Where to start: an ELP New Listener’s Guide

1  Don’t start here

The music is was bad as its cover. Not entirely their fault. Atlantic Records insisted on the title and the photo. But the music is just awful.

Let’s begin with where not to start. Don’t start with Works 1 or Works 2. There’s some good stuff there but it’s slim pickings.

Forget Love Beach; it’s as awful as its cover suggests. They were forced to record it by the record company at the end of a tour. They had nothing, and they were exhausted.

You could listen to Black Moon some time, because it’s got three good tracks on it. But it’s far from essential.

It really doesn’t sound like ELP, and nothing I’ve said about why they’re good applies to it. It’s pop music because their record company needed a hit. They dutifully released two singles, neither of which were hits. For addicts only.

Their final studio album, In the Hot Seat, competes with Love Beach for worst ELP abomination. (Though the Dylan cover version, “The Man in the Long, Black Coat”, is a cracker.)

2  Songs to start with, to see if you like the taste

i   “Lucky Man”, from the Emerson, Lake & Palmer album. Famous for including the first rock Moog solo, courtesy of Emerson, on record. (Tagged on at the end because Emerson was in the pub while Lake turned a simple ballad he’d written as a kid into something with real studio heft.) It’s still their most popular song. 

ii   “From the Beginning”, from Trilogy. Another pretty Greg Lake song, this time about fucking up relationships. This time, Emerson’s participation is more integrated into the song.

This made artist HR Giger a superstar, and probably helped him get the gig for designing “Alien”. The album title refers to fellatio, and so does a detail in the artwork, only half airbrushed away from the women’s neck

iii  Toccata, from Brain Salad Surgery. Now we’re jumping into the deep end. This is Emerson’s arrangement of the fourth movement of Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera’s Piano Concerto No 1. It aint that pretty at all.

After ELP had recorded their version, they went, nervous as hell, to Ginastera’s place in France and played it to him. Like Aaron Copeland, who loved ELP’s arrangement of Hoe-Down and Fanfare for the Common Man, he…

Well, Ginastera listened to their version, then threw his arms up and said it was “terrible”. Emerson was crest-fallen. Then Ginastera explained he meant “terrible” in French, as in “amazing, fantastic, formidable”, and so on. It is, indeed, terrific.

If unusual time signatures are your thing, this is orgasm central. It switches times at the turn of a dime and the drop of a hat. Even if the word “time signatures” means nothing to you, it’s exciting as hell. Fuck, it’s fast. 

iv  The Barbarian, from Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Basically an arrangement of Bartok’s Allegro Barbare, this is much simpler than Toccata. But it keeps the Bartok spikiness, the European folksong origin, and then it just charges forward. I believe the Foo Fighters drummer once said he spend much of his adolescence listening to this, over and over. It always cheers me up, every time.

v  The Endless Enigma, from Trilogy. Yeah, it’s prog, so its nearly 11 minutes long, divided into two parts, with a middle section called Fugue. But it’s seriously good instrumental work between the three of them, and a strong vocal from Lake. It has lyrics that sound ok, line by line, and don’t make any sense at all. But at that stage Lake’s voice could sell anything. Anyway, it’s the music that counts. 

vi  Take a Pebble, from Emerson, Lake and Palmer. This would have been a higher recommendation, but it’s in a similar mood to the first two numbers. It’s Lake’s composition, but the long piano solo by Emerson, and his in-fills, are amazing. So are the opening notes, which Emerson got by taking the back off a piano and plucking the strings like a harp. I also recommend the expanded version on Welcome Back. 

vii  Tarkus, from Tarkus. Actually, I think this is their best piece, and maybe the most high-energy twenty-odd minutes of music by anyone. It’s just not where I’d start someone. Again, the version on Welcome Back is also highly recommended. 

viii  Jerusalem, from Brain Salad Surgery. It’s that song. They play it, Lake sings it. The BBC banned it, for some reason. It’s pomp rock at its finest. It’s brilliant. 

The inside image on the Brain Salad Surgery cover. Same model: Giger’s partner, the late Li Tobler.

ix   Karn Evil 9, Parts 1, 2 and 3. I have a copy of Brain Salad Surgery on vinyl. Karn Evil 9  starts on side 1. You have to turn the record over halfway through Part 1, and the rest of it takes up the whole of side 2.

Contains the “Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends…” line. 

I’m also fond of: 

“Not content with that, With our hands behind our back, We pull Jesus from a hat: Get into that! Get into that!” They dropped those lines from most performances after they got Big in America. 

The music of Part 1 is pretty much straight-ahead rock, only faster. But it’s great. Come inside! Part 2 is instrumental, with high-speed silly noises from Emerson (that’s praise), and synthesised percussion from Carl Palmer. Part 3 is science fiction: a battle between two space fleets is won when one side destroys the other, and is in turn destroyed by their unimpressed ship’s computers. Lots of synthesiser and Moog, some great guitar and singing from Lake. And silly lyrics. 

x   The Great Gates of Kiev. 

That’s the last section of their version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. It’s fast, it’s big and it’s grand. Death is not life, by the way, As Any Fule Kno. But when Lake sings the opposite, you can find yourself momentarily convinced. 

3  Albums

If I were going to own just one ELP album, it would be that live triple, Welcome Back My Friends. It’s only a double in CD form, or a few hundred megabytes in digital form. It has storming live versions of most of the above.

Its full title, by the way, is Welcome Back My Friends to the Show that Never Ends; Ladies and Gentlemen, Emerson, Lake and Palmer. I believe it’s still the longest record title ever. They did it as a typesetter’s joke. They knew it’d get into the Top 10, and they also knew that there was no way of fitting that title into the little grids that the music press used to list the charting albums.  

After that I’d buy Tarkus, then the first album (called Emerson, Lake & Palmer), then Brain Salad Surgery, then Trilogy, then Pictures at an Exhibition. 

Amazing sex fun fact!

Lightly furred redhead, interested in the “Variation” aspect of that weird shit on the audio. And demonstrating Emerson’s Famous Mullet haircut. Not the actual girl in the anecdote left of this photo, though she was a redhead too.

I lost my virginity to Pictures at an Exhibition. I doubt if there’s many people can say that, since ELP’s music, for all its merits, was notoriously not sexy. I was giving it a listen when a girl who’d been teaching me how to kiss dropped by. I made her a cup of tea; she brought out some hash.

I started taking her clothes off. She didn’t stop me. “Oh,” I thought. “Oh, oh, I see.”

“Promenade”, indeed. Though you can really go at it during the “Blues Variation” interlude. I could make a “Great Gates of Kiev” joke, but that’d be ungentlemanly, also completely untrue.

I’d have put something else on if I’d known she was coming. But once she’d arrived I was distracted.

Anyway, you know who you are. I still think you’re wonderful. Also, thank you! 

Keith Emerson shot himself. Bugger. 

There are some things I’ve only got hindsight on. But I know that if I’d been watching at the time, I’d have got it wrong. When Led Zeppelin broke up, I’d have expected a constant flow of great new music from Jimmy Page, and Plant and Jones to fade into obscurity.

But instead we got Plant casually stepping over the self-parody trap as if it were a puddle, and Jones working with brilliant musicians including Robert Fripp to make vital if not exactly best-selling new music. While Page prepared yet another re-mastered re-release of the Led Zepp catalogue.

Palmer, Lake & Emerson, in this photo. They were pretty lads in their day, but they never really got the female fans.

Another thing I’d have expected is that together or apart, the members of Emerson, Lake and Palmer would be making brilliant new music, lots of it, to the present day. Or till about a week ago, when Keith Emerson shot himself. Given the talent that was packed into that trio, many fans, including me, were surprised there wasn’t more music.

Still, the power and passion and aggression of the first five ELP albums is unique. There’s nothing like it in rock, prog rock, or classical. Or heavy metal, though speed metal is probably the genre that comes closest to one of the things ELP were doing. Except that ELP were doing everything else, from classical to jazz, to ambient, to rag-time and boogie-woogie, to blues and hard rock, and sensitive singer-songwriter ballads, you name it, as well. 

Emerson riding and stabbing a Hammond organ, Osaka, 1972. He could get notes from doing that, using feedback. And knives. He got the knife from Lemmy, who was Emo’s roadie and not yet “Lemmy of Moorhead”. Lemmy died this year, too.

I also liked the massive critical hate for ELP. With the advent of punk, critics managed to persuade the world that ELP were ridiculous musos doing triple live albums, putting out pieces of music more than half an hour long and broken up into sections. All of which was true, except it wasn’t ridiculous. They had guts, and they took risks no band would take today. Carl Palmer said they were “a sabre-rattling band”, and he was right. 

One of the reasons I enjoyed the critical contempt for a band I only discovered after it had wound up was that it gave me a shameful secret that wasn’t about bdsm. I could say, “I’m into bdsm! I get off on telling women what to do and whipping them!” And that still wouldn’t have the shock effect in polite society as, “ELP are, seriously, up there with Led Zep! One of the five best bands that ever played!”

Emerson conducting his own music in the 2010s. Its not often you see a shot of Emo near a flat surface that doesn’t have a drink on it. I’m not sure which orchestra that is.

Although Emerson was 71, he still owed the world his Piano Concerto No 2. I’ve heard he had a worsening of his carpal tunnel problem and couldn’t play, and that’s why he shot himself. I wished he’d stayed. He could have composed and got someone else to play it. He was very kind and encouraging to young musicians like Rachel Flowers, and I wish he’d composed and let them play. 

I heard that Emerson and Lake wrote some music together when they were preparing to go out on the Manticore Tour in 2010. I hope Greg Lake finishes that and shapes it into songs for one final album. But – though I also admire Lake – I’m not holding my breath. 

But I’m too grateful for what Emerson left us to be complaining. Anyway, Keith Emerson is dead. Bugger.

Postscript

So if ELP are such an eclectic band, you say, they must have done a song about bdsm while they were rambling about from genre to genre. Why yes, I reply, they did: “So Far to Fall”, in 1975.

Sample lyric: 

“Ooh she had me, she had me running rings around the floor.
She had me nailed to a door, she had me crying out,
she had me crying out for more, more, more, more, more, more, more.
She bad me, she tied me up in knots like a piece of a string,
she did a thing to my thing, she did a thing to my thing
like it’s never been done before.”