This item will be released on Friday 19th June. It will be shipped to arrive on or around the release date.

To coincide with the releases of “Starless & Bible Black” in March 1974, King Crimson set out on a run of shows that many fans consider to be that line-up’s peak with the late music critic John Kelman (All About Jazz) describing them as being at their “heaviest and most guitar-centric version of Crimson to date” where “even 24 hours represented a significant difference in how this group approached form-based material”.In the final week of June, as the band neared its conclusion as a live act, four of these concerts -including the Asbury Park show from which much of the original 1975 released “USA” single live LP was derived – were recorded to multi-track tape but, with the exception of that release, lay unreleased until the 1992 assemblage/mix & compilation of “The Great Deceiver” boxed set by Robert Fripp & David Singleton which was centred around those performances. In the notes to that set Robert Fripp described the band’s 1974 tour as a period of “balanced disarray” characterised by “chaotic and intense” performances and “powerful, almost brutal improvisations”.Of the four multi-tracked concerts, Penn State was a last minute addition to the schedule and required gruelling additional journeys there and back, book-ended, on the original tour schedule, by the geographically easier Asbury Park, New Jersey on the 28th and Providence, Rhode Island on the 30th, leaving audiences then & since, grateful for the band’s willingness to use a ‘rest day’ for an unplanned performance.. Despite the travel complications, the Penn State gig featured two of the best improvs from this tour - Is There Life Out There? and It Is For You But Not For Us, which sounded, in many respects, no less fully composed than the recently released Fracture or the yet to be recorded Starless. For most attendees, the majority of the material would have been heard for the first time, not an uncommon feature of King Crimson gigs in that period, though unthinkable for most bands today.