THE BEAT GOES ON

Together with Tony Levin, Adrian Belew and Steve Vai join forces for a Robert Fripp-endorsed revival of King Crimson's groundbreaking 1980s music.

- RICHARD BIENSTOCK

FOR 40 YEARS, fans — and especially a lot of musicians — have told me that this era of the band was a watermark,” Adrian Belew says, discussing the version of King Crimson that he led alongside founder and visionary Robert Fripp in the 1980s. “Was it popular and well-known by MTV lovers? No. But that’s not what the intent was in the first place. We weren’t trying to make hit records. We were trying to be adventurous.”

“Adventurous” is an understatement. The three records that Belew, Fripp, drummer Bill Bruford and bassist and Chapman Stick wizard Tony Levin released during that period — 1981’s Discipline, 1982’s Beat and 1984’s Three of a Perfect Pair — represent some of the most groundbreaking, challenging and creative music of the band’s lifetime.

The original Crimson, under Fripp’s guidance, tended to cloak its proggy compositions in heavy drama and encase them within epic song structures. The ’80s iteration instead embraced the contemporary sounds of new wave, post punk and funk, along with exotic and avant-garde styles like Indonesian gamelan and minimalism, and used new technology like the Roland GR-300 guitar synthesizer to create music unlike anything in the Crimson canon. This was a new type of progressive rock: short, sharply played songs that were rhythmically taut, harmonically dense, and often built upon knotty and repetitive interlocking note patterns — what Belew calls a “rich tapestry.”

“The sound right out of the box was kind of shocking,” he says. “When you put those records on and you hear them now, they still, to my ear, sound ahead of their time. There’s been nothing like them before or since.”