The Bears

With King Crimson disbanded until further notice, Belew joined up with long-time friends to create The Bears, a power-pop quartet. Their first self-titled album was superb...and they were making big inroads while touring extensively.

Adrian Belew & The Bears

The Bears first album

Unfortunately their record company fell over...and The Bears died a death while recording their second album, the understandably grim Rise & Shine. Both their albums are unfortunately no longer available.

The members remained friends and have since released:

Cars Caught Fire, 2002

Amazon.com reviewer Skeebler Q. McWaffleface

Eureka! 2007

Amazon.com reviewer Skeebler Q. McWaffleface

Adrian Belew Interview snippet from guitarhoo.com

A.B.: The Bears are for fun. The Bears are more like a writing workshop than anythng else. I mean everybody in the band writes and we put all of our, pool all of our materials and ideas together. Sometimes I'll use somebody elses chorus or we'll change things around but it's really, you got four pretty prolific writers so you get a lot of interesting material to choose from.

You got four guys who've played together all their lives, so there's a deep kind of binding, family type of friendship there and it makes for a good kind of mid-western pop music.

It's not the main thing for any of us. We all have other things that we do that are probably the more important things in our lives but it's a lot of fun.