King Crimson – "21st Century Schizoid Man" (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!

[NOTE: The 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME wouldn't be worthy of that somewhat overblown moniker unless it included a song from the ne plus ultra of progressive rock albums, In the Court of the Crimson King.  Here's a lightly-edited version of my original 2010 post about the title song of that album.]

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King Crimson's 1969 album, In the Court of the Crimson King is 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."

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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:

King Crimson -- "21st Century Schizoid Man" (1969)

Blood rack, barbed wire 

Politician's funeral pyre 

Innocents raped with napalm fire 

21st century schizoid man 

Sounds like someone took too many hallucinogens last night and had a bad dream.

"21st Century Schizoid Man" is the first track on King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, an album that everyone -- by which I mean everyone who was male -- owned when I was in college.  

You must remember what was perhaps the most distinctive and eye-catching album cover of all time:

Although Roxy Music's Country Life cover wasn't bad:

I know, I know -- that was totally gratuitous.

And so is this!

If I had a nickel for every time during those four years that I heard In the Court of the Crimson King blasting from a dorm room, I'd be a rich man today -- assuming I had invested all those nickels in Berkshire Hathaway stock, of course.  Unfortunately, I don't and I didn't.  So my long-term financial well-being depends on your clicking on my ads.  Tres ironique!

King Crimson's music was half progressive rock, half jazz fusion, and half heavy metal.  (Yes, I know that a whole consists of two halves, not three.  That is the point, don't you see?)

King Crimson

"21st Century Schizoid Man" is over seven minutes long, but doesn't have much in the way of lyrics.  The second of the song's three short verses is quoted above.  Each verse takes lead singer Greg Lake (who later moved on to Emerson, Lake & Palmer) only about 12 seconds to sing.

Spiro Agnew

There are some Vietnam references here -- "Innocents raped with napalm fire" in particular.  (Maybe 1% of the songs from this era were about Vietnam.  The other 99% were about drugs.)  King Crimson's guitarist, the prolific Robert Fripp, later said that the song was inspired by "an American political personality whom we all know and love dearly. His name is Spiro Agnew."

There are some very interesting (by which I mean weird) cover versions of this song.  For example, Ozzy Osbourne covered it in 2005 -- no great surprise there.  

Other bands who have covered the song include Flower Travellin' Band (they were Japanese), Premiata Forneria Marconi (Italian), Entombed (Swedish), Edge of Spirit (Japanese),  Von Hertzen Brothers (Finnish), Let 3 (Croatia), and Noir Désir (French).  I got all that from Wikipedia, and for all I know all these bands don't exist, but are part of an elaborate hoax perpetrated by some computer geek with way too much time on his hands.

But let's assume all these groups are real, and that all of them did record cover versions of this King Crimson classic.  It's tempting to devote next February's "29 Songs in 28 Days" to cover versions of "21st Century Schizoid Man" and see how many readers (by which I mean how few readers) I would have by March 1.

Here's the most unusual cover version of the song I've found:

South Africa's Suck recorded a cover of this song on their 1971 album, Time to Suck.  That album includes covers of "War Pigs," "Season of the Witch," and a couple of songs from Grand Funk Railroad's Closer to Home album.  The originals of all those songs have been featured on 2 or 3 lines -- we may need to take a closer look at Suck.

On second thought . . . maybe we don't.

Kanye West's 2010 hit single "Power" samples "21st Century Schizoid Man."  I would never second-guess Kanye's decisions, but it seems like a very odd choice.

Here's the original "21st Century Schizoid Man":

I don't think you can buy an mp3 of King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man."  Click below if you'd like to order the In the Court of the Crimson King album from Amazon: