King Crimson – The Sheltering Sky

The sound Robert Fripp liked best from Bill Bruford came from a tourist-shop box, and the band filmed it in a Roman arena without a sound check.

One of the most important instruments on The Sheltering Sky came from a tourist shop. Bill Bruford found the small wooden box in California and thinks he paid about $25 for it. It sounds like an African slit drum, liquid and only half-pitched, and it did something little else Bruford played in the early-1980s King Crimson managed: it suited Robert Fripp. Bruford has said Fripp was not keen on much of his sound or style at the time, but the box chattered quietly in the background and stayed out of the way. On the band’s film of their concert at Fréjus, France, in August 1982, it is the last sound you hear.

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The piece takes its title from Paul Bowles’s 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky, a story set in the Algerian desert, and the instrumental was partly inspired by it. It closes the second side of Discipline, the album that brought King Crimson back seven years after Fripp had declared the band finished, with Fripp and Bruford now joined by the American guitarist and singer Adrian Belew and Chapman Stick player Tony Levin. The four of them share the writing credit, and the band recorded it at Island Studios in London in May and June 1981. Bruford’s memory is that it began as a recorded improvisation, and that Fripp later focused on one section and shaped it into the finished piece, though Bruford adds his own warning: “never trust a musician’s memory.”

What carries it is texture rather than tune. Belew and Fripp both play Roland GR-300 guitar synthesizers, which give the lead lines their horn-like tone, while Levin’s Stick and Bruford’s box hold a steady pulse underneath. The melody amounts to a couple of phrases. Bruford used the same box on Discipline’s title track and on Two Hands, and later on Earthworks’ White Knuckle Wedding.

No Sound Check in Fréjus

By August 1982 King Crimson had a second album out, Beat, and were opening for Roxy Music on seven dates in Portugal, Spain and France. The two Riviera shows, at Cap d’Agde on August 26 and Fréjus on August 27, were being filmed and recorded for Roxy Music, and Fripp later recalled that the crew asked whether King Crimson wanted to use the same facilities. At Fréjus the band played in the town’s Roman amphitheater and were filmed without a sound check or a lighting check. The tour had its other troubles too: Fripp has told how Belew turned an ankle after climbing onto a chair stacked on a table to swat a mosquito. The Fréjus footage became the band’s first home video, The Noise, later reissued by Fripp’s label Discipline Global Mobile and, in 2004, on the DVD Neal and Jack and Me.

Bruford hears this performance as one day in the desert. Belew’s repeating figure arrives like early morning sun, the melody follows, the heat builds to a searing midday around the seven-minute mark, and the late afternoon cools things down before the band leaves in reverse order. Fripp takes the most violent exit, then the Stick stops, Belew’s figure fades out, and the box closes the piece. Bruford says nothing in it quite counts as a solo, only sheets of sound passing between the two guitarists, and he rates it among their best spontaneous playing together. His own part, he says, was minimal and constant, and he was simply glad not to interfere.

That is the strange achievement of The Sheltering Sky. It belongs to a band famous for complexity, yet it works by holding back: a $25 box, a drummer content to stay out of the way, two guitarists who never quite take a solo. Filmed as the opening act on an unchecked stage in a Roman arena, it still sounds like four musicians completely sure of their own patience.