ZZ Top – Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard – are certainly among America’s musical elite a band who took blues rock, gave it a Texan tweak, and have for 50 years made gutsy music that amuses, amazes and gets your body moving.įrom their Houston beginnings in 1969 when guitarist Gibbons, then with The Moving Sidewalks, teamed up with bassist Hill and drummer Beard from The American Blues, ZZ have defied convention. To many people those things are the essence of the self-styled Li’l Ole Band From Texas.īut such memorable images are far from being the band’s only contribution to rock. The furry, twirling guitars from Back To The Future III. Two guys with beards, and a guy called Beard who doesn’t have a beard. ZZ Top at The Plaza Hotel in New York City, 1975 (Image credit: Getty) Watch: King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man 48. Yet against the odds they have also had some considerable commercial success – eight of their albums have made the UK Top 40.īut the band’s success truly lies in the fact that they are best described simply as King Crimson. This has taken them on a journey not only through the usual pastures of jazz, classical, blues and folk, but also across the globe in terms of their reach. They have never stood still and developed in a single direction, instead reaching out through all corridors and textures within music. It’s no wonder the tentacles of Crimson have touched so many disparate artists. Bands such as Tool and Porcupine Tree have cited Crimson as major inspiration, but they have reached far beyond the progressive world – Kanye West sampled 21st Century Schizoid Man for his 2010 hit Power, and British techno band Opus III covered I Talk To The Wind in 1992. This has led to a body of work that is not only the envy of many of their peers, but has also become hugely influential. Understanding that creativity is often born out of turmoil and disagreement, he has often brought in highly talented, strong-minded people. It’s easy to suggest that it’s Fripp’s vision, his drive, that has kept Crimson at the forefront of pioneering yet idiosyncratic music. Since then Fripp has remained the sole constant. The pair abandoned that trio’s whimsical pop in the pursuit of more headstrong – or head-fuck – music, and brought in multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, bassist/vocalist Greg Lake and lyricist Pete Sinfield. Their mid-70s drummer Bill Bruford once called Crimson “a terrifying place”, and that’s perhaps the best description of the band started by guitarist Robert Fripp and drummer Michael Giles, when their previous band Giles, Giles And Fripp ceased to be of interest to them. This most exhaustive and exhausting of prog rock bands have had nearly two dozen full-time members across five decades.
LEGENDARY PEARL JAM BOOTLEGS ARCHIVE
King Crimson on a French TV show in 1974 (Image credit: GAB Archive / Getty Images)įorget a linear career there’s nothing stable or logical about the way King Crimson have conducted themselves since forming in 1968. Their contribution to rock was cemented when they were inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. Combined with their powerful songwriting and the band’s devotion to individuality, it was a potent combination that ripped up the rule book of what it meant to be 'rock', and we were all the better for it. Roxy’s stylised glamour was catnip to the new romantics, their sense of provocation a beacon to the punks. Fearless and with a taste for overt experimentation, Roxy were radical and exciting, pushing boundaries without any concern for commercial compromise. A band of "inspired amateurs" (again, Manzanera's words), they were essentially a band of punks five years ahead of schedule. The group where a young Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno cut their teeth, they dominated Britain’s glam-era pop scene in the first half of the 70s, despite having next to nothing in common with Slade, Sweet et al and not being a pop group – or even a rock group.
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