King Crimson - Exiles live (video)

So this is from a widely and very long circulating bit of unofficial footage from a TV show performance in the mid 70s of King Crimson. KC is at its best on a stage instead of a recording studio (although it does sometimes make a damn fine studio effort), and while the recording quality is sub-optimal, this brief clip shows both the strengths and comedic weaknesses of KC at times.

Let's take this frame by frame, top to bottom.

1. Robert Fripp, who always plays sitting down, and normally has looked like a British schoolmaster, here looks like a cross between the school librarian and the chemist at a Hell's Angel methlab. As is to be Frippish, his hands do some amazing gymnastics, but the rest of him is almost completely inert.
2. Bill Bruford, the mercurial and meticulous keeper of obscure time signatures. Bill, the man who understands how to dissect beats into infinite new variations. Bill, the fully grown urban man wearing overalls and looking like a dairy farm urchin after the morning udder check.
3. John Wetton as the solid keeper of low frequency tidal noise, with his fabulously feathered hair and poor selection of shirt. As I have stated before, John is a weird beast; the man who helped birth the album Red for King Crimson, also gave us several albums of Asia beyond its expiration date.
4. David Cross was doing the violinist as rawk dood long before that guy in the Dave Matthews Band. David didn't last too long though, as eventually, he could not cut across the tsunami of caustic aural calamity KC would veer towards. Here, he provides eerie phrases and short passages of atmosphere-building swells. He also provoides the most bulbuous hair of the bunch. He does get the best bad, tripped out body aura TV special effect, complete with most eye-gouging colors.
5. Jamie Muir as....a total lunatic. Apparently a very soft spoken man in person on stage he was a sputtering, out of control freak with blood capsules and bizarre outfits (and this is even by 70s standards of fashion), all while playing a cacophonic array of percussive effects, knick-knacks and whistles. He later left and joined a Buddhist onastery in Scotland (they have those there????)

Overall, the weird body halos and skittish zooms make for rather strained viewing (I am not apt to take LSD just to enjoy a video...or much else forthat matter). Who are we kidding, the colors are at times so loud, Ray Charles could see them (and he is not only blind, but dead).