. I couldn’t imagine what the new Crimson would sound like. My friend Marc, back home in Newton, Massachusetts, bought the album before I did and we listened to it together for the first time over the phone. It was unlike anything we had heard before. Yes, there was a Talking Heads rhythmic influence, the production values were of its time, and it was unquestionably progressive. But the front line of Chapman Stick and the twin interweaving guitars created a unique sonic jigsaw that could only have come from something called King Crimson, even as it distinguished this edition from all previous ones.


I bought the album as soon as I could and played it often. I became very familiar with the seven cuts. But as the concert approached, I began a relationship with that album unlike anything I have ever had with any other recording.

I was a member of the student group that produced and promoted concerts on campus, and one of my responsibilities as a Publicity Department volunteer was to set up a record player on a table on the Campus Center Concourse and play the records of artists who were appearing, give out information, and answer questions. Typically, I had other volunteers I would schedule for when I had classes, but at this time for some reason I can no longer remember, extra hands were hard to come by. Therefore, I manned the turntable for long stretches over a three- or four-week period.

What this meant was that I heard Discipline in full probably four or five times a day for weeks. The first interesting aspect to that is that I never became sick of it. There always seemed to be new things to discover in it. The other thing is that I found the varying tempos and timbres of the album seemed to match perfectly the rise and fall of activity within the Campus Center. In between classes, students would rush through with a cacophonous din of conversation, shoe clacking, and the beeping rustle of retail transactions all around me. But then it would clear out and serenity would take over. Fast, slow, loud, soft, organic and electronic, Discipline had it all, and it truly became my soundtrack for that period of my life.


Ultimately, the concert came and it was a glorious experience. In the meantime, 1981 also saw Rush come out with its masterpiece album, Moving Pictures. In 1982, Asia, a supergroup comprising exp-members of Yes, King Crimson, and ELP, debuted to much commercial acclaim. Yes rocketed to the top of the pyramid in 1983 with 90125. It seemed progressive rock was back with a vengeance. But when Crimson disbanded again in 1984, the genre again appeared on the verge of extinction. Groups still plied their trade, but more often than not the music was a series of trade-offs between the echoes of the glory days and a more commercial, current sound that alienated as many old fans as it did win new converts.

But that’s as may be. The fact is, for 30 of my 48 years, King Crimson’s Discipline has been an album of unique emotional and visceral power for me, one that is by turns terrifying and tranquil, and as complete as it is complex. To Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, and Bill Bruford: Thank you.

Tales From Typographic Oceans

My first job out of college was doing public relations for a producer of computer industry trade shows. I was there for two years and got to visit Atlanta and Las Vegas multiple times, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Tampa. But I wasn’t all that interested in the computer industry and so I left in search of new opportunities. After 10 months without a job, I was ready to do just about anything. During this span of time being unemployed, I was devastated by the end of a four-year relationship and I met the woman I would eventually marry and divorce.

It was at that point (1988) that I got hired by a company called Bitstream, which was the first independent digital typefoundry. What that means is that they made digital fonts that anyone can use on any computer or printer. That seems obvious now, but back then it was a matter of a U.S. patent for an artificial intelligence-based scaling technology, while a package of four typefaces (usually the roman, italic, bold, and bold italic of a single design) sold at retail for $200.

This was when the term WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) was in vogue; it meant that the type you saw on your screen looked very much like the type on the document you printed. Again, we take that for granted today, but back then it was pretty exciting. That capability and the democratization of type (meaning it was no longer the exclusive domain of professional printers and publishers) led to the emergence of desktop publishing.

As part of Bitstream’s marketing communications team, I had to know how to use this stuff and when I realized how easy it was to make a pretty professional-looking document I realized I could do something I’d long thought of doing: publishing my own music newsletter.

The reason I wanted to do a music newsletter is because I’ve always loved talking about music. I was sort of expert in various groups and genres, was always an avid liner note reader who could make connections between producers and studios, and loved comparing and contrasting different musicians and albums. My friends and I were all like this, and I thought it would be cool to create a vehicle that would broaden the discussion among like-minded people across the country.

At the time, I was a subscriber to a Todd Rundgren fanzine, which was well-done in terms of content (having had the cooperation of Rundgren’s management) but hard on the eyes. I wanted to do something that looked nicer and hoped that the content would work itself out. But first I had to figure out what group or genre I wanted the newsletter (personally I despise the term fanzine) to focus on. It didn’t take all that long, as I pretty much knew I wanted to talk about progressive rock, that cerebral form of music that grew out of late-‘60s psychedelia and whose heyday lasted until the backlash of mid- to late-‘70s punk and new wave.

The latter styles brought rock music back to the basics after the progressives blended classical motifs and impressionistic lyrics in a complex stew of unusual time signatures, expansive instrumentation (multiple keyboards, mellotrons and moogs, double-necked guitars, and Taurus bass pedals were standard, and flute, violin, cello, and vibraphone were in some groups’ arsenals as well), side-long songs (one album by Yes, Tales From Topographic Oceans, was a two-record set with only four songs, while Jethro Tull and Nektar both put out albums where a single composition spanned both sides of a record), and the dreaded concept album.


Being so cerebral, progressive rock was a natural for prompting musical discussion. However, I thought for a while as to whether I wanted to key on my favorite progressive group, Gentle Giant, or the prog genre as a whole. Ultimately, I decided that Giant was too obscure (this was pre-Internet and I didn’t have a way to know just how many Giant fans there are in the world). Also, Giant ended in 1980 and few of its members were particularly active so it seemed like the content well would soon run dry. So I decided to focus on progressive rock, but I named the newsletter after a Gentle Giant composition, On Reflection.

To lay out the newsletter, I used a long-defunct application called PageMaker. I learned on the job how to design a publication, prepare images for printing, and amass content. I was lucky in that former Yes members had just announced out of the blue that they would be forming a new band with the law-firm name of Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe (Bruford had done even better work with two successive lineups of King Crimson after leaving Yes in 1972). So between that, a manifesto of what I wanted to accomplish with the newsletter, and a few album reviews, I had much of the first issue composed in fairly short order.

The next challenge was to promote it. I elected to start small with a single 1/16-page ad in Goldmine magazine, the primary publication of record collectors. From one ad I got numerous queries. I decided that I would send an issue to all respondents with an offer to subscribe. Over the next few issues, subscriptions grew and I was surprised to get subscribers from Europe and Japan. I don’t recall how many readers I had at the newsletter’s peak but it was well beyond my poor management and financial skills, and within a few short years On Reflection went belly up.

When all was said and done, On Reflection ran monthly from February 1989 to March 1992. Nineteen months later, I married a woman who despises progressive rock.

I was sad yet relieved that my venture had failed. The fact is, towards the end I was getting kind of sick of the genre, the problem being that I had been bound to focus on one style of music, listening to new recordings sent to me of neo-progressive bands who sounded just like 1973-era Genesis or Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Though I was desperate to explore jazz and ethnic music more deeply, I felt constrained by the needs and expectations of my subscribers to maintain a narrow musical focus – ironic, given the expansive scope of the genre.

Yet in many ways it was a very positive experience for me. It was my first entrepreneurial venture, it gave me a chance to write about a subject I was passionate about, I met some interesting people, and I had the opportunity to interview a few prog musicians, including the lovely Annie Haslam from Renaissance (she began the phone interview by saying she had just stepped out of the shower, and I nearly fainted), the iconoclastic Daevid Allen from Gong, and the ambitious Derek Shulman from Gentle Giant, who at the time was president of Atco Records and is still an industry executive and entrepreneur.

Today, I still enjoy progressive rock, and have even reviewed CDs for Progression magazine, which essentially is the reincarnation of On Reflection, it having risen from the ashes by a former subscriber with minor assistance from me in the beginning. However, I now have the freedom to listen to whatever I want whenever I want, so I certainly don’t miss those days spent traversing typographic oceans around the dark side of the moon, venturing close to the edge and lying down on Broadway.

Past Projects I: Music newsletter

In February 1989, I published the premiere issue of On Reflection, a monthly newsletter on progressive rock, the musical phenomenon of the late 60s and 70s that dared suggest that Mussorgsky and Bartok could be as valid an influence for rock and roll as Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley. Key bands include Yes, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP), Genesis, Gentle Giant, Renaissance, and Gong, among many others. I wrote and published the newsletter until March 1992.

There were two reasons why I started the newsletter, and two reasons why I terminated it. The first reason for starting it was that my friends and I loved to talk about the music we loved, and progressive rock was particularly rich for both conversation and argument because it was dense, impressionistic, complex, and bombastic. The second reason for starting it was that I was working for a digital type company called Bitstream that was helping to launch the desktop publishing revolution of the late 80s, and I was eager to experiment with the new tools I had access to. The reasons for ceasing publication were that I was broke (I've never been cut out to be a businessman and I guess I either never got a critical mass of subscribers or else never charged enough to build a financial cushion), and that I was eager to broaden my musical horizons and spend more time learning about and listening to jazz, folk, and ethnic music.

The title, On Reflection, is the name of a song by Gentle Giant, which is an all-time, hall of fame favorite band of mine, right up there with Brian Wilson. This English sextet-turned-quintet was, as its name suggested, both minimalistic and maximalistic. Eschewing long jams, songs, and solos, the group has been called chamber rock, constructing a musical jigsaw puzzle by stacking short, repeated, polyphonous phrases on top of each other. In addition to the standard arsenal of acoustic and electric guitars, multiple electronic and acoustic keyboards, bass, and drums, the members played such instruments as violin, cello, vibraphone, recorder, saxophone, and trumpet. They also were expert at astonishingly complex four- and five-part vocal harmonies. Given my love for the band, and the fact that the heyday of progrock was long over (though it continues to endure below the radar), I thought the title appropriate.

Here's Gentle Giant performing that song:



During my tenure, I had the opportunity to interview a few prog musicians, including the lovely Annie Haslam from Renaissance (she began the phone interview by saying she had just stepped out of the shower, and I nearly fainted), the weird Daevid Allen from Gong, and the ambitious Derek Shulman from Gentle Giant, who at the time was president of Atco Records and now is the founder of DRT Records, which has reissued a few Giant titles.

Check out Haslam's astounding vocal gymnastics:



After I called it a day, a subscriber named John Collinge, who had been a reporter for the Lowell Sun newspaper, asked if he could resurrect it. I helped him with his first two issues and he has grown it into a much more professional-looking publication called Progression Magazine.