The dance that Gurdjieff saw
people of Tibet use to enhance their spiritual discipline became almost only tool he used to teach his French and other students from his Parisian École which includes name Priory. That leads me to wonder about Protocols used by his Russian patron Czar; and his involvement in giving Hitler Swastika. I have also considered involvement of Bernard Baruch as a Gurdjieffian student and his Merovingians who benefited so much from wars of 20th Century in other books. In this excerpt from another researcher I enjoy, we find insight to modern music and Red headed or Crimson King. You will have a lot of research to do if you are going to understand these connections as this author properly notes. Gurdjieff was a spy and a lot like St. Germain. “British rock, particularly British progressive rock (whatever "progressive" may mean or not mean), is like a club or select society: more you find out about it, more you realize that practically everybody in club has played in practically everyone else's group at one time or another...
It would be silly to say that Fripp, or anyone other single person, was at "the" center of this tangled mass of perpetually mutating strands of double-helical do-re-mi. Yet Crimson King was inarguably one of ribosomal focal points of creative synthesis, touching, in his eccentric way, all musicians he worked with, and leaving his decisive stamp on history of rock in early 1970s and beyond.
Of classic heavyweight progressive rockers, who had laid down a more convincing legacy than King Crimson? By 1974 Yes had lost themselves in grandiosity beyond all reasonable bounds (though continuing to play to huge popular acclaim); Emerson, Lake and Palmer were grandstanding with thirty-six tons of equipment and labored flashes of lasers and psychedelic music-hall brilliance; Procol Harum were drifting into repetition and stagnation with Exotic Birds and Fruit, less than a mere shadow of their one-time life and soul. Faced with such examples of dinosaur burnout, and listening to records of all these groups today, I come away with a feeling that King Crimson's music of period sounds infinitely less dated... He was clearly in it for music... But then, one of marks of superior creative talent is precisely knowing when to quit, when to seek out a new vision.
As hinted at in previous chapter, particularly grating to Fripp was commercial/music-industry aspect of whole progressive rock spectacle. In October 1974 Melody Maker interview where he explained his reasons for disbanding King Crimson, Fripp said that successful rock bands often "originally start out to service a need but you now have a situation where, being creative, they have to create needs in order that they may continue to exist. In other words, they've become vampiric {This is proper word to use and readers of many of my books that address Dragons or Pendragons and work of Sir Laurence Gardner will see this is true.}.’ On subject of music itself, in 1987 Fripp dismissed early progressive/art-rock music as ‘a badly cobbled pastiche of a number of badly digested and ill-understood music forms.’
A sense of no new worlds left to conquer, of exhaustion of a particular set of possibilities. For an artist, to stay in same place is to go backwards, to stop growing is to die.
As for Robert Fripp - who disbanded King Crimson in face of what seemed to him insurmountable cosmic, business, and personal obstacles, and who effectively erased himself from musical scene - for moment, late 1974, he was indeed gone, top of head blown off, wandering around without a sense of ego. The Faustian pact was over, just like Lennon's dream. Music itself had stymied him, presentation of meaningful music no longer seemed a real possibility.
Fripp wanted to wrap up his unfinished business, however, and did so in a number of projects, among them putting together The Young Person's Guide to King Crimson, a double-album "greatest hits" package which pointedly omitted "Schizoid Man." The album included a detailed chronology of King Crimson I-III compiled by Fripp from record and concert reviews, conversations with musicians, and Fripp's own journal entries...
On break-up of King Crimson III, Fripp calculated that he had enough money to pay his bills for three years. And indeed, even in his disoriented frame of mind, he was hatching a personal three-year plan consisting of preparation, withdrawal, and recovery. His activities of first year - winding up his affairs - would prepare him for a decisive withdrawal from music industry - and effectively from outside world - at J.G. Bennett's International Society for Continuous Education at Sherborne House, following which he would survey inner and outer landscapes and decide what to do next.
It is quite possible that Fripp's transformational experience at Sherborne - which is, if obliquely, subject of this chapter - cannot be understood by anyone who has not undergone something similar. It is just possible, however, that some inkling of what was involved may be got by reviewing historical backdrop of his experience. Since Fripp's subsequent music and public posture was deeply affected by his encounter with Gurdjieff/Bennett tradition, and since only most superficial information on that tradition was dispensed by music press in course of reviewing Fripp's work, I offer here a somewhat more substantial summary for interested reader.
In recent years Fripp has publicly distanced himself from Gurdjieff/Bennett tradition, preferring to claim only that he speaks for his own school, Guitar Craft. It was not so long ago, however, that he was splicing Bennett tapes into his albums and quoting Gurdjieff in his articles. It may in part have been rock press's open hostility and ridicule of Fripp's apparent conversion to a "mystical cult" - though as far as I can make out, Gurdjieff work is neither mystical nor a cult - that led him to his present position of reserve. Gurdjieff
Who was George Ivanovich Gurdjieff? It appears that, even when he was alive - he died in 1949, his date of birth is uncertain, probably 1877 - if one asked ten people who knew him, one would receive ten different answers. Bennett wrote a biography of Gurdjieff, and his ultimate assessment of man was that he was ‘more than a Teacher and less than a Prophet. He was a man with a true mission and he devoted his entire life to it. He needed people who could understand his message and yet he was compelled to make message obscure and hard to understand. Therefore, he had to look for those who could acquire required perspicacity and also singleness of purpose to carry his work forward. Today [1973], twenty-four years after his death, there are thirty or forty people in different parts of world who are capable of transmitting teaching, but there are very few who can look beyond man to his message.’
