LIVE IN JACKSONVILLE, FL 1972

What A guitar solo!!!.. Fripp is on top-notch form here...

While the rest of the players here are not particularly thunderstealers (apart from Mel Collins' flute intro in "Formentera Lady"), Fripp steals the show with the amazing solo on "Sailor's Tale"; by far one of his best solos of the 70's only surpassed by "The Night Watch" solo. When I listened to the original version of the song I felt sort of disappointed to hear a choppy chord progression instead in the solo spot; besides, the mellotron really helps a lot, despite the overall sound quality.

Apart from that, Boz gets utterly desperate in "Ladies Of The Road", while Mel's sax is average, Ian Wallace is not bad, but not particularly amazing, so to speak; and the electronic drum solo spot on "Sailor's Tale" is awful (What's with the electronic effects?).

Needless to talk about the sound quality, there's nothing more I can add to this review; only that it's the first time I listen to a live version of "Cirkus" (which is considerably slowed down a bit too much from the original). 3 stars.

This, being only the second of the King Crimson Collectors Club releases (live recordings of various quality, released by DGM), was the first of the Islands lineup. So in that, it was the album that provided the revelation that this group didn't completely suck, as Islands and Earthbound seemed to indicate.

The sound quality is fair. The performances are good, especially Robert Fripp and Mel Collins. Boz Burrell appears to be trying to sound like Paul McCartney wailing though the vocals on Ladies Of The Road. But again, it's Fripp & Collins who steal the show with their solos, especially on A Sailor's Tale.

While this is not the live performance of this lineup that I would recommend first (there are others with better sound, and better set lists), it's still an okay live album.

This is a 1972 live recording of the Islands-era lineup of King Crimson, on the Earthbound tour. As always with this lineup's live work, there's an obvious caveat here, which is that the excellent Sailors' Tales boxed set compiles a great number of performances from this lineup (including this one), plus excellent remasters of the studio albums from In the Wake of Poseidon to Islands, and as such if you're interested enough in this lineup to go poking about in the depths of the Collector's Club, it's probably worth your while at least considering the box - sure, it's expensive, but the sheer bang you get for your buck makes obtaining these performances individually very much the expensive way to do it.

That said, supposing you weren't interested in the box and just wanted a decent live recording from the Earthbound tour - how would this serve you? Pretty well, as it happens! The recording quality is not perfect - though sourced from a soundboard, it like all the Earthbound tour recordings were recorded to cassette rather than reel-to-reel, with an inevitable loss in quality given that cassettes were a somewhat more rudimentiary medium at the time. Still, it's a good step above Earthbound itself and is of reasonable quality by the overall standards of the tour, and this particular evening finds the band (who, remember, were only slogging through this tour out of contractural obligation before they went their separate ways and Fripp installed the Larks' Tongues In Aspic lineup) in excellent form.

We're treated to a really dynamite improv on The Sailor's Tale, with a really nice guitar solo from Fripp as its highlight; the downside of this is that it's followed up by an Ian Wallace drum solo, and with the best will in the world, even if you like drum solos, Wallace's tend to be just a bit too long for my taste - it could have been a third of the length and three times as effective for it.