As part of the ongoing 50-tracks-over-50-weeks-celebrating-the-50th-anniversary-of-the-group effort, King Crimson released as entry #16, the recording of “The Sheltering Sky” from the storied 1982 show in Frejus. Technically it’s not “rare”, having been available as part of The Noise video for some years, but it’s certainly “of interest”, at least to me!
An absolutely mesmerising tour de force of mood.
While I still maintain that there is something about the studio recording that will probably never be equalled, I can say without hesitation that this is the finest live recording of this piece I’ve run across–a standout even among the considerable corpus of Crim’s hottest of “hot dates”.
And it’s something to be able to see it, too. From The Noise:
I seem to remember reading somewhere that Roland expressed astonishment that anyone had taken their then-new guitar synths seriously–they figured they’d be used primarily for karaoke–and after seeing such as this, they put a lot more attention into developing the guitar synth as a precision musical instrument.
I freakin’ bet.
Craftygrass 