Beat Brings King Crimson’s Early ’80s Back to Life at the Masonic Cathedral Theater – The Oakland Press

Adrian Belew laughed as he told fans at Beat’s show Sunday night, Oct. 27, at Detroit’s Masonic Cathedral Theater, “We had a plan: Let’s play the easiest songs we can play.”

“That plan didn’t work out,” Belew concluded, although drummer Danny Carey refrained from adding a rim shot.

Suffice it to say, there’s nothing simple about the nineteen King Crimson songs the Beat quartet performed on its first tour. But rest assured, the four musicians – Crimson veterans Belew and Tony Levin along with Tool’s Carey and world champion Steve Vai – were more than up to the task.

Beat’s focus is on the three albums King Crimson, then reactivated after a seven-year hiatus, recorded between 1981-84, when Belew and Levin first joined the band. The period marked a reinvention of the Robert Fripp-led progressive rock giant, adding more jagged and linear dynamics and tighter songcraft to the musical mix, while retaining Crimson’s penchant for intricate, complex arrangements. It was a crossroads of prog and new wave, strikingly daring and unlike anything else at the time.

On Sunday Beat, that music did justice without creating slavishly; even the short cuts like ‘Neurotica’, ‘Heartbeat’, ‘Sleepless’ and ‘Frame By Frame’ didn’t so much cover the original recordings as use them as guides, with Vai and Carey bringing their own rock-sized arena sensibilities to the mix and guitarists Belew and Levin on bass and Chapman stick follow suit with performances that build on the parts they created four decades ago.

The result was an exhibition in unapologetic muso chops and ensemble communication, especially between Belew and Vai on their guitars. For all their instrumental pyrotechnics and precision, the four played consistently in service of the songs, but with enough pivots to surprise even the most loyal Crimson fan throughout two hours of music, plus a 20-minute intermission.

With a few exceptions in the chronology, the concert was broken up into album segments, starting with 1982’s “Beat,” the middle release of the era, before moving toward 1984’s “Three of a Perfect Pair” — which Belew noted Crimson didn’t play live in the early 80s. very much – and then going back to 1981’s ‘Discipline’, of which Beat played all but one of its seven songs. Most of the compact performances reminded us how much music that incarnation of Crimson could pack into short song lengths, and how much Belew brought to the table from his previous tenures with Frank Zappa (“Dig Me”) and Talking Heads (“Waiting Man,” “Waiting Man”) . Elephant Talk”) into the mix. “Waiting Man” kicked off the second set with Carey going solo on a tuned percussion rig, with each of his Beat buddies joining in one by one until the song exploded into its joyful polyrhythmic fury.