In the Court of the Crimson King

King Crimson played their first official gig on April 9, 1969. They supported the Rolling Stones at a free concert in Hyde Park in front of half a million people in July. Jimi Hendrix was in the crowd, grabbed guitarist Robert Fripp's hand afterward, and told anyone within earshot that King Crimson were the best group in the world. The band started recording their debut album at Wessex Studios in London fifteen days later. By mid-August it was finished. The whole thing, formation to debut album, took less than five months.

Pete Townshend of The Who called it "an uncanny masterpiece" on release. It reached number five on the British charts. The recording was done on a one-inch eight-track machine, and the band produced it themselves after initial sessions with an outside producer failed to work out. Keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald spent hours overdubbing layers of Mellotron and woodwinds to achieve the album's signature lush density. When the stereo master was prepared for the American release, the engineers discovered the recording heads on the mixing desk had been incorrectly aligned for the entire session. The distortion that resulted on certain tracks, particularly the opening "21st Century Schizoid Man," was left in.

"21st Century Schizoid Man" opens the album like a door being blown off its hinges. Distorted vocals, jazz-metal guitar and saxophone in furious unison, time signatures shifting underneath it all. Then "I Talk to the Wind" follows with flute and pastoral calm, as if the previous seven minutes were a fever that just broke. This lineup of King Crimson recorded the album, went on tour, and disbanded by December. They made one of the defining records in rock history and then immediately stopped existing. Progressive rock was born and buried by the same five people inside a single year.