Today’s the birthday of Jon Anderson, lead vocalist for Yes.
And yet today’s song is not a Yessong. Back when King Crimson was recording its
third album, Anderson sang as guest vocalist on one track, today’s song.
Lizard is one of
those acquired tastes I remember acquiring as a teen. At first I was somewhat
aghast at it, as I had such hopes for it and, upon listening, found the album
not at all to my liking. Horns, I felt, had no place in Prog! “Prince Rupert
Awakes,” the first segment of Side Two’s sidelong “Lizard Suite,” though, was
OK, largely because of Anderson’s vocal. He has a choir-boy-like sound that
suits the song well, and the upbeat sound of the singalong chorus, with hand
claps, perhaps recalled a bit a song from that same year: “Your Move,” from
Yes’s third album, The Yes Album,
which was the song that got them on the radio.
“Wake your reason’s hollow vote / Wear your blizzard season
coat / Burn a bridge and burn a boat / Stake a lizard by the throat.” Well,
sure. Though I’m not at all sure what the song—or indeed the entire Suite—is
about, there’s no way I would go through a year of song posts without including
the lyrics of Peter Sinfield. His lyrics—in their obtuse, ornate style—grace
the first four Crimson albums, and it may be that on Lizard they’re at their richest and strangest.
The track is distinctive to me for its many interesting
musical fills that seem almost like asides or comments on the basic tune. Fripp
and company have no end of evocative sounds to pull out of their bag of tricks,
including—besides the horns, including Mel Collins’ sax—synthesizer and Keith
Tippett’s jazzy piano and fluid electric piano. Indeed, the piano playing on
the album is one of its strengths, as is Fripp’s acoustic guitar playing. The
album, but for “Prince Rupert,” features the vocals of Gordon Haskell who sings
for Crimson only on this album. That too put me off a bit in the early going
because the singing of Greg Lake had seemed to suit the heaviness of the first
two Crimson albums. Lizard is so very
different in all possible ways.
The part of the vocal that seems to really set the flavor of
the whole is “Of rainbow eh-eh-ends and gold,” that way Anderson gives it such
a madrigal-like feel. The song boasts many lines that I love just for the sound
of them—“all your tarnished devil's spoons will rust beneath our corn / [. . . .] Lizard
bones become the clay /And there a swan is born.” It always struck me as a song
about transformation, especially since a lizard such as the salamander—which was
believed to be able to live in flame or be born again from flame—was a symbol
of alchemical practices. I also felt the song was a harbinger of winter and
when I started creating tapes for my daughter—called Miscellanies—this song was
featured on the second one because it has that late autumn into winter feel of uplift, to
me.
Compared to earlier Sinfield concoctions such as “In the
Court of the Crimson King” and “In the Wake of Poseidon,” “Prince Rupert Awakes”
is even more obscure. Those other two—each a major track on the first and second LPs
respectively—involve images that seem parsable. The line from “Rupert” that has
that quality is “prophets chained for burning masks” which I still consider
rather good. The idea that a prophet is never appreciated at home, as they say,
enlarges to be a persecution of prophets for destroying the falsities we hide
behind. One suspects that Sinfield imbibed Elizabethan and medieval poetry and
various substances and then, in some Coleridgean transports, indited his oddball
verse.
Fripp, nothing loath, was able to create amorphous musical
textures in which such lyrics seem at home. It’s another matter whether the
vocalists hired to sing this stuff ever had any idea of what they were saying.
Haskell apparently didn’t like the assignment, even though the songs he sings
on the album are more intelligible than “Rupert.” Anderson, who had a tendency
to write rather oracular lyrics that could border on high-toned gibberish,
doesn’t seem at all put off. And his sound is so pure: “Go, Polonius, or kneel
/ The reapers name their harvest dawn.” Sure, Polonius belongs in Hamlet but
there’s no way to determine whether that Polonius is being referenced, except
perhaps as the figure of the counselor to the king or a nemesis of the Prince. “Now
tales Prince Rupert’s peacock brings / Of walls and trumpets thousandfold /
Prophets chained for burning masks / And reels of dreams unrolled.” The echo on
the “unrolled” and the dense sound of the chorale that follows is one of my
favorite parts on the album. That has the true grandeur of the courtliness of
King Crimson’s sound.
Gone soon Piepowder’s
moss-weed court
