Some day when this site gets a little more balanced I am going to post a page of absolutely-positively- must-have-in-every-collection records. King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King will be on that page.

In Winston-Salem at the turn of the 70s, the big hit station was WTOB and its closest competition was WAIR. I think WTOB was 1380 and WAIR was 1340, something like that anyway that made it easy to switch back and forth between the two stations with a brief turn of the dial.

By the early 1970s, I began to notice that WAIR was playing more obscure stuff while WTOB only played the hits. It was on this AM station that I first heard "21st Century Schizoid Man." I had really never heard anything like this song and it blew me away. WAIR played it a lot, along with other obscure stuff like Pink Floyd and the Mike Quatro Jam Band (which did a cover of the song "In the Court of the Crimson King" on the album "Paintings").

That guitar! Fripp had created this loud, intense, freaky wall of guitar that sounded good even on the AM dial. I didn't know at the time that the singer was Greg Lake of the future Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, who I would have a major crush on for years.

Shortly after I bought this record, I located a bootleg of a record called "Giles, Giles, and Fripp" on TAKRL records. This record had some pre-King Crimson songs where they had a foot in 60s pop and another foot somewhere else that wasn't quite King Crimson. There is a little solo guitar piece on it Fripp plays that shows his amazing dexterity, which sometimes gets lost in the wall of guitar sound on his King Crimson records. Fripp the master continues to plow away at new ground with his axe.

I can't begin to really explain the impact that the song "21st Century Schizoid Man" had on me, as well as the rest of this incredibly cool album.

-- July 23, 2005 (DD)