King Crimson, Islands (1971)

When I think of silence as a part of sound, I often think of this specific album.  Its “silence” was in fact the hiss of a pirated tape.

For a while in the early 1970’s, I remember being able to buy 8-track copies of “popular” albums at the grocery store.  They resembled the early “generic” food products, with the plain white label and black printing.  (I remember how compelling those white cans looked, with only the word “BEER” on the side.)  This was before changes in copyright law of the mid-70’s, and the tapes were simply recorded from the albums and sold, presumably always without permission or payment.

I probably only ever had a small handful of these, and now I only remember one of them.  I had picked up Islands by King Crimson, not yet knowing anything about them at that point, but finding myself intrigued by both the band name and the album title.

Now, this was still very early in my awakening to prog.  Imagine this naive young American teen from rural Ohio, listening to “Ladies of the Road.”  Then listening to it again.  Then again.  As many critics have suspected, it probably didn’t help with my intensely awkward, ignorantly misogynistic adolescent confrontations with my sexuality.  But oh man, that saxophone entrance!

I think it was at least a week before I really listened to the whole album with the same level of attention that I gave to LOTR.  (If I use that abbreviation, it will probably drive Brad Birzer crazy, which will be totally worth it.)  The second song on the album that began to reverberate deeply was “Song of the Gulls.”  What’s up with this?  All strings?  Like a “classical” piece?

Remember how those 8-tracks worked?  If I remember right, at that point I could just listen to the third section of the tape over and over.

By the time the entire album had me entwined in its tendrils, I had repented and bought a legitimate copy.  Removed the shrink wrap, so there was no band name or title, and it was another one of THOSE covers: Peter Sinfield’s original “Islands” painting.  My third (second legitimate) copy eventually had the Trifid Nebula cover.

Once I had immersed myself in the remainder of the album’s tracks, I began to feel the importance of pauses, of “silence” (I would learn a bit later from John Cage the relativity of “silence”).  It was this album, as much as any early “prog” album, that got me to notice the role of silence in music, of “negative space” in aural texture.

It was also a bit later when I went back to the earlier King Crimson, once I had made the connection that this was where Greg Lake had come from.  The transitional character of Islands gave its music greater depth for me.  It prepared the way for the coming adventures with Wetton, Bruford, and Cross, which are actually my favorite Crimson albums overall.  But Islands remains my point of entrance, and so inescapably a sort of benchmark for my sojourn with Robert Fripp.

Listen again to Islands, and notice the surrounding sea.