In 2014 late King Crimson member John Wetton looked back with Prog on the making of 1974 album Starless And Bible Black. Along the way he discussed the band’s reputation of being too cerebral for rock star behaviour – and illustrated that it wasn’t true.
Palazzetto dello Sport, Rome, November 1973: King Crimson have just finished soundchecking for that evening’s sell-out gig. As Robert Fripp, David Cross and Bill Bruford go to ready themselves in the backstage area, John Wetton is preparing to follow them.
“I gave my bass to our roadie and I was just about to leave the stage when this 15-year-old girl came up to me,” Wetton remembers. “‘My name is Lorena,’ she says. ‘My brother’s here because I need a chaperone. I’d like to marry you.’ What the fuck?”
Article continues belowBack then, at home and abroad, there were legions of girls charging about from venue to venue, hurling declarations of undying love and more in the direction of their favourite pop idols. But King Crimson – really? Wetton says he was taken aback, not necessarily by the demand so much as the potential danger of the situation.
“I laughed a bit nervously, but she told me that she was serious and her brother would attest to that. ‘I have a formal request from my family that you marry me.’ I managed to placate the brother, who looked like he’d murder me on the spot if I said no, and for a few moments I played along with it.
“It was extraordinary. There was no security because the gig wasn’t anywhere near starting. Then I went and got somebody from the management to tell the girl and her brother that we’d consider her request.”
Wetton emphasises: “She was deadly serious. Amazing, really. Italy in 1973 didn’t have a progressive feminist atmosphere. For this girl to get it together, get her brother down to the gig and, with her dad’s permission, make a formal request that I marry her… It took me completely by surprise! Stuff like that happened to Crimson all the time.”
Despite their cerebral image, the band were no strangers to the occupational hazards of a band on tour experiencing road fever. Although they never quite got as far as throwing TV sets into swimming pools or trashing hotel rooms, they were certainly fond of indulging in some boisterous behaviour.
“Like the time we were in Avignon,” says the bassist. “Crimson stayed in the same hotel that I’d stayed in as a member of Family, when there’d been a food fight there. A food fight for Family was an everynight occurrence, but not for King Crimson.”
After checking in, Wetton and company went down for dinner. “I just happened to mention about Family’s food fight, and the whole thing broke out again with Crimson! Everyone in the band and crew flinging food at each other – ice cream, pâté, foie gras, you name it.
“The poor maître d’ was standing there utterly bemused. He wasn’t angry; he was just thinking: ‘What the fuck is it with these guys? We had another English band do the same!’ Thankfully he didn’t twig that I was the common denominator…”
While that kind of behaviour wasn’t uncommon for touring rock bands, it’s fair to say King Crimson never had that reputation. “We get very bad press in that respect,” Wetton says light-heartedly. “They say we’re not rock’n’roll – we’re too studious or something. That’s not quite accurate. We just did it in a different way, and we did it where there weren’t any journalists, like in Avignon.
People probably expected Crimson to be more studious or more monkish. We were more monkfish than monkish
“There was plenty going on – I can assure you of that. We had our fair share of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, but not in the same way that Black Sabbath might have done, and we weren’t tarred with the same brush.
“Because of the technicalities in our music, people probably expected Crimson to be more studious or more monkish. We were more monkfish than monkish, I would say!”
There are other tales of far more lurid backstage antics from Crimson’s extensive catalogue of live dates, which are not quite repeatable. But any consideration of headlining bands of the era will inevitably uncover rock’n’roll’s close cousins, sex and drugs, lurking close by. Alongside such carnal cavorting, the consumption of cocaine would eventually become commonplace – though not, it should be noted, by everyone in the group.
‘What plays on the road stays on the road’ might well have been the golden rule for many groups of the day, but it seems nobody told Fripp. Weeks before Wetton’s marriage proposal in Rome, the guitarist told the Melody Maker and the NME to declare his availability to as many young ladies as might be interested – after admitting the numbers he’d already had congress with as being, in his own words, somewhat excessive. “Sexuality pervades my work,” he told bemused journalists at the time.
You might not think of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Part Two as the modern-day equivalent of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! or the ideal music to improve your seduction technique. But the makers of the soft-porn movie Emmanuelle evidently thought it couldn’t hurt.
They ripped off the track’s thrusting themes as accompaniment to the film’s on-screen action – winding up ended up in court and losing the copyright breach case. Even today, Fripp receives a trickle of royalties from Emmanuelle.
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