Photo via King Crimson
Since launching in 1969, King Crimson has been steered by the creative drive of Robert Fripp. And while the storied progressive rock outfit has featured a revolving door of musicians outside of founding member Fripp, bassist Tony Levin has been a constant in the lineup since 1981.
A renowned instrumentalist known for his prowess on bass and the Chapman stick, the Boston native is a fixture in Peter Gabriel’s band and has been a much sought-after session musician ever since he played his first studio gig alongside longtime friend and future storied drummer Steve Gadd on the 1970 Gap Mangione outing “Diana in the Autumn Wind.” Since then, Levin’s formidable skills have led to his touring and recording with John Lennon, Pink Floyd, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, Buddy Rich, Peter Frampton, Gotye, Carly Simon, Judy Collins, Paula Cole, Chuck Mangione, Steven Wilson, Sting, James Taylor and Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe.
Currently, Levin is back out on the road with King Crimson, a welcome return to touring after the pandemic shut down the live music industry for a year and a half. A creatively restless spirit, the 74-year-old instrumentalist spent his downtime working on a number of projects, including recording his third album with Liquid Tension Experiment during summer 2020 and releasing a passion project of his featuring photos Levin snapped during myriad tours he was on over the years.
“For a long time, I’d wanted to release a high-quality, coffee table-sized book of the best of Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, Seal, Paul Simon, Peter Frampton and all these tours I’ve done,” Levin says. “So last June, I figured if I bore down, it would only take a few months. I was wrong. It took all the way until December, but I was very gratified in January to release the book, which is called Images From a Life On the Road.
“You can visit www.tonylevin.com to find out more information on that book. More than selling it, this was more gratifying to have a big project that you really want to do that you’re not going to have time to do. So the year did help me out in that I got to finish that bucket list project.”
Day in the Life
The current project has material dating back to the ‘70s and is organized into sections of a day in the life of being on the road. One memorable image is of Peter Gabriel at the side of a car surrounded by sheep in the English countryside as the band is late to a gig circa 1977. As a self-described passionate amateur photographer, Levin admits to acquiring a lot of his gear in Japan during the ‘70s “... when I didn’t have a lot of bucks and Nikon cameras and good lenses were very cheap compared to buying them elsewhere. It was an opportunity to up my game.”
His love of taking pictures yielded two prior collections, Road Photos and Crimson Chronicles: Volume 1. Given his proximity to the action, the storied bassist has been able to give fans insight into the life of a traveling musician, be it on or off the stage.
“My real luck is that my vantage point is pretty unique,” he says. “So I’m taking pictures, for instance, of Peter Gabriel when he first started floating out in the audience in a thing that was later labeled crowd surfing. It hadn’t been called that yet. And there I was on the stage, taking pictures of that. It would have been in the early ‘80s when he started doing that. Taking pictures on stages is something that nobody else could see from that angle. It’s a lucky position to be in and very gratifying to finally release a lot of those pictures to the public. Why did I take them? I, of course, want people to see them.”
Meeting Fripp
But while taking pictures is an interesting sideline for Levin, it is his musical mastery that’s led to full-time positions with Crimson and Gabriel. Interestingly enough, his relationship with both the latter and Fripp dates back to the same day in July 1976.
“I showed up to record in Toronto with a young man I didn’t know named Peter Gabriel,” Levin recalls. “He had just left the band Genesis and I wasn’t even familiar with Genesis. The guitar player on that session was Robert Fripp, and it’s amazing to me that was in ‘76. In 2021, I’m still making music with both of them. It was certainly a watershed day in my career and I’m lucky to have been there.”
The next few months find Levin on the road with the current seven-member King Crimson line-up. Given Fripp’s musical fastidiousness and the complexity of Crimson material, quite a bit of rigorous prepping goes into a tour featuring three drummers playing in the foreground of the stage. It’s an approach that is both welcome and familiar to the bassist.
“We’re a very conscientious band, so we’ll rehearse for eight days before the first show,” Levin says. “Most bands do what’s called a warm-up show, where things aren’t fully up to speed. We don’t do that. We do the warm-up show before the first show. We have a lot of shows booked in the U.S. I’m thrilled of course to be back on the road and to have King Crimson back on the road. It was the end of 2019 that we last toured and it’s very compelling.”
Focus on Music
With Levin describing the Crimson live experience as “... being like an orchestral concert, where we wear suits and ties and ask the audience to really focus on the music along with us,” Levin said. noting that fans to expect the band to excavate numerous gems from its substantial canon.
“I can’t predict what pieces we’ll play, but I can predict that there’ll be a lot to make Crimson fans happy cause we really have delved deeply into the King Crimson repertoire,” he says. “What they’re going to see are spectacular drummers in the front and hear a huge variety of King Crimson’s compositions through the years. Each show is different. I would say we have 40 or 50 pieces that we can pick from every night. We don’t do them exactly like the originals, because we’re not a cover band. We really reinterpret the pieces and of course, with three drummers instead of one, it would be different anyway.
“We approach the vast material of King Crimson in a King Crimson way and I think it’s a very interesting show from a musical standpoint for the audience to be at.”
King Crimson performs Aug. 31 at the Miller High Life Theater.
