Tony Levin didn’t start out on bass. As a kid, he, like many, played piano at his parents’ behest. “You must learn to play piano and after a couple of years you must choose an instrument,” Levin recalls. “It was a culturally Jewish thing. After a few years of piano, I chose bass. I don’t know why. But it was a very good choice for me because I am still captivated by doing that exact same thing.”

A very good choice, indeed.

“How lucky am I to be doing what I wanted to do when I was 12 years old?” Levins says. “What’s changed is that I’m more grateful for it now. What hasn’t changed is I’m still trying to get better. I’m pretty good at it, but there’s so much to it and there are so many great bass players one hears playing amazing things, including very young bass players. So, I keep trying to up my game and be the bass player I feel I ought to be.”

Levin certainly made his mark prior to 1976. He played countless sessions including work with Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, Herbie Mann and Paul Simon – but it was that fortuitous meetup with Peter Gabriel and King Crimson leader Robert Fripp that helped catapult Levin to where he is now – and has been for decades. No one has served longer as a band member in either setting.

There is no more physically – and quite possibly musically – recognizable bassist in rock today than the tall, lanky man with the shaved pate and trademark mustache. On the occasion of his 78th

birthday on June 6th, he responded to the various well-wishers on Facebook by thanking his fans and noting his good fortune.

Though Levin prefers playing live to playing in the studio, he’s become a go-to session man for so many artists, famous and not. And why might that be?

“That’s a good question and I don’t have a good answer,” he says, “and it’d be pretty rare if you found me boasting about myself. What I know after all these years is the way I am: I’m not too inquisitive in a musical situation. Someone calls me and I listen to their music, whoever they are, whether they’re famous or not, and I’m just into the process of trying to find a great bass part for that. I’m so into it that I just don’t ask ever why somebody called me. Why? I almost never know.

“I never really thought of myself as a ‘studio’ player but someone who does a lot of records in a rhythm section. I guess one of the things you become OK with is working with a different process for each record.”

Levin’s career was already on an upward trajectory when he was summoned to work on Peter Gabriel’s first album, where he also connected with Robert Fripp. That brought him to another level.

“I’ve had some bad breaks, a few of them, but I’ve been very lucky and had some very good breaks,” Levin says. “One of them was in 1976 when Bob Ezrin, the producer, called me to come up to Toronto. He had used me with Alice Cooper and Lou Reed and thought I would be appropriate to do an album with this guy Peter Gabriel, whom I hadn’t heard of. I didn’t know about Genesis so I came into it with no experience of what Peter was and what he’d done on stage musically.”

Levin’s initial thoughts?

“Peter’s music was really unusual. He would play the songs for us on piano and I thought, ‘This is really different, I really like it.’ What I

remember was I was very interested in being introduced to this new kind of music that this young Peter was writing. It was very different from anything I had heard. I didn’t put it in that category of ‘progressive rock’ because I wasn’t very interested in genres. His chord structures and the way of going about writing a song was very different than anything I had run into. I thought it was fascinating.”

Peter had left Genesis and playing on that album playing guitar was Robert Fripp, whose music I didn’t know either. So, on that date, some day in July 1976, I met Peter and Robert and here I am 48 years later still actively making music with both of them. How amazingly special is that! The personal relationship and taking that journey of making music together, which changes if you’re making a lot of music, you learn a lot about each other musically.

“There were three guitar players, as Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner were also involved. We were all listening to this new music and we sat down trying to play it. Did I right away hear Robert and say ‘That’s amazing!’ No. I thought he was really good, but then, when I had time to focus on his playing, I thought that was really special. Obviously, we got along musically very well and not too long after than he asked me to play on his solo album, Exposure.”

And now, a little bit about life in King Crimson

“You sign up for King Crimson and you know you’re going to be challenged musically in a few ways. I don’t know how Robert knew this but jazz musicians had a way to signal the key of the piece before it starts – two fingers down means B-flat, one finger up means it’s in G- sharp, etcetera, and Robert knows this. Just as about we’re to go on, he wouldn’t tell me to play, he would just signal me with his fingers, the key for bass. Some nights he would hold all ten fingers in different directions and me being me I would take photos of that. There’s Robert telling me the key of this atonal soundscape he expects me to play to just a few seconds before. For a band with deadly serious music and is

deadly challenging, King Crimson, in all incarnations, had a great sense of humor. There was a lot of laughing and joking within the music and on stage and when we came off. That helps get through the tension of every night trying to create intense music that pushes you.”

Levin hails from the Boston area and as such is a New England Patriots fan. There was something instituted under former coach Bill Belichick called The Patriot Way. It’s a certain discipline, a way of looking at the game and its preparation. Might there be a King Crimson Way?

“Yes, indeed, there is a Crimson way,” he says. “I don’t think there’s much of a parallel between the Belichick-ian way and the Fripp way because Belichick is very exact and vocal about saying the way it is and Robert, in his unspoken way, has a Crimson way of doing things. We don’t have a big lightshow, a big production. The idea is, as in a classical concert, to watch the musicians and you’ll see a lot of personality from different guys. You’ll get to know them from watching them and there’s plenty of room for them to be themselves.

“It’s not like everybody is acting the same or is the same kind of person or musician. We rehearse a lot, including the day of the show and probably half the guys are rehearsing in their rooms. We’ll get to the venue at 1 and rehearse at 2 or 3. That’s a little unusual in a band of this maturity and guys that are technically able to play the parts. We find we need to be at our best to play the show we want to play it.”

Is there a future for King Crimson?

“I know better than to speak for Robert,” Levin says, “but when I last was with him — the tour ended in Japan at the end of 2022 — we had a nice talk about the future and what might happen. His words to me were that he had no plans for King Crimson doing anything else, but he would let King Crimson speak to him if it chose to. I interpreted that to mean

there are no plans and probably won’t be anything else, but it’s not impossible that there might be.”

But what there is BEAT. On September 12, Levin begins a tour with guitarist-singer Adrian Belew, guitarist Steve Vai and Tool drummer Daney Corey on tour under that moniker. They’ll be playing material from King Crimson ‘80s LPs, Discipline, Beat and Three of a Perfect Pair, with, if you’re wondering, Fripp’s blessing.

“It’s Adrian’s brainchild,” says Levin, of the musician who was in King Crimson from 1981-1984 and again from 1994-2008. “He’s been thinking about it behind the scenes and working on it for years. There were a lot of hurdles. I said a couple of years ago, ‘this sounds good’ and then time went by, trying to find the time we could safely schedule it when nobody was committed to another tour. That took a long time. When I came in, Steve was in there was in but they weren’t settled on what drummer it was going to be and I was glad they settled on Danny.”

Rehearsals start in late August. “The tour is gonna be exciting and challenging,” says Levin, “and even though I know the material I’m looking forward to the challenge of the material because two of the four are different players and this is material from the ‘80s Crimson. It remains to be seen how much things will change. I hope they change quite a bit. I will be fully on board musically and I will jump on the changes rather than insist that it be the same that it was.”