BEAT photo provided by the artist, Adrian Belew and Tony Levin photos by Paul Piazza
Tyler King: Hello! How are you guys doing?
Adrian Belew: We’re good, how are you?
TK: I’m doing pretty alright. You have this upcoming BEAT tour coming up. How are you feeling about it?
AB: I’m extremely thrilled about it. I love the band; everyone in it isn’t just a great player but is also a great person. It’s a no-drama band. [laughs] I love the music. I think the music is timeless. Five years ago I realized that it was coming up on forty years since Tony and I joined up with Robert Fripp and Bill Bruford and we made these three King Crimson records in the 1980s. I thought that the milestone was important enough that we ought to do something about it, and even after Robert and Bill weren’t able to do it, I still kept thinking about it and wanting to make this happen.
Tony Levin: We all feel great about the tour. It’s a very exciting prospect and we’re all excited to see where it goes. For me personally, to go back and do this music in the same way that we did it in the 80s wouldn’t be as exciting to me as it is to have new players introduced to it and see where they take it. And I’ll be very happy to be taken to a different place and I’m so thrilled that we got such excellent players. Steve Vai and Danny Carey aren’t only great at their instrument, but they have their own sound and their own approach to music. So per the new personalities involved that are playing the songs, they songs will evolve accordingly. As you can tell by all of my gushing, I’m excited about it!
TK: Do you have any personal history with Steve Vai or Danny Carey?
AB: I didn’t know Steve Vai personally when I wanted to originally get this band together about five years ago, but I gave him a call and told him that I had read an interview where he talked about how much he loved those three King Crimson records and Robert Fripp’s playing at the time, and would he be interested in doing this? He freaked out and said yes! Which was really surprising to me. So the ball got rolling and then COVID happened so that delayed further developments at that time.
With Danny Carey I have years and years worth of history. He and I have been buds for a long time. In fact my family went and stayed at his guest house in LA for a week a few years ago. We just love him and his family so much. We’ve ingratiated ourselves with the guys in Tool. King Crimson was graciously invited by Tool to share the bill with them as the opener for ten shows because Tool has always said that King Crimson really inspired their music. And that’s really true of Danny in particular, I mean he’s just nuts about Bill Bruford. Like, those records and Bill’s playing changed his viewpoint of music. So when you have someone like that, that’s exactly who you want in the band, someone who has a deep vested interest in the music because they learned from it. Danny was always my first choice for BEAT, but I always thought, Well Tool is this huge band, we’d never be able to pry him away from that. He also has a young family, so both of those things made me feel like it would be impossible to get him. But finally I asked, which is what you have to do, you know, and a few days later I got the answer! I talk to Tool’s manager every now and then and he tells me that Danny is walking around with a perpetual smile on his face.
TL: I have no personal history with Steve. I’ve met him and I love his playing. And with Danny, yes, he’s sat in with some iterations of King Crimson. I forget exactly when, but there were definitely at least two drummers onstage at the time. I’m looking forward to playing with them both, but especially the drummer and bass player have a bond and that’s going to be wild with Danny. It’s going to be very exciting to see where that goes. We’ve both talked about it and we’re both looking forward to taking that journey together onstage every night.
TK: How familiar were you with the music of King Crimson before Robert Fripp asked you to join?
AB: Well there was a point in my life where there was no way that I could make money playing the music that I wanted to play, and I was offered to play drums in a Holiday Inn lounge band. And I did that for two-and-a-half years. The money was great, the music sucked, but it was something to do. So what did I listen to every night after five sets of “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree?” King Crimson! I would go back to my hotel room and put on the headphones and just… I loved every second of that music and knew it inside and out.
TL: I became familiar with King Crimson when I was in it! [laughs] I met Robert Fripp when we were both working on Peter Gabriel’s first solo album in 1976 on the same day, and how lucky am I to still be friends with the two of them. And then I toured with Peter with Robert playing guitar, and then Robert asked me to play on his solo album called Exposure, so I was very familiar with that music, which was practically King Crimson music. And then he asked me to join what I thought was a new band with this very amazing guitar player named Adrian Belew and Bill Bruford, whom I didn’t know of. Then I went to what I thought was a rehearsal and later found out was an audition! But our intention was to name that band Discipline, only later after we were touring a little bit and recording the Discipline album did Robert decide that it was worthy of being called King Crimson.
TK: Adrian, when you joined King Crimson, how did you find your voice as a singer and lyricist over those three records with that quartet of you, Robert, Tony, and Bill, and how did your approach to songwriting change over those three records?
AB: That’s a good question and I’m going to answer it in a couple of different ways. Robert called me one morning, the first morning that I was in England touring with Talking Heads, and said that he and Bill would like to start a band with me. We didn’t even have a bass player in mind, but I was so shocked and happy to be asked. But it wasn’t originally King Crimson. If he called me and said that he was starting a new version of King Crimson, I might have said forget it, that’s too much for me to take on. But I couldn’t pass that up. Those are two of my favorite players.
So the next thing I knew, me and Tony are in the countryside of England stuck in this place called The Horton Inn. Bill and Robert lived around there. And the process began of “Ok, what are we gonna do here?” The first thing that happened was Robert told me that I was going to have to learn to play this kind of gamelan guitar-playing style that he played. A very precise picking style and a very mathematical approach, which was utterly different than anything I’d ever done. So he wanted me to learn this new style of playing and rehearse day after day after day, and at the same time that I was doing that he wanted me to write songs with that new type of playing.
I started as a songwriter. The only reason why I picked up the guitar at sixteen was because I had songs in my head. I was a drummer in a band at that point but I couldn’t tell anyone what my songs were. So I started as a songwriter, and since that time I had been honing my songwriting and lyrical abilities. So I felt prepared to finally be in a band where I was that guy, the songwriter and singer. But I wasn’t prepared to take on the music that was being offered and convert that to being songs. I was more of a traditional songwriter. So it took me about six weeks before I was able to break the ice on how to be a songwriter with that kind of music. Then I started moving pieces of songs around and Robert was all for that, and that gave me the leeway to start taking what was there and molding it into what I needed for the melodic content.
Trying to write words for King Crimson was the next challenge. The biggest maybe, because you’re playing in a band where, even though it wasn’t called “King Crimson” at that point, it had the cache of that. These are really high-end musicians, intelligent musical entities, and you gotta be careful with what you say. You can’t be writing something like my solo album Twang Bar King and expecting them to play that. Or any of my other material, it all at that point seemed really personal compared to what I felt like I had to write in order to speak for Tony and Robert and Bill in that genre of music, so that took a long time too. The breakthrough for me was when Robert said to me, “Well I have this guitar piece that I’ve had for a while and I’ve never done anything with it. It’s this set of chords.” And he played some of it for me and immediately I said, “Oh my god, that’s great. I can make that a song in the way that I know how to work.” It was “Matte Kudasai.” So I did what I could with the melody and adding my own guitar parts to it, these really beautiful slide melodies around what I was singing.
King Crimson always had really hard, complex music and then they had songs like “I Talk To The Wind” to balance it out. So I realized as a songwriter that that dichotomy was still what was going to happen. The music was very intense, like having to learn something like “Discipline” or “Indiscipline,” but to do that balancing as a songwriter was right up my alley. I still had to overcome the ability to take the ideas that Robert kept bringing to me to convert that into something more than an instrumental piece. At the end of the day, Robert would say to me, “What do you think? Is this something that you can turn into a song or does it just need to continue on as an instrumental piece?” And generally I would make that decision right then.
TK: Tony, I had seen an interview with you where you said you tend to not go back and listen to a lot of the older material you played on. When was the last time that you sat down and listened to these three records?
TL: I still haven’t done that. [laughs] Thank you for doing your homework, you’re exactly right, and I have not done that. I would say that in regards to the King Crimson material that we’re talking about, maybe half of it I had played many times in different live contexts. Adrian and I do a yearly King Crimson-based music camp where we play maybe ten or twelve pieces from this material, but mind you that’s only one show a year! A do some of the songs with my band Stick Men, but some of the material I haven’t played since the 80s. I have a lot of homework to do. Not only to listen and re-memorize the pieces, but also having to get back into playing the Chapman stick in one time signature and sometimes sing in another one. So maybe half of the material I need to listen to again, but I’ll be listening to the live versions because when it’s a good composition, whether it’s King Crimson or another band, it’s fun to see where it goes and see if the song is good enough to handle changing and growing over time on the road.
TK: Are you approaching the material now with BEAT differently than you did when you were in the last touring iteration of King Crimson?
TL: Very good question. In the last touring iteration, we were instructed/advised by Robert Fripp to look at the older classic King Crimson material as if we had written it. And so we did that with a lot of older material that the band had done before the 80s. We didn’t actually cover that much of the 80s material outside of a few songs. And what I did was revisit that journey that I mentioned of trying to get that bass part really right, and on that material there’s a lot of room for me to do that.
TK: And how did the guitar-playing of Adrian and Robert impact your approach to your bass parts when you began writing together?
TL: It had a huge impact on me and it did affect what I played then and how I’ve played ever since. I had not played with players like that who each has his own style of playing, his own way of making music. And as an American rhythm section player, what I was about and what I aspired to was getting the groove right, not inventing a new way to play the bass or a new way to play music or play a new kind of music. So I was kind of a kid hanging out with the grown ups and I quickly learned what worked and what didn’t work. Nobody was telling me that, but it just seemed a natural way to join in with the quirkiness of Bill Bruford’s parts instead of just laying down the bass groove and letting him be him. I could have done that, but it didn’t seem appropriate.
A very good example of how it affected me was that I had this instrument called the Chapman stick that I had played a little bit. And it’s quirkiness felt just right for King Crimson. It took me in a different place and I knew right away that it was going to be right for this band, and after we secluded ourselves writing the Discipline album for a month in England I was much more of a player in the progressive vein
TK: And did your approach to playing change over the course of those three albums?
TL: I would have to go back and study them to be sure! But we were still the same band with the same guys. Discipline was an album that we were very happy with. And then maybe a year later when we recorded Beat, we tried hard not to do the things we did on Discipline. We may not have entirely succeeded, but sometimes the ethic of a band is more important than whether they succeed in what they set out to do. We tried to strike out in new musical directions and of course we tried to do that again on Three Of A Perfect Pair. They all sound like the same four guys, but not the same four guys doing the same things. That is one thing I remember for sure about how we approached those albums.
TK: There are a lot of beautiful songs that that King Crimson quartet did. You mentioned “Matte Kudasai,” but there was also “The Sheltering Sky” or “Two Hands” or “Nuages.” Was that dynamic of having very intense songs like “Discipline” or “Indiscpline” paired with the more beautiful ones something that was intentional on the albums, and is it something we’ll see in the setlist on the upcoming tour?
AB: Oh yeah! What you’re going to see in the setlist for the upcoming tour is this: we really can’t play all three records from beginning to end, we just don’t have that much time onstage. So I made the decision to pick sixteen songs and I chose fourteen that I would really like for us to do. The idea is to showcase the songs more than normal. So I chose sixteen songs and then I asked Tony, Steve, and Danny what instrumental pieces they feel have to be in the setlist. I first started looking at what the essential songs are. “You have to play this, you have to play that, people are going to want to see you play that.” But then there remained some pieces that, because some of them came from the third album, “Man With An Open Heart” or “Model Man” or something like that, we only got to play them for one tour. So they weren’t the ones that we played very often. So that made me think, We can really give the audience something new here. Because the people who came to see King Crimson touring for Discipline and for Beat, they didn’t get to hear those songs even then. And the newer audiences that are coming, the songs will be new to them anyway.
So my approach for selecting the setlist has been to give you want you want from the catalogue and add in a couple of things that you may not expect, and then taking that stuff and adding in the drumming of Danny Carey and the special different kind of guitar playing of Steve Vai. Steve will play a few of the essential guitar parts how Robert Fripp played them, but other than that Steve is going to play like Steve. That’s what I want. At this point though, the setlist has turned out to be nineteen songs in total. One of them is from the era of King Crimson before Tony and I joined and that’s because when King Crimson finally went out and played in 1981 for Discipline, we realized that we didn’t have enough material and so we chose two songs from the back catalogue, and we played those songs throughout the rest of that lineup. So I consider those songs to be part of the 81-84 repertoire.
TL: It isn’t a set setlist, it’s a list of songs that we might do. And then we will fashion the best setlist, or setlists, from it. So come August when we all get together we’ll find out which songs need a lot of work and which ones not so much and which ones just are never going to happen. But right now the list is almost all of the material from those three albums, which is the way it should be. As for if the dynamic of the songs was intentional on the albums, I don’t remember that being something that was discussed at all. The songs were brought in by Adrian and Robert, and Bill and I did what was later referred to as “Crimsonizing it,” which was to take the songs to places that they wouldn’t have gone to otherwise. King Crimson always had very intense periods where we would just try out ideas that we knew might not work.
TK: You mentioned that King Crimson didn’t really get to play a lot of material off of Three Of A Perfect Pair live. Would you say that those are the songs that you’re most excited to play live on this upcoming tour?
AB: Oh no, not at all. I’m totally excited about all of it. I’ve played “Elephant Talk” a thousand times now, but I’m just as excited to play that song as any of the other ones because it’s all going to be new! Those songs still matter to me. I took hundreds of hours of my life to write the words and make the compositional changes that needed to be made to turn them into songs with Robert, who was a true writing partner. Those songs are still some of my favorite works that I’ve ever done, I think because the band that ended up making them happen was one of the very best bands there’s ever been. I think back about when we played those songs in that band and blew people’s minds at the time, and I’m hoping that we can do that to people who are coming to the show just to see Steve or Tool fans who are coming just to see Danny, or new fans or even old fans. I’m just excited to play every song, and let’s face it… this is probably the best band I’ll ever have to present the music from these three King Crimson records.
TL: In a solo way, in my little world, I’m very interested to attack and relearn the difficult pieces that I haven’t played in a very long time. But when it comes to the show and the pieces we do, it doesn’t really matter. What’s exciting to me is what we can do to all of the songs. I know we can go onstage and do a very good job of playing them the way they were, and I’m excited to see what they end up turning into when we do them on this upcoming tour.
TK: Adrian, one of the things that I love so much about those three records as a listener is the extensive implementation of the guitar synthesizer. As far as utilizing the guitar synthesizers on those records, was that something that you and Robert made a conscious effort to implement in the music, or was it just something that you were working with at the time that you thought sonically would work well within the confines of the band?
AB: I’m going to tell you my side, and Robert may say that it happened in a different way. In 1980 I went to Japan with the Talking Heads. I had already tried Roland’s first guitar synthesizer, which was a big behemoth and was not really playable. The technology just wasn’t there yet. The second one, however, they were just getting ready to release it when I was in Japan at that point in time. It wasn’t even out yet. And this one was really great. So I went to see the people at Roland and they gave me the GR-300 to take back with me, and I believe that it was the first one in the United States. By the time that Robert and I began working together, he had one too. So it definitely wasn’t planned at first, because I was already investing in it musically.
I remember I went into band practice one day and I began playing the intro to “Thela Hun Ginjeet,” which at the time was on the guitar synth. And I remember the band going crazy, saying, “Wow! What is that?” It did make a huge amount of racket when you played chords! And over time working on that song I realized that I preferred it without the synthesizer part, and just playing it as a rhythm guitar part. So the long answer is that I think it just happened at the right time that we came together. And I’ve thought, Why does that first record so different from everything else that was coming out at the time? Well everyone in the band had new technology that no one was using yet. Robert and I had guitar synthesizers, Tony was using the Chapman stick, which no one had even seen, and Bill was really the first drummer going through the aches and pains of making electronic drums workable.
TK: I was reading and watching some interviews with you that had been done around the time of the release of the Discipline album and the Beat album. I couldn’t find too many around the release of Three Of A Perfect Pair. I was watching one where you talked a bit about the lyrical themes and inspirations behind those first two albums. What would you say were the lyrical themes and inspirations for the third one?
AB: Well, Three Of A Perfect Pair is an exception. What happened was, and I’m sure everyone would agree on this, Robert had a plan that we would do three records over four years and three world tours. And that worked great for the first two records. But, I had put out my first solo record, The Lone Rhino, in between the first and second record. With Beat, we had just come off of a world tour and we were all exhausted, but we had to make it. So we tried and we did our best. And then in between that record and Three Of A Perfect Pair, I released my second solo record, The Twang Bar King. Unfortunately by that point I was getting pretty exhausted with constantly coming up with new material. It’s a hard thing to keep going. I didn’t have a lot of time to develop lyrical ideas on the road or play music, except for the music I was playing during the concerts.
So when it came time to do Three Of A Perfect Pair, we went back to the original idea of the gamelan guitar stuff, and we were able to write the song “Three Of A Perfect Pair,” and that kicked off the things we would do on the rest of the album. Pretty soon it became evident that we didn’t have a lot of material. And at the same time, Robert, Tony, and I were working on these very industrial-style sounds that we called “industrial bashes.” And so we decided that we should put the traditional songs on the first half of the record and then the industrial things on the second half. It didn’t quite work out to be exactly that dichotomy, but that’s why we ended up going that way because the songwriting was not ready. I remember at the end of working on that record, when we were really under the gun and the record label was screaming for the record, being in the studio every night and playing the songs over and over and over and trying to write words for them and get it finished. Songs like “Model Man” or “Man With An Open Heart,” they all came at the last minute. That’s a long answer just to say that I didn’t have a theme or a plan, I was just under the gun to find things to do. But I still think it’s a great record!
TL: Like with any band, you have half of your life to write the first album. You have years and years to write it, even if you’ve been in other bands. And at least in those days you would do the tour for that album, and soon the record company would call you and say, “Alright, we’re ready for the next album.” So you go in in a whole different mindset because you don’t have quite enough material and you try to come up with some material in the studio. And then typically, and this is not unique to King Crimson, the third album is even harder and it becomes a stress for the band.
TK: You mentioned earlier that when this line-up of King Crimson began playing live that you would play a couple of songs from the previous era of the band. Did that have anything to with the inspiration to record a third part of “Larks’ Tongues In Aspic?”
AB: That was entirely Robert. He felt that “Larks’ Tongues In Aspic” was an ongoing piece of thematic music that he would expand upon over time. He and I ended up doing a fourth and fifth part later on! But I always liked that idea because one of the things that I learned from working with Frank Zappa was that you should have themes and throughlines through your work. You should have components that you go back to and take them a step further or rework into what you’re doing. For me, it was rhinos and elephants! [laughs]
TK: The first leg of this upcoming BEAT tour has all but sold out, and so a second leg was recently added. How do you feel about such a strong demand for this tour, and once it’s done would you have any interest in continuing BEAT and going further into the King Crimson catalogue playing material from THRAK or The Construcktion Of Light?
TL: Geeze, that’s an interesting idea! It never crossed my mind. When you’re the kind of musician that I am, a kind of freelance guy who is sometimes in bands and loves being in bands that has good music and good musicians, you always want to do play with other musicians. What the musical idea is and where the material is coming from is secondary to that. But if the other three guys in BEAT want to keep doing this music, that would be very viable for me as a player. You’ve come up with an interesting idea! I’ll have to try to get it out of my head. Musically I would love to do it. Even though we haven’t been together on a tourbus yet, the guys are also really good guys as well as musicians, so we’re gonna have a good time personally being together for 66 shows or however many it’s turned out to be now.
AB: Well that’s a two-part question and another good one. First of all, the plan was not to add any more shows at the beginning. The original plan was to do something like 42 shows, and that to me sounded like a lot. Tony’s 78, I’m 74, but I feel like I’m 30 tops. But you do have to factor that stuff in. So originally we were just going to do the 42 North American dates and then go away to Japan, Australia, China, and elsewhere. So what we decided to do was to wait until we all had downtime next year and we’re going to do the international shows then, which will be next April and May, to add more North American dates. But now looking at it, it’s a fearsome thing to play 65 shows! [laughs]
The future relies on the guys in the band and their availability. If you ask me, I would love to continue going on for as far as we can. If everyone else wants to, I know we could do as much as we want. I foresee us doing more shows than we have booked now, even including the ones that are happening next year. I could see us going into next Fall doing even more shows. And by that time, if you call me, I’ll tell you whether or not we’re going to start writing our own music.
TK: I’ll keep your number just in case!
AB: Please call me and then I’ll tell you whether or not I made it through 65 shows. [laughs] But honestly, for me it’s a bit of a dream to be at this point in my career and suddenly have the hottest ticket in town and be in such an incredibly great band. How could I feel anything but thrilled?
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