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BUY CDs > Buy Light of the Dawn > Lyrics & Song Information > Song Information - 'Stone With a View'
Tuning: Open ‘D7’

Capo Position: 0

Strings from bottom to top: D A D G A C

 

This song has a strange story to it.

Stone With a View is about the tour Keith did with King Crimson in 1972, his first as a professional musician.

In 1972 and 1973 Keith was living in a farmhouse on Somerset in a musician's commune. By the autumn of 1974 Keith would have left to go to Los Angeles for two years to record the second of the two Manticore albums 'Stories from the Human Zoo'.

At some point (it was a freezing cold winter and so it was almost certainly 1973) Keith sat in a tiny scullery with a paraffin stove for warmth and a borrowed Revox tape recorder (probably Peter Sinfield's who was living nearby) and put down four songs, Jaimee, Foothills, Bargees and The Road Song.

Foothills and Bargees wound up on 'Brighter Day' but not the other two, and it is probable that Keith didn't think they were good enough to go on the album and that these tracks were done before the album was recorded. In those days space on vinyl was very limited and they weren't the kind of material that Keith was playing live at the time.

These songs were on a 1/4 inch reel of tape and spent the next 30 years in lofts, trunks and various storage places, shedding oxide and slowly rotting away.

The story takes a twist here, as in 2003 Sandy Roberton, Keith's producer from the first three albums was shutting his UK storage facility and offered Keith the return of his 1/4 inch master reels from 'Stimulus', 'Fable of the Wings' and 'Pigmy' (1969, 1970 and 1971 respectively). In order to make digital safety copies, Keith bought an old Studer reel-to-reel tape recorder from the BBC in Bristol who were selling them off cheap.

Once that job was completed Keith then started going through all the 1/4 inch tape from 20 to 30 years in the past and discovered The Road Song. He decided to learn it, updated some of the lyrics and tried it at some gigs to gauge audience reaction. The reaction was good and with the name changed to Stone With a View it is now a permanent part of this CD and Keith's live set.

As a postscript to this, the original recordings, with some cleaning up, were added to the Voiceprint reissue of 'Brighter Day' in 2005.

Keith finds it strange now that he did not rate this song at the time and that it was forgotten for so many years, but there is a saying that artists are the worst judge of their own material!