Robert Fripp
Posted By BillHeise on August 25, 2010
It’s no secret that the 1980s have gone out of style, but I miss them all the same. As I’ve said, I didn’t listen to much music in the 80s, so I have only fond memories of the decade. But my friends tell me that musicians relied on a series of electronic synthesized gadgets, rather than relying on good old-fashioned musical talent. I would remind them of the 70s, which featured Terry Jacks, the music of Love Story, and in which Ringo Starr was the bestselling ex-Beatle.
The lesson I took from my experience in the 70s is that there is good music to be found in any decade, but you have to wade through a lot of bad music to find it.
The Avant-Garde
In the 1970s, one of my favorite musical genres was glam rock. Despite the fact that I knew David Bowie’s work from a popular music perspective, after I met Leroy, I thought that his avant-garde work in the 70s was exciting. So I bought a lot of Bowie records in the early 80s. I had also been introduced to the work of Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets. Eno at the time of the Warm Jets (1983) was another glam rock artist. On Warm Jets, Eno had recorded another avant-garde song: Baby’s On Fire:
What struck me about the avant-garde of the 1970s was how it was pushing the envelope of music. Just as Mike Garson’s piano work on Aladdin Sane struck a chord in me, the solo on Baby’s on Fire was an avant-grade masterpiece.
I wanted to know who the guitarist was on Baby’s on Fire. It turned out to be a guitarist from a band that Leroy had introduced me to, as well: King Crimson. Their debut 1969 album, In the Court of the Crimson King featured Robert Fripp’s guitar. I thought that that was the sort of correspondence that I liked to follow, so I did.
What had happened to Fripp, I asked myself. It turned out that he had taken the period from 1974 to 1977 off. Fripp’s biographer Eric Tamm explains:
During his period of retreat, Robert Fripp had had no concrete plans for returning to music; before breaking up King Crimson III in 1974, he had concluded that being a rock star was no longer conducive to his continuing self-education, that it was, in fact, counter-productive to his aims. With the self-imposed retreat drawing to an end, Fripp did not thus return to the music world with a loud splash, making his presence known to one and all in a grandiose gesture. Rather, he stuck his toe in the water bit by bit, carefully considering whether the world of the professional musician was a suitable arena for his activities.
Fripp loves to formulate little paradigmatic lists, and in 1982 he was to formalize what he called the “four criteria for work”: work should earn a living, be educational, be fun, and be socially useful.
In seclusion, he read the works of Gurdjieff and John G. Bennett (a follower of Gurdjieff). The works of these guys is absolutely ridiculous and should serve as a warning to stay away from quacks. Their works appeal to people who deeply want to feel that the world makes sense and who also feel that science is inadequate to make sense of the world. Both of these are noble, human ideas. But then Gurdjieff starts in on his own philosophy, which you can get a feel for by reading the 18th chapter of his Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
I believe that Fripp’s system-making was related to his desire to form a sense of purpose out of the random acts of ordinary life. The scientific worldview cannot encompass the extra-scientific flow of music. Gurdjieff encompasses both in a neat package. In the world that we live in—a world in which we don’t need to behold the true reality of things but only need to behold nature in accordance with our minds, no matter how ridiculously manufactured—this is enough (see my ‘Why Fido Can’t Drive’ in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing
But I digress. Tamm continues:
As he leaked out of retirement in 1977 and 1978, Fripp was gradually able to acknowledge that for him, working in the music industry could be all of the above. Although in some respects Fripp seems a solitary introvert, living in a world of his own, on a plane of symbolic structures of his own devising which very few others are able to understand, let alone accept whole-heartedly, he was to receive much encouragement from friends old and new during this period, and was to succeed in carrying his musical odyssey through the next several island links in the archipelago of his life’s work. In retreat he had reached the point of realizing he could choose what he wanted to do, so now, he could choose music freely – spontaneously after reflection, to paraphrase Kierkegaard.
Work With Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads
He started a project that he called ‘The Drive to 1981.’ It was to be a project that would give him a framework for his life as he reentered the musical world. The project was to end in 1981. This appealed to me when I found out about it years later, as my friend Edward Vidmar had a similar vision in his bookstore, Project 1999.
Once again, I digress. Peter Gabriel was newly released from Genesis and was looking for someone to help him bridge out of the progressive rock genre. He settled on Fripp to produce his second album. To hear Tamm tell it, it wasn’t an altogether happy experience for Robert:
Perhaps Fripp succeeded (however temporarily) in bringing the sound of Gabriel’s music closer to “reality” – out of the inflatedly progressive early 1970s into the stripped-down late 1970s….Peter Gabriel 1978 shows us a very Frippicized Gabriel, as though Fripp was doing his utmost to incorporate Gabriel into his own scheme of things.
Anyway, here’s Fripp’s guitar work on Gabriel’s ‘White Shadow’:
He also worked with the Talking Heads, as I showed you a couple of weeks ago.
Reformation of King Crimson
By 1981, right on schedule, he had refounded King Crimson. Their first album was entitled Discipline
My favorite track on the album today is Thela Hun Ginjeet.
The song combines the Frank O’Hara/Lana Turner school of poetry as pure narration of everyday events not tied to any grand poetic themes with the ambitious rythyms and time signatures that King Crimson was known for.
I always thought that the lyrics were derived from Africa, which made me like it more. It turns out that the title is an anagram for ‘in the heat of the jungle,’ the original title of the song. To read more about it, click here.
I Check Out, But Music Continues Without Me
I checked out of the music scene soon after that. I was involved in my own quest for order, although I thought I had a better model than Gurdjieff. My model was Joseph Campbell. And although he, too, disappointed me by his inability to close off his model satisfactorily, I was satisfied with the sense of purpose he provided me at the time.
During the period when I was dormant, Fripp continued his journey, working with Lori Anderson on her avant-garde Home of the Brave (1986), an ironic indictment of America capitalism. When I started listening to music in the 1990s, Lori was extremely popular at the University of Illinois.
Sharkey’s Day was about how a guy named Sharkey had disappeared from his desk because ‘All of nature talks to me.’
But Sharkey has a problem. He doesn’t know what nature is saying to him.
All of nature talks to me. If I could just figure out what it was trying to tell me. Listen! Trees are swinging in the breeze. They’re talking to me. Insects are rubbing their legs together. They’re all talking. They’re talking to me. And short animals- They’re bucking up on their hind legs. Talking. Talking to me. Hey! Look out! Bugs are crawling up my legs! You know? I’d rather see this on TV.
Desk people are bad people. People whom nature talks to are good people. People who would rather watch things on TV are bad people who have lost contact with nature. Artists are people like Lori Anderson, who is not afraid of getting in touch with nature, despite the fact that she is performing an artificial and highly ritual dance in her unnatural white 80s costume while the sounds her band is making sound completely unnatural to me.
Lori describes the unnaturalness of America in terms that Joni Mitchell would understand.
Nobody knows me. Nobody knows my name. You know? They’re growing mechanical trees. They grow to their full height. And then they chop themselves down.
‘They’ are growing mechanical trees, and ‘they’ are not appreciating natural beauty. But more important that that is the fact that nobody knows the real me! I thought this was an instance of where the 80s had gone wrong. The emphasis on ‘they’ is emblematic of modern thought. We don’t have to have answers if we can prove that ‘they’ are idiots. This sometimes (as here) gets confusing. Ms. Anderson goes on to explain Sharkey’s sense of the origins of life. He alternates between fear and love before opting out for a third thing: ‘life.’ Presumably, Sharkey would also like to watch ‘life’ on television, too.
Sharkey says: All of life comes from some strange lagoon. It rises up, it bucks up to it’s full height from a boggy swamp on a foggy night. It creeps into your house. It’s life! It’s life! I turn around, it’s fear. I turn around again, and it’s love. Nobody knows me. Nobody knows my name. Deep in the heart of darkest America. Home of the brave. Ha! Ha! Ha! You’ve already paid for this. Listen to my heart beat.
There was a mania for this at the time. Intellectuals would begin their rational inquiry into things and would get stuck. So they would invent a third new thing. In Ms. Anderson’s world, it was this: thesis: fear, antithesis: love, synthesis: life. In Joseph Campbell’s world the rational alternation between the many gods (thesis and antithesis) was followed by ascent to the One Word behind the words, the One God behind the gods (synthesis). Another of my heroes at the time, Douglas Hofstadter
My Interest in the 80s
I thought that the 80s had some pretty interesting ideas, no matter how much I thought (and still think) that the legacy of the 70s, with its sense that humanity was on the verge of a great discovery that would put to rest the alternations of Enlightenment reason and rationality in favor of a vaguely defined third way.
In the popular culture, of course, capitalism was robbing all but a few (‘the knowing’) of the human dream of ‘life,’ just as we were about to break on through to the other side. Filmmakers like Louis Malle were inventing a mythology of escape to a Gurdjieff planet where Gustav and Chiquita Björnstrand could escape capitalist reason after meeting an English tree expert at Findhorn who had devoted his life to saving trees and other natural forms. English tree experts were the sort of people who could see a seed, not for what it was, but for what it could be if capitalists with their insistence on the literal aspects that appeared to their empirical eyes could only be gotten out of the way.
The fact that Gurdjieff believed stupid stuff, like his notion of Atlantis inhabited by ‘three-brained beings,’ which can be found in Chapter XIX of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson:
During this second serious catastrophe to that planet, the continent Atlantis, which had been the largest continent and the chief place of the being-existence of the three-brained beings of that planet during the period of my first descent, was engulfed together with other large and small terra firmas within the planet with all the three-brained beings existing upon it, and also with almost all that they had attained and acquired during many of their preceding centuries.
Things like this made sense to people like Robert Fripp in the 1980s. It didn’t mean they were true. It just meant that people like Robert Fripp believed things like this. That fact was not enough to turn me against his music, although it did sort of make me question his sanity. But I’ve known a lot of musicians, and rationality and even sanity is optional in their quest to obtain things that reason cannot manage on its own.
But I digress.
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