by Greg Lake
We stayed chatting for a while and had almost finished when Mitch turned back towards me and said, ‘You know, maybe we should all get together with Jimi and have a jam. You never know how things might work out.’
‘Sounds good,’ I said as we got up to shake hands.
After Mitch left, I reflected on what he had said and decided that, as much as I loved Jimi, the idea of having too many strong players trying to do something radical in one band would probably be a bridge too far.
The following day, I phoned Keith and told him about the meeting I’d had with Mitch and about the strange incident of the gun being placed on the table. I remember Keith being quite surprised because we both knew Mitch to be a really laid-back and peaceful guy. I think it was just a little bit of silly bravado, but it was disconcerting. During the latter part of Jimi’s life, through no fault of his own, he had got mixed up with some less than savoury characters in the States and perhaps a bit of their gangster posturing had rubbed off on Mitch and the road manager. We decided that we had better continue our search for a drummer just in case things didn’t work out with Mitch. As it turned out, Mitch didn’t join the band and we never did jam with Jimi – Jimi died soon afterwards, in September 1970.
A couple of days after I met Mitch, we got a call from Robert Stigwood, the manager of Cream and the Bee Gees, who had heard we were forming a band. He told us that there was an outstanding drummer by the name of Carl Palmer that he had come across, and he thought he would be a perfect match.
He explained that, although Carl was only twenty, he had already played with Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and his own band Atomic Rooster, and Robert felt that he was eager to develop musically and was capable of much more. Atomic Rooster had released a debut album in February 1970 and were pretty successful – there had been a change of singer but Carl says he was relatively happy at the time Keith phoned him in May of that year.
A few days later, we arranged to meet up with Carl in a small rehearsal studio in Soho Square in London’s West End. As soon as Carl walked into the room it was clear that he was an extremely bright young guy with a very effervescent personality. It was also very easy to see by the way he went about setting up his drum kit that he had the mindset of a professional player.
From the very first few bars we played together, I could sense there was a very special chemistry between the three of us. We started with ‘Rondo’, which Keith had adapted from Dave Brubeck’s jazz classic, ‘Blue Rondo à la Turk’, for the Nice’s first album. While we were playing, I looked across at Keith – it was clear that he had also immediately realised that this was the drummer we had been looking for.
For a few days after that, Carl played hard to get even though he knew that this was one of those offers that only comes along once in a lifetime. Carl still likes to tell the story of how I called him in the end and told him that if he didn’t join the band he would not only be hurting himself but would be hurting me as well. My determination may have helped to push him along, but he does say that he finally worked out that perhaps the musicians in Atomic Rooster were not good enough to take him to where he wanted to be. The next day he joined and the band was complete.
The first thing we needed was a name for the new band so we all put on our thinking caps and started to look for something appropriate.
We initially came up with a few different names but none of them sounded right. If a band name does not really suit the music, it can sound dreadful. It’s rather like calling a dog Graham. After a great deal of soul searching, we eventually came to the conclusion that the reason we were having such trouble was that we had all come from such well-known bands that somehow these past identities were not sitting easily with anything new.
It was then that I think Keith suggested just using our own names. After just a few moments of consideration, we all agreed that ‘Emerson, Lake & Palmer’ sounded right and so that would be the name of the band. Perhaps it sounded a bit like a firm of accountants or lawyers, but it turned out all right.
It is interesting now just to reflect back on exactly how ELP came into being. Unlike the Beatles or the Stones, we were not old school pals or local kids who happened to meet up on the train or bus on their way home. ELP had really been created by the destiny of our earlier bands and although we didn’t realise it at the time, this would have some quite profound implications a little further down the line when the word ‘supergroup’ was being applied to us due to our previous successes.
We never had the chance to develop the band organically before we were being labelled. ELP were often portrayed as if we had all been born with silver spoons in our mouths, which of course was a very long way from the truth. All three members of ELP had spent many hard years in former bands sleeping in the back of vans and quite literally living on the breadline. We had paid our dues in the early days in order to get to where we were, so this tag of being a supergroup was not something we either wanted or felt good about.
It was this tag, added to the fact that a lot of the music we played had European classical roots, that probably gave some people the impression that we were being pretentious or high-minded. It was certainly true that we were ambitious and we did want to be original and innovative. However, at no time did we ever claim to be classical musicians or even classically trained musicians – we were just British rock-and-roll musicians drawing a large part of our influence from European rather than American roots. For us, it seemed important at the time to try and break away from the same old tried and tested path that so many other British rock acts had followed in the past by using American blues, rock and roll and gospel music as their sole source of inspiration.
By taking this approach, we left our mark on the history of rock music, but I will always have a certain amount of regret somewhere deep down inside, particularly as a singer, at not having been able to embrace American soul, blues and country music in my career as much as I would have liked.
When ELP was formed, such was the buzz around the band that expectations were very quickly flying high and within days we were being asked for a date when we thought we could deliver the first album. None of us really had any material written at that time and it was fast becoming obvious that there wasn’t really going to be a whole lot of time to prepare any. Because of the good experience I had enjoyed with Chris Blackwell, we were happy to sign to Island Records and immediately started preparing to record our first album.
Due to the fact that we had such a short time to prepare the material, it was mostly made up of things that Keith and I still had locked away in the vaults from the past. This is one of the reasons that the album did not really have a descriptive title. The album when it came out was simply entitled Emerson, Lake & Palmer, which we thought was the most honest way to step out and move forward.
While all this was going on in 1970, Pete Sinfield increased his involvement in King Crimson because Robert Fripp was the only member. I believe that there was some talk about asking Elton John to be the singer, but he had just recorded his second solo album, which included ‘Your Song’ and was about to become a big hit. Although I was no longer in the band, I ended up singing on every vocal track but one of their second album, In the Wake of Poseidon, which was recorded from January to April 1970 at Wessex Sound Studios and released in May of that year.
The album begins with an acapella ‘Peace – A Beginning’ and concludes with ‘Peace – An End’, and features the eight-minute title track and ‘Pictures of a City’, a version of ‘A Man, a City’, which King Crimson used to play on tour in 1969 before Michael, Ian and myself all left the band. The only song in which I didn’t feature on In the Wake of Poseidon was ‘Cadence and Cascade’, which Robert’s old friend from Dorset, Gordon Haskell, recorded, and there were a couple of instrumental tracks, ‘Peace – A Theme’ and ‘The Devil’s Triangle’, as well.
The Giles brothers worked as session musicians on the album, and the three of us ended up
performing the single ‘Cat Food’ with Robert and the jazz pianist Keith Tippett on Top of the Pops. In the Wake of Poseidon proved to be King Crimson’s highest-charting album in the UK, which is a bit bizarre as most of the people who performed on it were not even in the band at the time it was made.
As it turned out, this would not be the last King Crimson album that I would appear on. A four-CD live album called Epigraph was released in 1997 and features the 1969 performances at Fillmore East and Fillmore West in the United States and at the Ninth National Jazz and Blues Festival and the Chesterfield Jazz Club in the United Kingdom, as well as a live session we did for BBC Radio. The recordings include some of our best music together, including ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’, ‘The Court of the Crimson King’ and ‘Mars’, as well as ‘A Man, a City’.
It’s funny to think that during most of the performances captured on that album, I was playing away enthusiastically with a band that had great material and seemed to be going places fast, but I had no idea it was all about to end. As the album also includes songs from that very final concert at Fillmore West, I sometimes wonder whether you can tell that I knew it was all over just from the sound of my voice and the way I played the bass.
The early recording sessions for Emerson, Lake & Palmer took place at the Island recording studios in Basing Street near Portobello Road. We quickly changed studios to Advision in Gosfield Street, Fitzrovia, and it turned out to be a fortuitous move for us. It was equipped with state-of-the-art equipment but, more importantly, this was where we first met Eddy Offord. He was a first-class recording engineer and incredibly dedicated, too. Most nights, after everyone had gone home, Eddy and I would sit down at the recording desk and work on the rough mixes until daybreak. I was the producer of the album, with input from both Keith and Carl, but having Eddy there was fantastic. Keith would always say that the band never really made a decision that I would be the producer – I think I just naturally sat at the desk because I already had some experience with King Crimson – but he did acknowledge that it turned out well.
The band had a sense that the music we were making on this album was meaningful, and that it might even be successful as well. Our style of music is, of course, known as ‘progressive’ but this was not a term we used at the time. Like King Crimson, we just saw ourselves as an innovative band who were going to break free from the conventions of the industry. The experimentation we had done in our previous bands would be taken to a new level. We certainly were not going be a singles band.
One of my songs on the album did turn out to be a hit single, though, and it all happened by accident. At first, I had no plans to bring ‘Lucky Man’ to the group. We already had a fairly simple song on the album, ‘Take a Pebble’, which I wrote very early on with Keith before Carl had joined the band, and we built it up with a piano solo for Keith and a guitar solo for me. The other tracks on the album were more complicated, though, including ‘The Barbarian’ inspired by Béla Bartók’s ‘Allegro Barbaro’, and ‘Knife-Edge’, which merged elements of Janác˘ek’s Sinfonietta and Bach’s ‘French Suite in D Minor’ – those pieces showed how we were trying to draw on European classical influences to create a radical new sound. ‘The Three Fates’ and ‘Tank’ showed off the musical virtuosity of Keith and Carl respectively, with ‘The Three Fates’ involving us lugging all the recording equipment to both the Royal Festival Hall and a church in Finchley to capture Keith’s organ solos.
‘Lucky Man’, however, didn’t seem to break new ground and was very simple in its approach. This isn’t how Keith remembers it, but that day remains very clear in my mind. As the recording sessions were about to draw to a close, we counted how much of the album’s running time we had left. We discovered to our dismay that we were over three minutes short. (During the glorious days of vinyl, the prescribed time for a record was twenty-one minutes per side.)
Eddy’s voice came over the talkback.
‘We need one last song,’ he said.
Carl asked if anyone had any ideas. We looked at each other blankly and there was a pregnant silence until I reluctantly came forward.
‘Well, if there’s nothing else, I do have this little folk song that I wrote when I was a kid,’ I said.
The awkwardness in the studio returned until Keith said: ‘Okay, why don’t you play it and let’s take a listen?’
I put down my bass, picked up my Gibson J200 and sang the song. For a couple of minutes, Keith tried to improvise along on the Hammond organ but he ran out of ideas. He suggested that I just record it on my own. I was a bit surprised. It was such a straightforward song, after all, so it allowed plenty of room for him to come up with something. What was the problem? I could see he wasn’t keen, though, so I agreed to carry on without him. Keith left to go to the pub down the road from the studio.
I took my J200 into the isolated vocal booth and got ready to record the song. Suddenly the padded door opened and Carl poked his head around.
‘Do you want me to play along on drums?’ he asked.
I gave him the thumbs up and a few minutes later we had recorded the first take. We went back into the control room to take a listen. It didn’t sound great. We started analysing what was wrong but Eddy suggested that I record the bass track before we got overly critical. So I did, and then I added the backing vocals and the electric guitar solo as well.
I was never tempted to revise the lyrics. Over time, people would interpret the song in various ways. Some people associated it with the last years of the Vietnam War and a soldier getting shot, others with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It seemed to evoke the tumultuous era we had been living through. But that was never my intention. The lyrics were simply a medieval fantasy I had written as a child.
When Keith returned from the pub and we played him the track, he was shocked to hear how this modest folk song had been transformed into such a rich and powerful track.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘perhaps it would be good if I played on it, after all.’
We all laughed. I was happy that he was enthusiastic about playing on the song but the problem now was I had just covered the solo part of the song on electric guitar. The only space left for him was the long fade-out at the end of the song. We started to think about what sound would be best to use.
‘How about trying out the Moog synthesiser?’ said Keith.
We had seen this new piece of equipment being delivered earlier in the day. Bob Moog had sent it and it looked more like a telephone switchboard than a musical instrument.
‘What does it sound like?’ I asked.
‘I don’t really know. I’ve never used it in a studio.’
So we agreed to give it a go anyway.
Keith went back into the studio and started to experiment with the sounds.
Eddy and I sat in the control room listening as Keith slowly brought this machine to life. We started to hear this fascinating swooping sound, a portamento whereby the pitch slides from one note to another, and we suggested to Keith that we should run the track alongside it. When experimenting in a recording studio, it is always worth capturing the first performance just case something extraordinary happens. So many magic moments have been lost in studios over the years because that first pass wasn’t recorded. Fortunately, this was not the case here and, as the run-through started, we punched the track into record. As the track came to an end, I turned to Eddy and said: ‘Is it just me or did that sound really good?’
Eddy smiled. ‘Let’s listen back,’ he said.
Over the studio talkback I told Keith to come in and take a listen. He insisted that he was only just getting started and that he was sure he could do a better take. However, the track we had used to record him on was the last one available. To do a second take would mean scrubbing the one he had just recorded. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Keith would later say he was devastated about this but we managed to talk him round and he agreed to take a listen.
As soon as he heard it in context, there w
as no question about it. We all knew then that it was special. Keith would say that I was always better than him at choosing which of his solo takes to use – he was too close to the music and always thought he could do a better take, but later he would agree that it was impossible to imagine a better solo for a particular track than the one I had chosen.
Of course, the Moog has now become one of the most famous synthesisers of all time, but this was the pop breakthrough for the instrument. As Kurt Loder of MTV would later say: ‘“Lucky Man” demonstrated for delighted keyboard players everywhere that it was at last possible for them to blow amp-shredding lead guitarists right off the stage, if they so chose.’
So that was it. ‘Lucky Man’ was finished and ELP’s first album was complete.
CHAPTER 6
What a Circus
The spirit of the band at that time was extremely strong and in some ways it felt like a coiled spring just waiting to be released. Although we had really enjoyed recording the first album it was nevertheless clear to us at the time that the real moment of truth as far as audience reaction was concerned was going to be based on the band’s ability to perform live.
As the recording sessions for the first album came to a close, our managers E. G. Management booked our first UK tour. Luckily, they were able to get us a slot to perform at the now legendary Isle of Wight Festival in 1970, and we knew it would be a real platform for us to show the world what we were capable of. We were extremely excited to have this incredible opportunity so early on in the band’s career, but at the same time we were quite nervous about playing at such a big event before we even had a chance to get the show broken in and under control. In this sense, it really was a trial by fire.