King Crimson's little success?

People say that about Yes also but in both cases it's not true. Rush played arenas but not stadiums. As for selling them out I'm sure they did but I don't have the details on that. 

Ah, I see the confusion now.  I'd call a 10k seater as a stadium.  But I guess it's something like American definition of small car, which is radically different from what that term means in Europe or Asia.

Sure, no problem, I just didn't know stadium means something like that in the USA.  Only a few of our cricket stadiums can accommodate over 40000 people, forget music venues.  20-30k is considered a decent sized stadium. I should have guessed though...I have been over there and seen the massive parking lots set aside for retail stores.

Hi,

I am not sure that there weren't bigger numbers in the sales ... I think that Robert Fripp did not have control of a lot of the music for a long time, and that means that he would not know (necessarily) any numbers about the sales, and it would be easy for a record company to throw out a number for 10 stores instead of 50 to make it look like things didn't sell, or the album was crap.

In the end, when Robert finally got control of everything, he has been doing just fine, and it shows ... he has the control needed to be more successful, but in those early days, you signed your life away and many bands ended up in their death bed without any financial rewards that they deserved.

The difference now, is that it looks like finances are not an issue, and for the longest time they were ... 

(... haven't found/read any good books on RF/KC. Only Bruford's book, but he does not talk much about it all except ... when things went wrong. He doesn't even talk about the music itself.)

Catcher10 wrote: ... According to their official tour book Wandering the Face Of The Earth, Chapter 12 describes the MP Tour opening date was Kalamazoo MI on 20/Feb 1981.....They played 79 shows to more than 900,000 fans, or approx 11,400 per show avg. They played several multi night shows, for example Seattle 2 nights of 12,320 per show at Seattle Center Coliseum (now Key Arena). 2 nights at Forum in LA of 14,600 per show, 2 nights in Maryland at Capitol Centre 18,600 each show and Madison Sq Garden 1 night of 17,300. ...

 

Sid Smith's book - In The Court Of The Crimson King has just been updated and reissued and is definitive.

 

Nicely summed up sir, I have nothing to add.

I think unless you are AC DC, Motorhead or Iron Maiden, you have to change.  I will agree that Rush never had the vision to refashion the sounds of their times to create something original and distinct out of it the way KC could.  But I won't hold that against them as no band other than KC did anyway.  Nobody other than Fripp would have operated akin to a jazz band leader, rearranging his troops once every few albums.  He recognised that that is the only way to do something totally different for a rock band too.  In the case of Rush, Lifeson (the weakest link of the trio if you ask me) became disgruntled with the keyboard oriented direction of the mid 80s and the other two eventually decided to come around and accommodate him.  These are the typical pressures of a rock band where everybody is not always on board with the changes.  Fripp upended this problem entirely by just changing the lineup altogether.  This may be why KC is seen as elusive even for some prog rock fans because fans of rock bands look for a sound whereas KC is just about an approach to music.  That is the only common denominator between its various formations.

Yeah, Fripp never learned that he had to stand up and play guitar onstage!!  

That is what Lake told him, anyway.  

I've seen some real flashes of stagecraft brilliance with the Crimson King over the years....John Wetton was a brilliant, forceful frontman who had the rare talent of being as adept at playing his bass as singing lead.  

Discipline era KC certainly attracted more than a few women (after all, you have to appeal to more than the "male prog ghetto") and the THRAK show I saw, with the entire band lined up & singing "People," was stirring.