Great Guitar Solos 2

In something of an audiophilic fit this morning I listened to no fewer than four versions of King Crimson's song The Night Watch in a bid to determine which of Robert Fripp's solos was the best - to these ears, at least. As I sort of suspected, it was the one on the 'official' rendering of the song, on Starless and Bible Black, that held me most enchanted. This version of the song is the most lush of all, fairly obviously since, unlike the three live versions I listened to, it features a fair amount of multi-tracking. For example, you get Mr Fripp playing rather lovely lead lines as ornamentation around Wetton's rendering of the early verses - like the one that follows ...upon the canvas dark with age... . On the live versions here we get mellotron and gentle chordal picking on the guitar: quite lovely but sparsely so in comparison to the original. That lushness seems characteristic of the wonderful solo played after the rather duff verse-ending, ...guitar lessons for the wife. (Oh how I wish lyricist Palmer-James, to whom I never really did take, had gone for a half rhyme on wives instead, which would have made for a classier line all round. An even greater pity in that this is his one reasonably successful lyric - with the exception of this blemish - on the three albums for which he wrote.)

The solo is by no means Fripp's most striking, original or incandescent - there's a very long line of candidates fulfiling various of these qualities, with the one on the studio version of The Sailor's Tale extraordinarily managing all three - but it is surely the most beguiling solo he ever got down on vinyl. Somehow it contrives to blend into the musical canvas all about it such that it's easy to forget it is a solo. You can almost not notice it, except as something fascinating taking place within the textures on offer, but when you do give it your undivided attention you realise how peculiar it is in terms of the oddly jagged nature of its timing against the pulse of the song. I read somewhere that it sounds as if whatever was originally recorded has been played backward and, yes, that's a fair description of the initial impression you get.

It's obvious that when the band played The Night Watch live that Fripp wasn't interested in reproducing the studio version of the solo. I listened to versions from Glasgow 1973, Mainz 1974 and Pennsylvania 1974 and enjoyed the great performances of the song, and just how brilliant our guitarist's full parts in each piece were, but at no point did he get close to the spell-binding quality of what he achieved in the studio.

And that leads me to the thought that it's quite striking how often a musician who's known for his absorption in live music has delivered definitive material in the dry studio context - a testament to the discipline he so values.