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To stand up in front of thousands of rock fans and call yourself a dinosaur is bound to be a risky business. By 1995, progressive rock was viewed with great suspicion by both critics and Commentariat, seen as bloated, pompous and preening - barely able to walk, like a dinosaur on the verge of extinction. If you call your song ‘Dinosaur’, you’d better be good with irony and making sure the listener gets it. I winced when I heard the plan, and gave it a low estimate of success. Actually, I thought we’d be murdered.

I needn’t have worried. Happily, Belew’s masterful lyric is full of self-deprecating, deeply ironic humour (just like an honorary Brit), but at the same time painfully honest:

“Ignorance has always been something I excel in
followed by naiveté and pride
doesn’t take a scientist to see how
any clever predator could have a piece of me
standing in the sun, idiot savant,
something like a monument.”

Excellent stuff. As the song progresses, the grain of Belew’s voice gets progressively and spectacularly gritty on the title line, showing this guy ain’t messin’ around.

Meanwhile, down in the Crimson engine-room, Pat Mastelotto and I were finding it hard to find fresh things to do, particularly on a fairly straight 4/4 backbeat song like this. We’d already used all the obvious strategies in the band’s repertoire: two different meters at the same time (Sex, Sleep, Eat, Drink, Dream); playing the same thing as the other guy, but a quarter- or eighth-note later (Vrooom Vrooom); improvisation (Thrak); my small percussion to Pat’s groove (People, One Time); improvising with meters over one constant meter from Pat (B’Boom). Several of these approaches had been influenced by the work of one Gavin Harrison, shortly to become a Crimson drummer himself.

But, by Dinosaur, the rhythm tank was running on low. On the album ‘Thrak’, we had opted for the displaced thing for two drummers in the chorus of the song, and a pleasantly displaced backbeat by one drummer in the verses, until the last two lines, where you get a straight backbeat. Three variations then, so a decent bang for your buck.

Here though, live at the Warfield, and listening for the first time in years, I hear we’ve mostly abandoned the album version, and I potter along comfortably in a straight 4/4 with an underrepresented Pat playing along as second percussion. So, I guess we thought the album version didn’t translate as well on stage, at least as far as the drumming was concerned. The re-entry for Fripp’s guitar solo after the percussion-free rubato section is satisfyingly huge though, on both album and Warfield theatre versions.

The song reached peak exposure on ‘Late Night with Conan O’Brien’, a national US TV show. I remember a heavily-edited, pretty feeble version of it limping out of the speakers. This was another episode in King Crimson’s long-standing stand-off with mass media.The band’s occasional confrontations with the Big Time usually ended in tears. On that occasion, Mr O’Brien won hands down, but there is plenty of strength left in it here. Hope you like it!

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