Welcome back, my friends, to Orbert's Discography series. Ladies and Gentleman...
Emerson Lake & Palmer (1970)(click for larger view)
Keith Emerson - Keyboards
Greg Lake - Vocals, Guitar, Bass
Carl Palmer - Drums, Percussion
The Barbarian
Take a Pebble
Knife-Edge
The Three Fates
a. Clotho
b. Lachesis
c. Atropos
Tank
Lucky Man
----------
Let's get one thing clear: There are no commas in the name of this band. There is no Oxford comma, and there is no comma between "Emerson" and "Lake". Look at the cover. Do you see any commas? No, you don't, because there aren't any. Go to
the band's official website and read what it says across the top of the Home Page: "EMERSON LAKE & PALMER". The name of the band is almost, but not quite, a proper listing of the names of its three members. I'm glad we have that straightened out. I'm sorry I have to take this tone of voice with you, but this is important. The Internet: Serious Business.
The Nice were a four-piece English band in the late 60's, and Keith Emerson was the keyboard player. He was pretty much insane, although to be fair, so were the rest of the band. Their music was a bizarre blend of rock, jazz, blues, classical, and everything else they could work in, from Bach to Brubeck. During his solos, Emerson would wrestle with his Hammond organ, flip it around on stage, simulate sex with it, and stick knives into the keyboard (it was quite theatrical, but actually served a purpose: it held down certain notes while he continued to abuse the instrument). He set fire to things on stage. He became known as "the Hendrix of the keyboards". Their singer was not very good, however, and after four albums in three years, Emerson felt that the band had gone about as far as they could, and he was thinking of leaving.
King Crimson's debut album
In the Court of the Crimson King sold more copies than The Nice's entire catalogue, and featured a brilliant young singer named Greg Lake. Greg Lake and Robert Fripp grew up together and had the same guitar teacher, so when Fripp put King Crimson together, Lake played bass. Lake's first love was singing, but his second was playing guitar, and he couldn't do that in King Crimson. It would be over 10 years and several lineups until King Crimson had room for a second guitar player.
Carl Palmer was only 19 years old, but he had already played on a hit record, "Fire!" by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Arthur Brown had a somewhat different career trajectory in mind than most would assume a band would take after their first hit record, and it would be several years before their first album. Meanwhile, they played the underground circuit. Carl Palmer left that band and helped form Atomic Rooster, and thus was not looking for a new gig.
The Nice and King Crimson played a lot of the same venues and even shared the bill a number of times, and Keith Emerson ended up talking with Greg Lake about forming a new band. It would be a trio, with plenty of room for everyone. Emerson would of course play keyboards, which meant Lake would play bass much of the time, but Emerson, a classically trained pianist and organist, had no trouble providing a bass line with the keyboards so Lake could play guitar. All they needed was a drummer. They convinced Carl Palmer to join them for a jam, even though he was not looking to leave Atomic Rooster. After playing with Emerson and Lake, he decided to leave Atomic Rooster. The name of the band would simply be the names of its members in alphabetical order (without a comma) and ELP was born.
Emerson Lake & Palmer opens with an instrumental, "The Barbarian". Heavily distorted guitar, then the drums and organ come in with a heavy, plodding beat evoking a powerful, lumbering hulk of a man, a barbarian. It is essentially a rock treatment of "Allegro Barbaro", a piano piece by Bela Bartok. The break is an acoustic piano solo. So right away, this was different music.
Completely changing the mood, Greg Lake's "Take a Pebble" is mostly acoustic guitar and piano, and Lake's clear, lyrical voice. At 12 1/2 minutes, it is the longest track on the album. After the second verse is the first piano solo, accompanied by bass and drums, based on a variation of the verse. Then there is a quiet section featuring acoustic guitar and the sounds of someone tossing pebbles into the water. The guitar works its way into a two-step pattern, accompanied by some handclaps, and eventually reaching a climax. Then a second, longer piano solo follows, and eventually the third verse arrives in a very dramatic fashion, featuring cymbal crashes and tympani, but other than the bass, it's all acoustic.
"Knife-Edge" is another band composition, but again, during the break, Emerson brings in some classical, this time a Bach organ prelude.
Emerson's "The Three Fates" opens Side Two of the original LP. Based on The Three Fates from mythology, "Clotho" is performed on a pipe organ, "Lachesis" is an acoustic piano solo, and "Atropos" is piano, bass, and drums, a jazz trio playing classical variations in a rock format. This is a very heavy, experimental track, with moments of brilliance, and all of it basically the guys seeing how far they can take things.
"Tank" is an Emerson/Palmer composition, another instrumental, with Palmer's drum solo bridging the two parts. It's an up-tempo piece featuring virtuoso playing by all three members.
"Lucky Man", the closing song, was released as the single. It became a hit in both the U.K. and the U.S. It has some percussion and multiple tracks of voices and guitars, and Lake insisted the Emerson add something. Emerson had just taken delivery of his first Moog synthesizer, so he noodled up a solo to end the song. Lake loved it and they kept the take. Emerson referred to his solo as "a lot of shit, actually".
----------
In 1976, I was in junior high. I had a job making minimum wage, and pretty much all of my money was spent on records, snack food, and various things to smoke. I joined the RCA Record Club, which sent me a catalogue every month of the latest offerrings. There would be a little picture of each album cover and a little description. I learned later that these "clubs" were basically clearinghouses for surplus albums, but I didn't care. Cheap records, lots of new music to check out.
What caught my attention was "
Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show that Never Ends, Ladies and Gentlemen... Emerson Lake & Palmer. Lucky Man, Karn Evil 9 (35 minute version), etc. (3 records)"
The title of the album was so long that that's all they had room to write in the space for that album. Oh, and the price, which was the same as a single LP. Now, I remember hearing "Lucky Man" on the radio a few years back. It was an acoustic guitar song with nice vocals, kinda like Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Ah, I see! ELP are a folk band, like CSN. But what's with the 35-minute song? Holy crap. I'd never heard of a song that long before. But I was ordering it anyway; a triple live album for the price of a regular single LP was too good a deal to pass up.
My mind was blown. This was not an acoustic folk band. My musical horizons, which were actually pretty broad for a junior high kid, since I'd cut my teeth on Chicago's four-record live album
Chicago at Carnegie Hall, were broadened another couple of sizes. Also, I was a pianist and aspiring keyboard player. I'd recently joined my first band and bought my first electric piano. And here was keyboard-based rock and roll. And it was totally insane! A triple live album with seven songs total. Can you even do that?
I have to believe that a lot of people's experience with
Emerson Lake & Palmer was similar. They heard "Lucky Man" on the radio, and they went and bought the album. I'm sure some people had no idea what to think, many probably tossed it out, but there would be a certain number of people whose minds and ears got expanded by it. This is not an album for the meek. This is insane, classical-jazz-art-rock. The word "progressive" hadn't been invented yet, let alone shortened to "prog". I heard it called "classical rock" because it had a lot of classical in it, and "art rock" because... well, because it wasn't normal rock, so it must've been "artsy" or something.