The Aim Without Suffering

Robert Fripp : Exposure

[Purchase]

In June of 1979 Robert Fripp released Exposure, his debut solo album. Though he was hardly solo, with musical contributions from Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, Peter Hamill, Terre Roche and, perhaps most surprisingly, Daryl Hall.

Fripp dissolved King Crimson following the release of 1974's Red and eventually moved to New York City in 1977 where he checked in on the punk rock scene. He plays guitar on Blondie's "Fade Away and Radiate" and produced albums by The Roches Peter Gabriel and an as yet unreleased record by Daryl Hall. 1977 is also the year he played those twin guitar solos on David Bowie's "Heroes".

Fripp was obsessed with the year 1981. At one point he was convinced the world would that year so in 1979 he established a campaign he called "The Drive to 1981", three years of very hard and very public hustling.

Exposure is exhibit A.

"'Exposure' deals with tweaking the vocabulary of, for want of a better word, 'rock' music," he told Melody Maker's Allan Jones. " It investigates the vocabulary and, hopefully, expands the possibilities of expression and introduces a more sophisticated emotional dynamic than one would normally find within 'rock.'"

Exposure was originally supposed to be part of a trilogy along with Peter Gabriel's second album and Hall's Sacred Songs. First RCA rejected the Hall album. Then they asked that Hall's vocals be removed from all but two tracks on Exposure. (You Burn Me Up" and "North Star")

Fripp flew  Peter Hammill of Van der Graff Generator to New York .

"He came into the studio dressed in a rather svelte and smooth fashion, took off his nice cloths and got into a smelly dressing-gown, poured himself a liberal dose from the bottle of cognac he'd brought with him, and went in there and started delivering the goods. Great man. Very nice man. He said that when he began singing he wanted to be the vocal equivalent of Hendrix. Conceptually, he was right on the beam. And he delivers, I think."

Though it may not have been the album he originally envisioned, Fripp was very pleased with Exposure.

"As a whole it's so good. So good. I think probably, in terms of the genre, it's conceivably the best record in the past five years, perhaps longer. I don't think of it as a 'progressive' rock album. I think in a sense it rises above ALL categories. In a sense it's a compendium, none of the components are in themselves innovatory, but nothing is dated."

Many of the lyrics are written by Fripp's girlfriend, an American therapist named Joanna Walton. As he explained to Canadian college radio DJ Dick Tooley 

She's in fact a native New Yorker, and one level Exposure has to do with the kind of way a man and woman relate to each other in a contemporary situation, trying to be free of all the archetypes and so on. And how difficult that might be. So You Burn Me Up, I'm A Cigarette is my love song to Joanna. I May Not Have Had Enough Of Me, But I've Had Enough Of You, Chicago and North Star are her love songs to me.

Exposure received a rare 5 star review in one of the Rolling Stone Record Guides and a B+ from Robert Christgau who wrote 

Fripp has always been a bit of a jerk, but over the years he's figured out what to do with the talent that goes along with his affliction. This concept album earns its conceit, orchestrating bits and pieces of art-rock wisdom--from punk to Frippertronics, from King Crimson to singer-songwriter--into a fluent whole. Maybe soon he'll get smart enough to forget about J.G. Bennett. "It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering" isn't exactly big news, and old Crimson fans will swallow side two without the caveat 

    In 1985 when I was a program director at my college radio station I chose this six year old album for one of our Classic Album hours and was actually stopped on the street and thanked for the choice.