ROBERT FRIPP Explains Why KING CRIMSON’s Red Felt Tense, Risky & Ultimately Worth It

A lot of fans talk about King Crimson’s 1974 album, Red, like it arrived fully formed. The reality, according to Robert Fripp, is that the process felt exposed and uncomfortable, which is part of why the album still hits with that cold, heavy edge decades later.

Fripp put it bluntly in an interview with Guitar.com: “The strength of Red is that the power is in the music.”

Looking back, he points to how open-ended the band’s approach was at the time, and why that freedom also created pressure: “It was very, very open. But it’s a very difficult and uncomfortable place to be.

“If someone comes in with a pretty well-written piece of music and says, ‘Let’s play this’, then it’s relatively safe and straightforward. But the problem is, when you know what you’re doing, if you know where you’re going, you might get there, and that’s not an interesting place to be. Where you wish to arrive is where you could never possibly know you might be going. But that is a very difficult tension to hold together.”

Time seems to have softened how he carries the backlash the record got on release. He even joked about choosing a calmer life if he could rewind the tape: “I would’ve stayed as an estate agent in Wimborne, Dorset, if I had known the grief that was coming my way. I would have stayed in real estate!”

And he summed up the whole “classic vs. hated” split in a way any band with a divisive record will recognize: “My approach has been, if you read your press, you read all of it. And if you read all my press, there have been — by and large — as many people who hated it as who enjoyed it.”