King Crimson -- "The Court of the Crimson King" (1969)

The yellow jester does not play

But gently pulls the strings

And smiles as the puppets dance

In the COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING!

That's the last verse of the last track of King Crimson's 1969 album, In the Court of the Crimson King – an album that I heard countless times as a college student.

Here's the album's cover, which is certainly one of the most distinctive and unforgettable album covers you've ever seen:

I spent much of the past summer remembering high school and writing about some of the songs that conjure up memories of those days.  But summer's over.  It's late September and I really should be back in school.  

This post kicks off a series of posts about the albums that I will always associate with my college years – my college madeleines, if you will.  Over the next few months, I expect to do at least a couple of dozen posts featuring songs from the signature albums of my college years (1970-74).  

Don't expect more than a few of those to feature the most popular songs from those albums.  I'm not going to focus on the tracks that got a lot of radio play, but rather on some of the longer and less famous cuts.   You see, we didn't have iPods with "shuffle" options in those days – or satellite radios, or Pandora.  You usually started at the beginning of a record and listened to at least a whole side.  What a concept!

I've started the process of selecting the individual songs, and I must say the experience has been much more intense than I expected.  I don't have many of these albums on CD or my iPod, and because I'm picking mostly the songs that aren't played on the "classic rock"-type stations, I'm hearing music that I haven't heard in 20 or 30 years.  It's a lot like what I felt when I went to my 25th college reunion and saw my college campus and the surrounding neighborhood for the first time in a couple of decades.  I'm having what I can only describe as hot flashes.  

She's a BIG King Crimson fan

Everyone seemed to have a copy of this album, which was King Crimson's first.  I firmly believe that In the Court of the Crimson King was always playing on at least one dorm-room stereo every single moment of every single day I was in college.  I'd hear snippets of it as I walked to our dining hall, and it was usually one of the albums that accompanied our late-night spades games.  No album was more ubiquitous on my campus in the early 1970's than this one.

It is arguably the quintessential progressive rock album.  (That's a musical genre that has a lot to answer for, but there are some great progressive rock albums, and nearly all of them were released during my college years.)  Pete Townshend of The Who called it "an uncanny masterpiece."

King Crimson has had 19 principal members over the years – there were seven different basic lineups for the band.

Guitarist Robert Fripp is the only current band member who was around for In the Court of the Crimson King.  In fact, a couple of the original members left only two months after that record was released.  

Vocalist and bass guitarist Greg Lake departed for Emerson, Lake & Palmer (more about them later) a couple of months after that, although he did agree to sing on the group's second album.

I was startled a few weeks ago to hear Kanye West sample the first track of the album, "21st Century Schizoid Man," in his new song, "Power."  (You can click here to listen to an abbreviated version of "Power.")

Given how hot this song is now, I probably would have gotten more hits if I had blogged about "21st Century Schizoid Man."  Live and learn.

Click here to listen to "The Court of the Crimson King."

It appears that the songs from this album are not available for purchase in digital form.  Below is a link you can use to buy a pretty good live version of the song: