Peter Sinfield, the lyricist for King Crimson’s first four albums, has toddled off to the Court of the Crimson King. He was 80.

Progressive rockers like King Crimson and Pink Floyd were big on my personal hit parade in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Probably the upshot of taking piano and flute lessons, playing in school orchestras, digging the big-band music my parents loved, and like that there. A “more-is-more sensibility,” as The New York Times obit puts it.

The single “21st Century Schizoid Man” was killer, you should pardon the expression, since it took actual killers to task with lyrics like “Blood rack, barbed wire/Politicians’ funeral pyre/Innocents raped with napalm fire. …”

Eventually my musical tastes became less grandiose, more stripped down. Even so, I still prefer bombast to bombs.