Putting aside their comeback in the 80s for a moment and even their mid-70s heyday, what was it about early King Crimson that so connected with me as a 15 year-old boy? Was it the utter pretension of it all, the grandiosity of the Mellotrons, the ludicrous Shakespearean poesy about the end of the world and the madness of life? Was it the purported rejection of pop music convention? Was it the jagged edged bombast of the overdubbed saxophones, the post-Django guitar runs, or the stutter of Michael Giles' drums? Or was it just that it sounded like nothing else I had ever heard?

Listening to a few of official bootlegs from the era (71-72, in particular) to have flooded the market in recent years, I think the answer might well be all of the above. To its detractors, King Crimson's music remains inpenetrable and unbearable, not to mention somewhat un-musical. But it's their loss; King Crimson may have been deeply flawed, but they were also one of the most engaging intersections of "high art" and pop to come out of progressive rock in the early 70s. Without question, the stuff--a hybrid of English jazz and classically-oriented rock--fails as much as it succeeds -- there are times when the lack of a proper pop sensability threatens to undermine even the most heroic left-field experiments. Like, you're fucking around with pop songs in there, so just give us a tune already.

But in other respects, as I listen to bootlegs of what was supposedly their "worst" band (the 1972 Islands band with future BadCo bassist, the much-maligned Boz Burrell, on vocals), it's hard to argue that Robert Fripp wasn't onto something impressive -- albeit quirky, generally humorless and a lot less important than he probably thought it was. Fripp's constant dwelling on the tritone--the most dissonant musical interval, once associated with...the Devil(!!)--indeed returns like a Wagnerian leitmotif throughout the group's first four records as the basis for the music's melodic and harmonic structure. The effect was that the band had a powerful, if sometimes off-putting, musical language that was all its own in pop. As a bonus, it helped make Sinfield's most over-the-top lyrical blatherings seem almost visceral -- no small feat.

And unlike so much other prog, there's also a quaint, Old-Europe sense in songs like "I Talk to the Wind" and "Cadence and Cascade" about what lyricism should be. There's the feeling that superior instrumental technique should actually serve something greater than sycophantic audience approval -- it certainly added to the band's formidable ensemble power. For sure, neither helped them on the charts, where their prog rock counterparts (and, in some cases, alumnus) so succeeded. But in both cases, Fripp's stubborn English quirkiness has ultimately proven the group somewhat more bonafide progressives as well.

Of course, for all the interesting mucking about, there's also the sense that Fripp doesn't really know what he's going for, which might be the real reason I loved it so as a teenager. It's is probably why he disbanded the group abruptly after these American '72 shows for the "classic" mid-70s' lineup, which replaced Sinfield and his Formentera Ladies with what came to be regarded as the finest heavy metal improv in rock. It was probably for the best, but sometimes it's the failures that I love more than the successes.