Dang, Asia is one of my favorite bands from the 80s.
I liked their first album. But I
loved the King Crimson in which Wetton played. Crimson
in the early to mid 1970s had such an unstable lineup (you could win bets asking people to
guess the members who stayed for more than one full album) that, when the lineup featuring
Robert Fripp (guitar, mellotron), David Cross (violin, viola, mellotron), John Wetton (bass,
vocals), and Bill Bruford (drums) lasted
two albums (officially, they were a trio down to
Fripp, Wetton, and Bruford for
Red, but Cross appeared on the album--and co-composed
two thirds of the material---as did a number of Crimson alumni; at the time, it was thought the
band was going out in a blaze of glory with that jewel of an album---nobody knew Fripp would
reform the group with yet another lineup and an entirely new approach centered on interlocking
guitars by the 1980s), there were those clamoring to put it in the
Guinness Book of World
Records.