King Crimson - 1995 - Red - Live @ The Warfield Theatre, San Francisco, CA

Bill Bruford This was pretty much my last big tour with King Crimson, a band that had given me a lot of sustenance over many albums and even more years. This is the title track from one such album - ’Red’ - that had influence out of all proportion to its sales, although it’s a steady seller now, half a century later. Sometimes things take a while in the music business: in 2015 Rolling Stone eventually ranked the album at number 15 on their list of the 50 best progressive rock albums of all time. I didn’t immediately warm to the song’s original recording. Robert Fripp, who composed the piece, remembers it this way: “Once the track was put down we played it back and Bill said, ’I don’t get it, but if you tell me it’s good, I trust you.’ ... I said, ’We don’t have to use it.’ John was in no doubt: ’We’ll use it.’” The word ‘heavy’ has been bandied about a lot in reference to both track and album. I’ve always seen and heard myself as a fairly ‘light-touch’ drummer (who still has his hearing in good condition…I never broke a drumstick in my time with King Crimson), so the word ‘heavy’ as applied to the original studio track, doesn’t resonate with me. But this version with the extra help of Pat Mastelotto (drums) and Trey Gunn (touch bass) definitely does. But it is an elegant sort of heaviness: it’s dinner-jacket heavy. Black Sabbath it ain’t. A percussion instrument generally has an optimum dynamic range. If you keep hammering beyond that, it doesn’t get any louder, you just break it. So all that heavy-sweating, glistening-bicep, tortured-agony slogging of the committed metal player is mostly for your benefit. It’s already as loud as its going to get. When I endorsed Tama Drums, they had a ‘Black Museum’ of twisted and wrecked bits of kit returned by (usually complaining) drum techs. One of their prize possessions, they told me proudly, was the metal arm of a boom cymbal stand that had been broken clean in two by drummer Liberty DeVitto of Billy Joel fame. He’d been pounding the cymbal so heavily he broke the steel arm that supported it. They didn’t say what happened to the cymbal, or to Liberty’s arm!