Who the hell does Robert Fripp think he is?
Robert Fripp is addressing a room of around 25 or so attendees at a Guitar Craft course in the summer of 1998. Held in an old educational establishment in Alfeld, Germany, the windows are open, allowing a breeze carrying birdsong to accompany his gentle tones. He’s talking about the importance of understanding what your aim is when undertaking something; if you can state what it is that you want to do, clearly and simply, then you’re halfway to achieving it.
Later in the course, aspirant guitarists of various degrees of ability ranging from the fluent to the fumbling meet with Fripp in smaller groups where, among other things, he takes time to look at how each individual is holding their pick. Finding that all hands are far too tense and thus squeezing rather than holding the pick, Fripp stands back to demonstrate how it should be done.
Feet apart, knees slightly bent, quite relaxed, he proffers his right hand holding the plectrum before him. “Now try and take the pick from me,” he says. Unlike all the other guitarists in the room, there’s not a telltale trace of tension or whiteness around the knuckle as, one by one, each student attempts to pry the sliver of plastic from his relaxed grasp. No matter how hard each guitarist tries, Fripp remains impassive and at ease, the pick nestling between his thumb and the middle phalanx of his forefinger stubbornly refusing to budge despite the very best efforts of those trying to prize it from him. Admitting defeat, there’s a feeling that everyone in the room has witnessed some baffling but beautifully cool Zen conjuring trick. The experience is also illustrative of the Guitar Craft aphorism that goes, ‘How we hold our pick is how we live our life.’ Later, Fripp explains, “How we hold our pick is a very small thing; but how we do one small thing is how we do all the small things which, taken together, is how we live our life.”
Throughout his professional life, Robert Fripp has had plenty of experience in maintaining a calm yet steely grip on matters, seeing off all kinds of attempts to knock him off course and divert attention from what’s important. He’s always been a man with an aim, a person of single-minded determination ready to do what’s necessary to create the right situation and environment so that, as he puts it, “music may enter our world.” To suggest that the pursuit of this aim hasn’t always been easy would be something of an understatement.
“Robert is that part of me that decides what to do and Fripp is the person that has to go out and do it.”
As Fripp has tenaciously wielded his plectrum, King Crimson’s 50-plus-year history not only contains a catalogue, citing Fripp’s dictatorial approach to the recording process as cause for concern and ire. Following the completion of 1971’s and Fripp’s cutting of the final cord with the original Crimson when he sacked lyricist Peter Sinfield over the phone, Mel Collins, Raymond ‘Boz’ Burrell and Ian Wallace quit en masse at the very first post-Sinfield rehearsal, serving out their notice on a sometimes rancorous US tour that was captured on the 1972 bootleg-quality live album, . By the time the era came to an end in 1974, Fripp called time on the group he had helped to form, with the now critically acclaimed and hugely influential standing as a final studio album of the 1970s. Burnt out by years of constant touring and increasingly souring relationships within the group, he went looking for a different way to live his life after discovering the writings of English philosopher and mystic JG Bennett.
