King Crimson
Lizard

My wife continues undeterred to feel unwell. Every day, especially today. She is here beside me, moaning softly, twisting now and then, shifting positions from the sofa to the armchair to the chair, rolling a little cigarette and smoking it, turning on the TV and muting it during commercials, then turning it off, sucking on a mint, taking sips of water, all the while grimacing in pain once in a while.

I suffer too, of course: for her pain and for my sense of helplessness, discouragement, prolonged closeness, and longtime cohabitation with all this discomfort, still undiagnosed.

So I go out. It’s already afternoon, I grab keys and a mask, put on my parka, and set off in the car to grant myself a few hours of break, of physical distance, of minimal perspective with the bad luck that has befallen her and likewise affects me. Air, air!

Where do I go this time? I decide in an instant to head south, towards that beautiful town by the sea like mine, about thirty kilometers away (same region, obviously...). The Qashqai rolls comfortably on the asphalt while I relax, enjoying the pleasure of driving without hurry and turning my gaze left and right on familiar and known profiles and colors, houses, gas stations, shops, roundabouts, bridges, road signs. The landmarks, the stakes of daily life and of the world that moves forward regardless.

Almost there, I decide to stop at that hypercoop on the outskirts, with its surrounding shopping center. I haven't been there in years… I have one closer to home, after all, but to the north. I park, put on the mask and enter: lots of light and few people around. I enter the supermarket and leave after five minutes, to conscientiously stroll through all the corridors of the center which offer the usual boutiques… the optician, the dry-cleaner, and the sandwich shop, the jewelry, the Tim Wind Vodafone cellular shop, and the newsstand. I notice several vacant shop spaces, especially on the first floor where hardly a soul stirs: covid bites, it keeps on biting.

Half an hour and I’m back in the parking lot looking for new resources. An inspiration hits me and I cling to my phone, after all, I have a couple of good friends in this city. We haven't seen each other for a few years, but we’ve known each other for thirty, and in this present urgency to socialize and make the evening come, I have no qualms. She answers (of course, I chose to call her number, I have more affinity and history with her than with him), surprised and pleased and ready with an initial ironic remark, which I don't fully understand, though. I tell her I'm in the area, she immediately invites me over, but an hour later since she is having a lesson now.

Meanwhile, I reach the center, park near the highway and that mighty fortress a few steps from the sea. I set off and soon emerge from an alley onto the main street. I start wandering up and down and then right and left. I verify that ninety percent of the shops and people around are just on the main street… in the parallel and cross streets there are just a few isolated places, with a handful of people inside drinking something and chatting. It's always nice to explore yet another seventeenth or eighteenth-century Italian historic center, lovely and welcoming; we have thousands in Italy, all different and all alike, an immeasurable treasure.

The last twenty minutes to make the time pass right, I spend in the record store almost beneath my friends’ house. I compulsively thumb through all the available merchandise, from the offers to the full prices, from the Italian to the international. The shop assistant asks if I’m looking for something, I give her to understand that I'm one of those collectors who enter without knowing what to search for, or rather with a hundred possible solutions in mind, difficult to accomplish for those who already own thousands of records at home. And I find nothing to buy, as expected… but in the meantime, it’s the right time to ring the bell, just twenty meters ahead.

The door clicks open, I walk up the stairs and pass through the half-open door. She is at the dining table with a young blonde, speaking in French and looking at a laptop screen. We greet each other quickly, she tells me they're almost done, and I let her work while I start wandering around the living room and entrance, surprised by the amount of stuff piled everywhere: books, magazines, clothes, records, knick-knacks, bags, rags, cushions, trinkets: compulsive accumulation… I didn't expect it! The last time I was in that house, maybe five years ago, it certainly wasn’t in these conditions.

Friends are perfect for letting you live comfortably with realities that at home you wouldn’t be able to tolerate for even a day… In my living room, there is only one piece of furniture for each wall, spaced at least two meters apart. Books, records, binders, and desks are all out of the way on the mezzanine so my wife and I can enjoy, in perfect taste similarity, the ample cubic space of the room and its few well-chosen pieces of furniture, upon which no more than five or six knick-knacks reside. Quite the opposite of this house, where I struggle to even find a place for my ass on an armchair or a sofa.

I choose to stay on my feet and start peeking at the disorderly piles of CDs badly wedged in the crammed bookshelf. I browse ten or so titles insignificant to me and then find “Lizard” by King Crimson in my hands.

I don’t have it.

I had the long-playing record that ended up with many others in a store owner's hands, in those early 2000s years when I decided to get rid of the relatively few vinyl records I had left, a decision never regretted. Over the years, I've scrupulously converted much of my old discography to CD, but for some reason “Lizard” remained excluded. Perhaps because I have no great memories of that record, experienced as a step back compared to the previous two by Crimso.

I haven’t listened to it for decades, and certainly, you don’t hear its tracks on the radio. Only two passages have remained cemented in my mind: the mellotron riff attack in the opening “Cirkus” and the guest voice Jon Anderson of Yes on “Prince Rupert Awakes”, the first movement of the final suite which titles the work. It sounds strange to me that such an album is found in this house… I know my two friends well as rather casual and distracted music listeners; hmm, I bet they haven’t put this disc in the player for years.

…And my kleptomaniac moment strikes. Sporadic, but already experienced at times in the past. Instead of placing the album back, I slide it into a big pocket of my coat. While doing this, I push myself to frame the act as a sort of proletarian expropriation: these “difficult” records deserve to stay in the homes of those who occasionally really listen to them, know various things about their genesis, know how to place them in context… What a sneak, huh?! I let it go, it’s a small theft from a friend, harmless as much as incorrect. More than a lie, less than a wrongdoing.

The women, meanwhile, have finished the lesson, the young blonde girl takes leave and disappears. I say to my friend “I’ll hug you…” keeping a distance, but she comes to hug me for real, albeit without kisses and with our faces turned sideways. “No, I really want to hug you, huh, damn!” she emphasizes. While I hold her and barely squeeze, I verify her significant increase in circumference and body mass. She’s gotten quite fat! Instead, she finds me to be in shape and slimmer. I don't think so… I more or less maintain the same weight over a lifetime, while hair and skin race toward their twilight… I decide not to respond.

Then we sit at the appropriate distance around the dining table and she starts talking to me about her student: she’s seventeen, lives in the same building, a very good girl, has a boyfriend but is still a virgin, yet he sent her a WhatsApp with a picture of his erect dick! And she reciprocated with one of her young pussy. That’s how it’s done… wonders of the smartphone, which also lends a hand to shyness and first sexual advances. I feel like telling her “When we were their age, we used to get help from the darkness of a doorway or cinema, the throng in a dance hall during the “slow dances”, from a shared single bed at the end of an evening among students in an apartment...”

She retorts: “You’re older than me; in your times, you were like rabbits… there were the remnants of the hippie culture and no AIDS and open relationships and all those things I, younger, have always envied you for. You were born in the right years!” I counter that the best years of all were those of half a generation before mine, where they were young in the sixties, and then young men in the seventies.

Meanwhile, she slips into the kitchen, and I watch her as, with a Martini bottle in her hand, ice and all the hullabaloo, she prepares two spritzes for us. My blonde boozy friend! It brings to mind a common booze binge in Merano, where she had moved after getting her first teaching position at the local high school, and I, having ended up there for work, had invited her to dinner, and then she had taken me on a tour of inns. I deduce that her definitive overweight has more alcoholic than nutritional origins.

The charm may have faded (as has mine, come on), but my affection remains unchanged. She seems German, and she is, in looks, mentality, efficiency, and the little drinking vice, indeed. She makes me laugh, she makes me think, she entertains me, she piques my curiosity. The aperitif goes down in a few gulps, and she immediately stands to prepare another. At that point, the conversation between us becomes further, wonderfully, comfortingly fluid, rapid, connecting. We get along and love each other, we are friends, we keep each other company, an invaluable event in these times of covid and further personal misfortunes in my case, skipped restaurants and shows and weekends and trips and weekenders... It's a miracle, a precious good to find some hours of healthy and solid conversation with a pleasant, bright, attentive, well-disposed soul, with a person you respect, who amuses and inspires you, and who likes you equally. And with no need for any sexual tension.

And we even talk about this! “Sure, we could have done it a couple of times, twenty years ago…!” I tell her. She nods but doesn’t convince me. She's one of those who seems to flirt with everyone but in practice doesn't go beyond that phase. I had to explain it to several people, friends' women furious because they believed she had come on to their men strongly. “All show, she’s like that, in reality, she’s a natural monogamist!,” I tried to convince them. I've experienced it myself after all… we’ve had logistical chances, but neither was I particularly convinced and explicit nor did she give me the slightest real lead. Good like this.

After an hour of engrossed talking, her husband comes home from work, logically my friend too, but in a less…spontaneous way. A good occasion to prepare the fourth spritz and knock it back for the three of us, continuing to chat, of course no longer about the two of us with that nice couple tension, but rather about other subjects, mutual friends, work, politics, health, home.

It’s quarter past nine in the evening, time to speed off because there’s a curfew. We say a quick goodbye and I swiftly head back to the parking lot. The journey back is pleasant due to the almost absence of traffic, one of the few positive aspects of this fierce pandemic, and obviously due to nearly the full listening of “Lizard” on the Qashqai player.

Listening to a record after so long creates a special effect: notes and instruments and words and sounds already latent in the brain's depths resurface, ready to be refreshed yet filtered by the new awareness of a different age, of greater experience, of the objective distance in time which has by now elevated the rock of the sixties and seventies to classical music (and in fact, for years it's been called “Classic Rock”), giving it an increasingly convincing historical patina.

Thus, in this 2021 revisit of “Lizard” I can dwell on new thoughts, with the basic knowledge of these music pieces already acquired and reiterated in its time. The first thought is: “Wow, how poorly did poor Gordon Haskell sing!”; the school friend of guitarist Fripp, called on this occasion to patch up the departure of Greg Lake, who left the group to follow Keith Emerson and form ELP.

His poor, inexpressive voice, always fortunately mixed very low, diminishes the charm of “Cirkus”, when Lake used to soar epically over those waves of mellotron; then makes “Indoor games” less convincing and bothers me on how he's made to end the ironic “Happy Family”, with a sad a cappella laugh. While the rarefied ballad “Lady of the Dancing Water” is simply not in his veins, he being a fan of the earthy Ray Charles and all soul music. Fripp was really desperate at that time, offering this opportunity to his untalented friend.

Instead (second new thought) with the drummer replacement, Fripp got it right! Good old Andy McCulloch plays in the style of his predecessor Mike Giles, but better, with those broken rhythms and continuous snare paradiddles: a nice creative support to the special soloists surrounding him.

Among whom (third thought) there's very little Fripp the guitarist! Incredible… perhaps because he was all keen on familiarizing himself with the mellotron, left with him after the departure of specialist Ian McDonald, but the guitars are indeed scarce on “Lizard”: “Cirkus”, for example, only contemplates acoustic textures, not a single note of electric. “Indoor Games” is dominated by winds, and the Les Paul sits aside contributing little. Same on “Happy Family”, same on the ballad (again the acoustic), while in the suite “Lizard” here finally comes one of his solos, with that peculiar long-lasting distorted sound, simultaneously “sucked” with the volume pedal. But all this happens at the twenty-minute mark! Not even four minutes before the end…

The nicest thought though (and in the meantime, I’ve reached home) is this: “Lizard” is more fascinating, more exciting than I remembered! Not so different from the first two albums… those games of rarefied emptiness shattered by dramatic fullness, and instrumental balances that are always played between mellotron (enough), guitars (few here, as already stated), and winds (many this time: there's an array of great musicians dealing with saxophones, cornets, horns, trombones, flutes, and even an oboe, this last one however a so-called wood, not a wind). Then there’s the poor Keith Tippett on piano, this time engaging in more melodic performances, only sporadically askew compared to the previous “Wake of Poseidon”.

Perhaps because Haskell’s presence inhibits him? Anecdote on this, read and memorized from a biography:

_Haskell to Fripp: “Bob, when Keith plays, it seems there’s a cat hopping on the piano keys!”

_Fripp replies: “No Gordon, he knows well where he’s putting his hands, on the piano!”

_Haskell concludes: “Yes, but the final effect is the same!”

I’m glad to have snatched “Lizard” from my friends and to have listened to it well in this adult perspective of mine, sharpened by greater experience. Who knows how the recently remixed version by Steven Wilson sounds… but I’m fine with this old one, surely incomparable in yield, but faithful to my youthful memories. The suite is beautiful! Its magical moment is the sudden fading of the mellotron’s fullness at the end of “Prince Rupert Awakes” and the coming of Marc Charig’s cornet, poetic and excavating, approaching the crescendo of “Bolero/The Peacock’s Tale”.

Right now, it’s my second-favorite Crimso album, after the incomparable debut. This narrated experience has made it surpass in hierarchy both the excellent, but colder “Red”, and “Wake of Poseidon” which is indeed excellent, but structured too pedantically like “In the Court…” and thus a bit forced.

Just last, unfortunate year cancer (Haskell) and the unsteady heart (Tippett) took away two protagonists of this record. Nice that fate has allowed me to rehash them in this way, in the only album where they evolve together. A full four-star rating.