At birth, King Crimson was a monster, the infant terrible of cutting edge rock music, born in England in the late 60's of eccentric and gifted musical minds. Contemporaries of the Moody Blues, Crimson was the shadowy compliment to the Moodys' light.

Crimson's songs were orchestral, sweeping and often baroque, combining electronic strings with haunting flutes and reeds. By turns malevolent, melancholy and simply mad, King Crimson's music immediately set new standards in rock for intensity, inspiration and musicianship.

As time passed, lead guitarist and co-founder Robert Fripp emerged as the sorcerer through whom the essence of King Crimson was expressed, and he remains as the sole original member, gathering extraordinary musicians in everchanging permutations to conjure sounds that express delicacy and destruction, desire and dementia.

Continually innovative, Fripp and King Crimson set a musical course beginning in the eighties that influenced heavy metal and industrial bands alike. Echoes of Crimson can be heard in artists as disparate as Tool, Korn, Metallica, Shriekback and Skinny Puppy.

Having staked a claim to the zeitgeist of the new millenium with the first album's signature song 21st Century Schizoid Man, Fripp and the new heirs to the King's legacy have released a CD of 21st Century Crimson, "The ConstruKCtion of Light."

Guitarist Adrian Belew has been a stellar musician in the rock scene since he was recruited by Frank Zappa as a touring musician. A gig with the Talking Heads soon followed. In the early eighties, Belew joined Fripp, legendary drummer Bill Bruford and Peter Gabriel's bassist Tony Levin to record the classic Crimson album 'Discipline.'

This is the Dark Romance interview with Adrian Belew, recorded during the ConstruKCtion of Light Tour in San Francisco.

Adrian Belew- I suppose there's a whole preparation period that you go through when you're young, and I was in so many different bands that you'd never have heard of and played lots of different kinds of music, but none of that really prepared me for what happened when Frank Zappa walked in and he heard me play. He asked me to audition and everything changed from there. It was as though I was catapulted right into the Big Leagues, so to speak. Overnight I was playing around the world and meeting people like David Bowie and having people like the Talking Heads and Robert Fripp and Laurie Anderson, all the people from the early eighties art scene hear me and see me play. It just became a succession of people calling and saying 'I love what you're doing, and would you work with us?'

It must have made your head spin!

Adrian - It did, because it wasn't the way I expected it to happen. I had been working for quite awhile on the traditional method: get your record deal and put out your own records. But I walked into the smaller international world of music... it gets a lot smaller once you get into that realm of people... I walked into it backwards, and it worked out.

Have you had the same kind of jazz guitar influences in your background as Robert Fripp?

Adrian - You know, jazz is the one area of music that I dont feel that I know much about. I've taught myself so many different kinds of music, and I've been exposed to alot by being in so many different kinds of bands. I've played blues and country and even Elvis songs. But from early on, the two things that do show up in my music are a love of modern, avant garde, classical thinking, and a love of pop music. When I really started listening to the radio, it was the Beach Boys, the Beatles and Roy Orbison in the sixties. At that time I wasn't even a guitarist, I was a drummer and a singer. What really drove the nail in the coffin was the arrival of Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck and guys like that had really taken the expression of the guitar to another level, and at that point I jumped in the pool.

I'm curious about your technique of bending the guitar neck to change the pitch of your notes.

Adrian - First of all, my friend in The Bears with me is the guy that I saw do it first, and he saw Ted Nugent do it. So some of the things I do on the guitar I invented myself, but that one definitely has a precedent somewhere else. The reason I started doing it is because tremolo arms were notoriously bad for going out of tune at that time. With modern tremolo systems, that's no longer a problem, so I bend notes both ways. But there's a difference when you grab the end of the guitar neck and you bend it, it's a more physical feeling, and it actually gives you a different kind of nuance, a different feedback.

It's effective in terms of body language in expressing the music as well.

Adrian - Yeah, people always ask if I've ever broken the neck off of the guitar, and I've had people describe it as a violent move, so obviously it makes for a good show, but I do it for more of a musical reason.

The song 'Prozac Blues' seems like such a departure, although for Crimson, nothing should be too surprising.

Adrian - (laughs) Well, it is an attempt to surprise and shock a little bit. Over the last few years Robert and I have more than once talked about doing something with the blues form. It's a very traditional form that seems to have stalled out, so we always do something we call 'Crimsonizing,' and this was another area we thought we could Crimsonize. It was also very tongue-in-cheek because for the singer, I created a character that we called Hooter who sounds like he's about 300 pounds, a smokey blues singer, and I wanted to walk the line as we do musically between tradition and somewhere new. So the singer starts out in a traditional mode, "I woke up this morning" and ends up talking about Prozac and things that are fairly modern.

The song is totally your own, but it struck me as a cross between Crimson, Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits.

Adrian - (laughs) That's a very good hybrid. I like all three of those.