by Greg Lake
Our next destination was Boston and, much to the relief of Michael and Ian in particular, we were told that we could drive there rather than travel courtesy of Sudden Death Airlines. We were booked to perform three nights at the Boston Tea Party, an underground venue often used by artists such as the Velvet Underground, the Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa. We then moved on to Chicago, the home of Al Capone, prohibition and, of course, the blues. For us, it was right up there with New York and Los Angeles as one of the iconic cities of the United States. We had come to know and love it from television programmes such The Untouchables with Eliot Ness and from the blues and big band recordings we had heard over the years.
After we checked into the downtown Chicago Holiday Inn, a lady from the front desk called my room and insisted I come back down to the lobby. I asked her what the problem was.
‘Oh, my lord,’ she replied. ‘Just get down here right now.’
I jumped off the bed and put on a pair of sweatpants, and headed for the elevator. As I stepped out into the lobby I looked straight ahead and in one jaw-dropping moment everything became horribly clear. Our equipment truck had crashed into the front of the hotel.
It turned out that the road crew had rented a huge Avis truck to move the equipment around and when they drove up to the hotel they forgot that the truck was much taller than the regular car they were used to driving. The top of the truck crashed into the canopy roofing that covered the entrance to the foyer, and the vehicle got stuck so far under the roof that the crew were not able to reverse it back out. So, there it stood among the debris of bricks, broken glass, dust and rubble.
‘It would appear we’ve had a slight issue with the roof,’ said Vick Vickers, one of our road managers. ‘But don’t worry, everything is being taking care of.’
There was certainly nothing I could do, so I went back to my room and waited for the afternoon call to go down to the venue for a sound check. We were playing at the Kinetic Playground, a converted old theatre. When we arrived, Dee came up to us in the foyer and told us to hang back for a moment. He diverted us into a side room and we closed the door behind us. Outside we could hear shouting. I asked Dee what was happening and he explained that there was a dispute between the promoter and some people who had been demanding protection money. Dee thought that they might even be the police.
After a few minutes, it went quiet and Dee went outside to find out what was happening. When he returned, he told us there was nothing to worry about. The people offering the protection had threatened to burn the place to the ground if the promoter didn’t pay up, but it seemed that the matter had been resolved. Dee then smiled and said: ‘Welcome to Chicago!’
He took us up to the stage for the sound check and we listened to the headline act. It was Iron Butterfly and they were playing their famous song, ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’.
When the show started, our support slot overran and we couldn’t get our gear off the stage before Iron Butterfly were due on, so we had to leave it up there on stage. The road crew were told that they should load out early the following morning.
The next day began with another distressed phone call. This time it was from one of the road managers telling me to get down to the venue as quickly as possible. There had been a fire in the theatre overnight.
We assembled in the lobby and set off for the venue. I will always remember walking into the foyer of what remained of the Kinetic Playground and being struck by the acrid smell of burning rubber. We climbed over the fire hoses that were still in place in case the fire restarted. As we entered the theatre area, I saw all of our formerly beautiful new equipment still standing where we had left it, but the speakers had melted out of their charred cabinets and the Mellotron was reduced to a pile of ashes and a skeletal metal frame. It was clear to us all that the dispute of a day earlier hadn’t been resolved, after all.
At that point, we were convinced the tour would be over. But this was the United States and things move fast. Within twenty-four hours our entire back line, including the Mellotron, had been replaced and the tour continued on to Motor City Detroit, where we performed on 12, 13 and 14 November 1969 at both the Grand Riviera and the legendary Eastown Theatre. After a few days off, we started the second leg of the tour at the Fillmore East, New York, on 21 and 22 November for the promoter Bill Graham. Bill was both loved and feared in equal measure, and went on to become perhaps the greatest rock promoter of all time. He was referred to by Dee and by our booking agent Frank Barsalona as ‘The Mouth’.
I soon realised why Bill got that nickname when I started to talk to him – he was a larger-than-life character with a wide, cartoon mouth and he shouted all the time. He was a lovely man, though, and I have no doubt that the formula behind his astounding success was simply his honest love and enthusiasm for music. At heart, the great people who were involved in King Crimson’s American tour had one essential thing in common: they were passionate about music – music as art first, business second. That is not to say that the business was unimportant, but they were led by the heart. They looked for the talent, they believed in the talent, then they sold the talent, and that’s the way it worked.
Dee, Frank and Bill were close friends and between the three of them, plus our record company boss in the States, the legendary Ahmet Ertegün of Atlantic Records, you can trace a direct link from this group to almost every successful artist in the American music industry: Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Who, U2, Bruce Springsteen, ELP, Joe Cocker, the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Led Zeppelin . . . the list goes on.
In terms of live music, rock and roll was just about package tours and fifteen-minute sets before Frank Barsalona came along. ‘At that time, rock was lower than the rodeo,’ he would say. It was Frank who introduced a brand-new creed of honesty and ethics into the music business and transformed live music performance art into the modern, well-organised business that it is today.
When these men got together it was challenging – and hilarious – to be around them. The energy level was so intense. If you didn’t know who they were, you would assume that they were having a screaming argument. It seemed that the whole point of the discussion was to see who could deliver the best insult. They would spend the first five minutes demeaning each other – Bill Graham would be calling Frank ‘a flesh peddler’ – and then they would say what they had to say. It’s a New York thing – there are some restaurants where even the waiters insult you. But these meetings always ended up the same way, with laughter and hugging and kisses on the cheeks.
The Fillmore East shows were fantastic. We were supporting Joe Cocker and the audience were eager to see this new band from England who everyone was making such a fuss over. This was the moment we had been waiting for. Here we were – at last – performing in New York City, the Big Apple.
After we had finished playing I watched Joe perform. It was remarkable seeing how he writhed and contorted and hung on to the microphone stand in an effort to remain upright as he sung ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’. Despite being the worse for wear, he sounded great and the audience loved him.
We headed down to Florida to play the Palm Beach Festival on a bill also featuring the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin. This was the first open-air festival that the band had played in the United States and we didn’t know what to expect. We had done a few festival shows in England at racecourses and public parks but this was on an entirely different scale.
The first shock happened during the take-off in a little bubble-glass helicopter which was being used to shuttle artists to the festival site about thirty miles away. I had never flown in a helicopter before so it was a heart-stopping moment when it rose vertically and began soaring over the buildings below. The pilot had just returned from a tour of duty in Vietnam and was taking real pleasure in demonstrating how he could throw his chopper around.
We touched down at the festival site and were bundled out of the helicopter. Dust and dry grass were blowing into our eyes as we were pulled
away from beneath the rotating blades, but I could see that someone lying on a stretcher was immediately being loaded on to the helicopter. As soon as we were at a safe distance, I asked one of the stretcher bearers what had happened. Over the noise of the rotor, I heard him shout: ‘Rattlesnake! Bitten by a rattlesnake under the stage!’
We were relieved to get back to the hotel safely that night.
At breakfast the following morning, Janis Joplin was sitting alone at a table. She had a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels in her lap. She looked up as I entered the room and we nodded and smiled to each other but her head fell back down and we sat in silence. I felt dreadfully sorry for her but there was nothing I could do. I went back up to my room to pack my bags and get ready to leave for the next stop on our tour: Los Angeles, the city of the fallen angels.
There is a special feeling I get when arriving at LAX. No matter how many times I visit Los Angeles, I always take a moment outside the airport to stop and savour the waving palms, the warm breeze and the clear blue sky. On that first visit, the next thing that struck me, while we were driving into LA, was the sight of all the working oil wells with rocking-horse pumps that keep pumping the oil day and night. I had never seen anything like it. It emphasised to me that LA may sometimes seem to be a shallow place full of people seeking stardom, but it was built by pioneers whose spirit lives on in the hearts of some of the old Californian residents to this day.
When we arrived at our hotel, the Sunset Marquis, the road manager and I went straight up to my room to take a look at it as we would be staying there for a whole week. As we opened the door, I saw that there was a large ice bucket containing what appeared to be two bottles of wine on the dining table. What better time to celebrate than right now? I thought.
The road manager opened one of the bottles and filled a couple of glasses. We drank the first glass straight down and he poured us both another. After they were finished, we had another half a glass each and then I realised that I needed to go to the bathroom. I can remember pushing open the door but the rest is a blank until I woke up on the bed with a huge black eye and a searing hangover.
I discovered the ‘wine’ had actually been mescal – the spirit similar to tequila – and after opening the bathroom door I had blacked out and hit my head on the side of the bath. The worst thing about having the black eye was not the pain or temporary loss of vision. It was about having to go through the same laborious explanation every time I met someone new. ‘Oh dear, how did you get that?’ they would say. Or ‘I bet that hurt!’ I had to endure this for a week as we played our five-night run on 3–7 December at the Whiskey a Go Go on Sunset Boulevard.
These were not the best shows we did in the States. Although the band played well, the show times were later than usual and by the time we came on stage most of the audience were out of it and in bad shape. The finer moments of the band’s performance were lost on them. Although this was the wrong venue for an act like King Crimson to perform in, we did manage to kick-start our reputation on the West Coast. Those people who could actually remember being there enjoyed the show and helped to spread the word.
My time in the band, however, was coming to an end.
The last performances by the original King Crimson line-up took place at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West in San Francisco in mid-December 1969. On the same bill were the Nice and the Chambers Brothers.
When we arrived, Ian McDonald and Michael Giles made the sudden announcement that they had decided to leave the band and stop touring. There were never any musical differences between the members of the band: they just wanted to concentrate on a studio career instead. I knew that neither of them liked flying – and we had endured a few unnerving flights by then – but I had not realised that the rest of the travelling and the general mayhem and intensity of touring had become such a decisive issue for them. They wanted to retreat from the circus of being in a rapidly successful touring band.
Soon after we had heard the news, Robert came to my room. I said to Robert, ‘If you want to form a new band, we can do that. I’ll be happy to form a new band.’ But he told me that he would like to continue on with the name King Crimson and wanted to find replacements for Ian and Michael. I didn’t agree with him. King Crimson was all about the magical chemistry between the original people involved and the idea of bringing in two new people and pretending that nothing had happened just didn’t feel right to me. Ian had made a massive contribution to the band both as a writer and a performer while Michael’s drumming was so unusual it was essential to the King Crimson sound.
I left the meeting with Robert feeling depressed. A bright light had shone for a brief period of time, but now it was all over. The King was dead.
After our last show at Fillmore West had finished, on 15 December, I returned to the hotel and just as I was walking through the lobby I ran into Tony Stratton-Smith, the manager of the Nice. We had a few brief words and he told me that Keith Emerson was in the bar and that he would like to meet with me. I had been struck by Keith Emerson’s playing and stage presence when I had stayed to watch the Nice’s sound check. So I told Tony that, yes, I would go down and see Keith after I had made a couple of phone calls back to England.
When I arrived at the bar, Keith and I shook hands warmly and I sat down beside him and we began to chat. There was an immediate sense of compatibility, as we both drew upon European music for the roots of our inspiration rather than the blues or Motown or gospel. He asked me how things were going with King Crimson and I told him that, despite our incredible early success, the band was about to split up. He said that he was also thinking about moving on, having become creatively exhausted in the Nice.
‘We should consider forming a band together,’ he said.
Part Two
CHAPTER 5
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
I arrived back in London on 16 December 1969. The tour of the United States had been bittersweet. On the one hand, I had enjoyed all the new experiences and met fascinating people: the United States had taken me to its heart and in turn I had started to fall in love with it. On the other, the great young band that I had formed with my friend Robert Fripp had come to a sad and premature end. And in a final twist, a new door had just opened up, with the exciting prospect of working with Keith Emerson. It was a strange and rather bewildering experience.
I knew about Keith before playing on the same bill as him at the Fillmore West. The Nice, like King Crimson, had been causing a bit of a sensation. I don’t think that many people remember that they were originally the backing group for the soul singer P. P. Arnold. Things really took off for them when Keith started experimenting on keyboards and reworked Leonard Bernstein’s ‘America’ from West Side Story. There was a lot of fuss when he burned the American flag on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall – some American radio stations refused to play ‘America’.
By the time King Crimson and the Nice were playing on the same bill in the States, the Nice’s set list would include reworkings of some Bob Dylan songs together with versions of Bach and Tchaikovsky pieces. Meanwhile, King Crimson were mixing together Holst’s The Planets, quite heavy rock, jazz and folk, and the two bands together were spearheading what would become the progressive rock scene. But, like King Crimson, there was some unhappiness in the band. In their case, there were musical differences and changes in the line-up, and Keith was beginning to feel that no one else in the band could spur him on creatively.
Keith was thinking of scrapping the Nice and starting again before we got to know each other. He had already asked Tony Stratton-Smith who was the best bass player in the United Kingdom, and Tony had brought up my name. While we were on the same bill in the States, Keith, it turned out, had been keeping an eye on me, thinking about the future. Apparently, he wasn’t sure what to make of me, disagreeing with some of my opinions – he always would – but he could tell that we shared something in our approach to music.
Very shortly after I arrived back home, Keith came ro
und to visit me in my basement flat near Sloane Square in London. We chatted for a while and I played him some music that I was particularly fond of from my record collection. I think this was the first time Keith heard Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. We sat there for some hours and played through various pieces of music all the way from Bach to Dave Grusin, a composer and pianist of whom I am still very fond to this day. Keith was quite surprised by the diversity of music I had in my collection and it also formed a really good basis for our discussions regarding a future musical direction with which we would both feel comfortable.
During our initial discussions, we decided to try and keep the band down to a three-piece and in order to achieve that we would need to find the perfect drummer. The first person I thought of was the great Mitch Mitchell, who had recently become available due to the break-up of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
I called Mitch on the phone and a couple of days later he came around to see me. He arrived with his personal road manager and, after we said our initial hellos, I offered them both a drink and we sat down facing each other across a coffee table. I started talking to Mitch and telling him how much I had always enjoyed his work with Jimi, when all of a sudden out of the corner of my eye I noticed that a handgun had been placed on the table.
For a moment, my eyes flashed back and forth between Mitch, the gun and the road manager, and Mitch could obviously see that I was uncomfortable. He laughed a little awkwardly and told me not to worry – the road manager just carried the weapon for their personal protection. I asked the road manager if he wouldn’t mind just putting it away while we were talking, and he kindly obliged.