Grandiose Records Made With Some Spontaneity

Bassist Billy Sheehan

Billy Sheehan: I had the great, great fortune of meeting and hanging out with Robert Fripp in Japan one time.

Cris Cohen:  Oh, wow.

Billy Sheehan: He came to the Mr. Big show and we had him sitting on the side of the stage. A wonderful guy. Afterwards, we went to a bar and had a couple of drinks. He was telling me amazing stories, because I was a huge King Crimson fan. He basically – I hope I got this right or it's nearly correct, the details – they did “In the Court of the Crimson King” in a week in somebody's living room. That was how it was recorded.

And you see something that’s that epic, of earth-shattering importance. It's amazing to see something like that can come about quickly and speaks volumes about the talent of the people involved, of course.

In another example, similarly, I've got the demos for “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway”, which is just an epic piece, a double album set by Genesis with Peter Gabriel.

The final song is called “It,” and it is the punchline of the whole record. Unbelievable how this song came about and the lyrics of it and what they mean. It's just a glorious, incredible piece of music. And in the demo, Peter Gabriel is just doing blah-blah lyrics. In other words, he made the lyrics up later. I thought for sure he had this whole thing penned out and figured, because it was really constructed brilliantly. But he's just, "Blah-blah-blah," through the thing, and then later went out and figured out what the lyrics would be.

And they fit together. Pure genius. So, it's interesting. Even some of the more grandiose records that seem to have taken a long time, there's a spontaneity to those that makes them quite magical.

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