KING CRIMSON UK LP RED 1974. NEAR MINT

$

100

I am selling some of the records I've had for many years in my great collection.  KING CRIMSON is one of the great progressive rock bands, and RED is easily one of their greatest achievements.  Additionally, Robert Fripp is one of the most under rated guitarists in music.  The power trio of Robert Fripp, John Wetton, and Bill Bruford go full throttle on this, and with great assists from violinist David Cross, and Mel Colins on saxes and a few others...  This copy I am parting with sounds incredible.  The cover is shiny an looking like new with the exception of a tear in the bottom left corner.  The back cover is also beautiful but with one small rip that's about 18" where the LP comes out.  The labels are beautiful MINT condition.  THE LP is shiny and new.  There are about 4 whisper lines that are audible on the first 40 seconds in the beginning of side 1.  There is also a whisper line on side 2 but is 100% not audible.  With the exception of those few minor whisper lines in the very beginning of side 1, the LP plays as mint, with no background noise between tracks or in the quiet areas of the music.    The sound of the UK pressing is far superior to that of the US pressing.  This is a great copy of an incredible LP that was never a big seller, so there are fewer copies around that can be had.  Here's a review from Pitchfork;

Red stands as one of classic rock’s heaviest, most meticulous albums. With its dark, meditative sheen, it laid the groundwork for Robert Fripp’s more atmospheric work to come.

Robert Fripp composed a list of reasons why he needed to end King Crimson. “The first,” he told Melody Maker in 1974, “Is that it represents a change in the world.” Fripp, then 28-years-old, felt that King Crimson—the progressive rock group he founded six years earlier—had become antiquated, representative of a different time. Furthermore, the band was dissolving before his eyes. On tour from October 1973 through the following summer, Fripp had observed growing tension among the quartet, now settled into their strongest lineup and on track to achieve their greatest commercial reception to date. “Situations are developing to an extreme,” he wrote in his fastidiously maintained tour diaries from this period, “Wonder how much I should take.”

The tour culminated with Fripp’s decision to end the band and focus on self-preservation. The work that immediately followed—his ambient, experimental collaborations with Brian Eno; his seminal guitar accompaniment on David Bowie’s “Heroes”—was more serene, more cerebral. He lived in solitude. He studied Gurdjieff. This was how the future looked to him. Crimson—with their drum solos and multi-part epics, their Mellotrons and tales of purple pipers—had become what he called a “dinosaur” band. “The old world is, in fact, dead,” he explained, “What we’re seeing now is, if you like, the death throes.”

While it would serve as the band’s final statement of the decade, Red, released in the autumn of 1974, does not sound like a eulogy. It’s vicious and vital, bristling with energy and new ground to cover. It stands as one of classic rock’s heaviest, most meticulous albums. It was equally influential for Kurt Cobain and Trey Anastasio; as seminal for metal as it was for math rock; equally beloved by scholars and stoners. With a dark, meditative sheen, it also lays the groundwork for Fripp’s more atmospheric work to come: music that influenced an entire field of artists diametrically opposed to everything he helped popularize in progressive rock.

This LP soars from quiet to in your face explosions.  This is climax music at it's peak.  And along with Starless and Bible Black, the last we would hear from Fripp until he unveiled his new incarnation of Crimson in 1980 with the Discipline LP.  A keeper of an album! A must have, and especially in the UK pressing.