Red stands as one of classic rock's heaviest, most meticulous albums. With its dark, meditative sheen, it laid the groundwork for Robert Fripp's more atmospheric work to come.
Robert Fripp composed a list of reasons why he needed to end King Crimson. "The first," he told Melody Maker in 1974, "Is that it represents a change in the world." Fripp, then 28-years-old, felt that King Crimson-the progressive rock group he founded six years earlier-had become antiquated, representative of a different time. Furthermore, the band was dissolving before his eyes. On tour from October 1973 through the following summer, Fripp had observed growing tension among the quartet, now settled into their strongest lineup and on track to achieve their greatest commercial reception to date. "Situations are developing to an extreme," he wrote in his fastidiously maintained tour diaries from this period, "Wonder how much I should take."
The tour culminated with Fripp's decision to end the band and focus on self-preservation. The work that immediately followed-his ambient, experimental collaborations with Brian Eno; his seminal guitar accompaniment on David Bowie's "Heroes"-was more serene, more cerebral. He lived in solitude. He studied Gurdjieff. This was how the future looked to him. Crimson-with their drum solos and multi-part epics, their Mellotrons and tales of purple pipers-had become what he called a "dinosaur" band. "The old world is, in fact, dead," he explained, "What we're seeing now is, if you like, the death throes."
While it would serve as the band's final statement of the decade, Red, released in the autumn of 1974, does not sound like a eulogy. It's vicious and vital, bristling with energy and new ground to cover. It stands as one of classic rock's heaviest, most meticulous albums. It was equally influential for Kurt Cobain and Trey Anastasio; as seminal for metal as it was for math rock; equally beloved by scholars and stoners. With a dark, meditative sheen, it also lays the groundwork for Fripp's more atmospheric work to come: music that influenced an entire field of artists diametrically opposed to everything he helped popularize in progressive rock.