Excellence, Existence, Tyranny, Death, and Rock

I t’s tough to be on top. It’s tough to be in the middle, too. Here’s how it goes for a touring prog-rock band whose biggest and only hit sputtered out at No. 80 on the singles chart:

It’s all the same. Different dark, dingy halls. Dark, dingy, smelly halls sometimes. Really dark, horrible halls. Cold, wintry, horrible places we go to. Never lovely. Just horrible, horrible, cold, dark halls.

The speaker is a roadie for King Crimson, which made it to the small-time and has stayed there for more than 50 years. Everyone involved speaks of the endeavor as a tale of endless toil and suffering, and they bring to mind the old joke about the guy who works at a circus and complains endlessly about having to clean up elephant poop all day, every day: “Say, fella, did you ever think about quitting?” “What? And leave show business?”

The concert venues may be dark and dingy, but what King Crimson offers its members, its roadies, and its small but maniacally dedicated fan base is ecstatic moments, contact with the sublime. Such is the essence of music: the pursuit of a transcendent, mystical experience. Should the goal be reached, doing it again becomes the new goal.

All of this is the core of one of the finest rock documentaries I’ve ever seen, In the Court of the Crimson King, which just debuted at the SXSW film festival. Toby Amies’s film stretches beyond the usual parameters of the form — tales of the gossip and strife attending a band, recaps of how the songs were created — to try to answer a broader question: What is it that we live for?

King Crimson, formed in England in 1969, is generally known, if at all, for its magnificent unruly beast of a single, “The Court of the Crimson King,” and for helping birth the progressive-rock genre. The band represents the life’s mission of one man: 75-year-old cofounder Robert Fripp, the composer/guitarist/autocrat who dresses like a valet and rules like an emperor. From whatever bandmates he is able to tolerate at any given moment — no one but he remains from the original lineup — he demands fanatical professionalism and absolute loyalty to his demon vision. (The group has 15 past and seven current members.) Fripp himself practices his art four or five hours a day, because, he says, quoting the similarly dedicated cellist Pablo Casals speaking late in his life, “I think I’m getting better.”

When the music flows ideally, “it changes my state,” Fripp says. But if a concert strays from the pattern on Fripp’s mental map, he says, it’s as if “my mother has died.” Should such a letdown be caused by the selfishness of any musician in the act, he says, he becomes as irate as if someone has trampled on his mother’s body. He means it. He exudes wrath like an Aztec god. And you think your boss is demanding: “Being in Crimson’s a little bit like a low-grade fever,” says one of Fripp’s bandmates. “You’re not really sick, but you don’t feel well either.” Another bandmate says his orders from Fripp were (in 2013), “You have to reinvent rock-and-roll drumming.”

With its rejection of conventional musical forms — meandering and droning and spinning off into a zero-gravity musical universe where collaborators work in three time signatures at once — King Crimson is a deep plunge into icy esoterica where progressive rock, jazz, and experimental elements intermingle. To flatter the popular ear is no part of its mission; the band’s brief and unintended mainstream breakthrough might have been when Kanye West sampled “21st Century Schizoid Man” 40 years after it was recorded. There is something amusing about artists who work so hard and yet have so little presence in the mass market. But King Crimson has plenty of fans (in 2019 they were able to fill London’s non-dingy Royal Albert Hall for three concerts), and those fans are as impassioned as a religious flock, even if the faith in question may be slightly silly (Larks’ Tongues in Aspic is both an album and the title of two songs on that album).

One fan describes the cult of Crimson thus: “It’s like Scientology or something, you know, it’s quasi-scientific religious bullsh**, kind of a freak’s club. It’s an occult experience, you see . . . It goes over most people’s heads, [but] if you get it, you really get it.” A former bandmate says a King Crimson concert is like experiencing “a kind of regal, royal figure . . . trying to struggle out of something monumentally obstructive.” Another musician says that what the listeners crave is nothing less than “peak experience” — the best evening of their lives. Many an epiphany does seem to transpire at the performances, and where humans are having the best times they will ever have on this planet, the phenomenon is not to be dismissed.

Here Amies, the producer and director of this analytical yet impassioned film, is fortunate to receive the candid thoughts of a bandmate calmly explicating profound existential questions. Drummer Bill Rieflin, an American, explains to Amies that he has stage-four cancer and enumerates all of the bits that have had to be cut out of his body. He wears a colostomy bag. Parts of his lungs had to go. His pain is an inseparable companion. “Right now, things are hazardous,” he dryly says, explaining that he means to spend his last days playing music because that is his purpose on earth. “The only thing that’s gonna be left behind is the work,” he says, “so it better be good.”

At King Crimson concerts, a large sign sternly warns attendees that they are not to record the performance with their phones on pain of ejection. The band’s purpose at these events matches Rieflin’s: “to be present, pay attention . . . to exist as much as possible in the present moment, in the here and now.” Maximum appreciation, maximum concentration, maximum presence, maximum existence. Whether at a rock concert or not, this is an enchanting way to think about the project of being alive.