by Greg Lake
Having had a good deal of experience in playing live shows with our previous bands, we had the good sense to insist on having our inaugural show somewhere a bit more out of the way and less conspicuous, so the very first show of ELP took place in front of 800 people at the Guildhall in Plymouth on Sunday 23 August 1970.
We were nervous. I had barely performed in front of an audience since December 1969 and Carl and Keith had both been away from the stage for a few months, too. And here we were, playing live together for the very first time as well as playing material no one had ever heard before: ‘The Barbarian’, ‘Take a Pebble’ and the full-length, three-quarters-of-an-hour version of ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, as well as ‘Rondo’. Keith kicked off the concert with the simple words: ‘This is what we sound like.’
We ended up getting a fifteen-minute standing ovation and I felt a deep sense of relief as I drove back home to London.
There is a saying that ‘a day is a long time in politics’ and sometimes the same can also be said of music. For ELP, the ‘longest day’ would almost certainly be Saturday 29 August 1970. On that day, we performed our second show to an audience of over 600,000 people at the Isle of Wight Festival.
The roster of artists appearing there was truly awe-inspiring: Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Miles Davis, Leonard Cohen, Sly and the Family Stone, Joni Mitchell, the Doors, Jethro Tull, the Moody Blues and many more. And here we were, this almost completely unknown band, Emerson, Lake & Palmer. It could not have been a better launch pad.
We sensed an atmosphere of barely controlled chaos from the moment we arrived. Like most of these early epic rock festivals, the backstage area was complete pandemonium: people running around and panicking; medical emergencies taking place against the constant din of stage managers pleading and howling abuse over their walkie-talkies as the band on stage typically ran over their allotted time slot. Just as we arrived, we heard that the police were threatening to shut down the entire event.
Eventually the time came for us to perform and we were called to the steps at the side of the stage. As the MC started his announcement, we walked up the steps and out on to the stage itself. The scene was almost biblical, or perhaps like some huge set-piece in a Cecil B. DeMille epic film. The audience stretched back almost as far as the eye could see.
As I looked out at the crowd, I was suddenly overcome by a very strange sense of detachment. I think it must have simply been the sight of the huge gathering I was facing while I was standing there with just a guitar in my hands. Somehow, I was going to have to step forward and entertain them. Then we started to play.
Of course, there had been no chance of undertaking any sound checks before the show, so it really was a question of just flying by the seat of our pants and hoping for the best.
During the first number, all kinds of things were going through my head simultaneously. How is the sound? Are the monitors working correctly? (They weren’t.) Is the audience responding to the music? (They were.) All of this, of course, at the same time as actually performing the music, which I believe at that moment was ‘The Barbarian’, the first track from the album. Keith and I could not hear each other and Carl was trying to tie everything together based on the few snatches he could hear.
The rest of the performance passed by in a blur until the very end of our experimental arrangement of ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, when Keith and I triggered the two cannons on stage. It was an unbelievable, once-in-a-lifetime moment when the entire audience rose to their feet and gave the band a standing ovation.
The very next day, ELP were being blasted across the front page of almost every daily newspaper and music magazine in the world, and most of the reviews were excellent. We were thrilled by this reaction, but I still remember one small thing that slightly bothered me at the time. One of the newspaper headlines used the word ‘supergroup’ for the very first time. The word ‘supermodel’ was already in circulation at the time, so some journalist must have thought it had a catchy ring about it. I think they meant well but I was immediately concerned that it made us appear rather removed from the real world of rock and roll. I was right to be wary as, later in the life of the band, some journalists used the supergroup tag to try and attack us for being somehow elite or pretentious.
The band continued on our first tour and, on the back of that Isle of Wight performance, the shows sold out and we received standing ovations every night. The tour continued in Europe during the following months and the legend of ELP as a formidable live band had begun. The Emerson, Lake & Palmer album came out in November 1970, received an excellent review in Melody Maker and reached number four in the charts. We knew by then that we were always going to have some detractors in the music press, no matter what we did, but we also knew we had a future as both a live and a studio band.
At that time, things began to move very fast indeed and it felt like new shows were being booked literally minute by minute. We played a number of shows in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and the tour of Germany in particular threw new experiences our way, including when we flew to Bremen airport on 31 December 1970 to play the famous German TV show, Beat-Club. Our aeroplane was an old Lufthansa propeller plane, and when we landed we taxied up to the front of this old concrete building with a corrugated tin roof that was clearly also a relic from the Second World War. It all looked exactly the same as those black-and-white wartime images of Adolf Hitler disembarking from his own aeroplane. It was as if nothing had changed.
There, waiting to greet us, was the legendary German promoter, the late Horst Lippmann of Lippmann and Rau, who had brought the blues legends Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf over to Europe, including the UK, in the 1960s, where they had a huge effect on the likes of Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton.
Horst was standing there by a car and, after a few warm handshakes, we jumped into his vehicle and began to drive out of the airfield. The first thing we all immediately noticed was how smooth and comfortable the car felt so we asked him what make it was. A one-word answer came back: ‘Mercedes,’ said Horst with a huge smile on his face.
After we left the airport, we drove on to the autobahn – the forerunner of what we now refer to as the freeway or motorway. Very soon the car was moving along at over 90 mph – the autobahn had no speed limits.
Our expectation was that, because Germany had lost the war, things would have been poorer, or perhaps less good than they were back home. Once we had left the airport, it came as quite a shock for us to see just how advanced the Germans were, not only in terms of car manufacturing and road infrastructure, but also in the general quality of daily life, food, hotels and so on.
One of the German shows that will always stick in my mind was on the night of 29 November 1970 when we played in Munich at a venue called the Circus Krone. Despite the name, we had no real idea what this venue was. Sometimes you come across venues that take their name from some historical association like the corn exchange, assembly room or so on, and we just assumed that this would be the case in Munich – maybe it was named after some old Roman amphitheatre. However, when we arrived we were quite shocked to see that this was indeed an actual live working circus, complete with lions, tigers and elephants, and a sawdust-covered ring in the middle. Apparently, from time to time they would allow the venue to be used for music concerts and now ELP were about to perform there.
A stage had been built within the circus ring itself, and the audience was all around the stage, just as they would be when the real circus performed there.
The problems began when it became clear that someone had oversold the tickets. Halfway through the performance, a riot broke out in the crowd.
I went up to the microphone and tried to calm things down but unfortunately, due to the language barrier, the message just didn’t get through. In fact, it just seemed to make things worse.
Eventually the sides of the tent opposite to the stage were opened up, revealing two fire trucks that immediately opened up with three or four powerful water cannons
. As the jets of water blasted into the arena, people were being knocked off their feet and spun in all directions across the floor.
We had no choice other than to get off the stage as fast as we could and jump into the waiting cars backstage to make a speedy exit.
We had only performed half of the show but the water cannons, rather than our own cannons in ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, had terminated the evening for good.
For weeks afterwards, no matter where we performed, our nostrils were filled with this awful smell of elephant as soon as we walked up on stage. In the end, we had to have all of the equipment deep cleaned in order to get rid of it.
After our first tour, the band’s momentum was building at an incredible pace. It was obvious to all of us that we needed to record and deliver a new album as quickly as possible. We were already back in Advision Studios by January 1971, starting to record new music.
The debut album had been very successful, but it had not fully created a definitive style or template for us. It was largely made up of individual tracks and lacked an overall sense of cohesion. So, I suggested to Keith that we should develop an overarching concept for the second album.
We met at his house to exchange ideas. The two of us sat around the piano and the first thing he played me was this idea he had for a piano riff in five-four time. It was a repetitive, left-hand figure that continued to go round and round upon itself while the right hand performed an independent top-line melody.
My immediate impression was that it was a clever display of musical dexterity but it didn’t provide a meaningful basis for a concept album. It sounded like a musical juggling act. From a lyricist’s perspective, it didn’t have the type of melody I could use as a starting point.
Since the advent of progressive music, there had been a tendency among certain musicians to try and impress the public by performing songs in odd time signatures. These pieces usually sounded gratuitous and self-indulgent to me, and I always thought that they were not as clever as they pretended to be. Often a piece claiming to be written in five-four time was just four-four with an added beat pasted at the end of each bar. A proper example of five-four, by contrast, would be ‘Take Five’ by Dave Brubeck or ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’ by Holst. Those pieces were conceived using five beats to the bar from the start.
So when Keith played the piano riff to me, I was wary that it might just sound like musical showboating. We could risk losing our musical integrity. I always believed in Keith’s creative ability as a writer, but I was determined to try and protect the work we did together from becoming cheapened by pretention.
Keith felt strongly about keeping this riff, though, so I decided it would be better just to let it go and focus on other aspects of the album and its sound.
In the end, a complete musical concept was never developed for what became Tarkus so, personally, I wouldn’t call it a concept album, although the songs are united by themes of science fiction, violence and the futility of war. Each separate piece is connected either by a musical transition or a seamless edit. The title and the cover images were simply retro-fitted after the recording had been completed.
The artist William Neal was given an acetate of Tarkus to listen to, and he developed the idea of the armadillo, other creatures and tank tracks along with Keith and myself. As for the title, Keith later said, according to Malcolm Dome’s Classic Rock Presents Prog, that he wanted some kind of science-fiction name that ‘represented Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in reverse. Some mutilation of the species caused by radiation . . . Tarkus!’, but we only came up with that name after we had composed the music, so neither the title nor the artwork were part of the original concept. Of course, in the world of art anything can be viewed as a concept or a concept album. A red square painted on a white canvas entitled Mud in Spring is a concept if you choose to accept it as such and so it is with music. But in the case of Tarkus, it’s skewing the facts a little bit. A concept album also might suggest that we were drawing on one source, one type of music, but when you listen to Tarkus you can hear that we weren’t just tapping a single reservoir: classical, country, jazz, honky tonk and good old-fashioned rock and roll all played a part in creating the sound.
Despite my early concerns, I was very pleased with how Tarkus turned out. The playing, the production and the songs share a surreal quality that brought all the strands together. The twenty-minute ‘Tarkus’, made up of seven sections, takes up the whole first side, beginning with ‘Eruption’ and closing with ‘Aquatarkus’. In between, there are short sections, written by Keith or the two of us together, plus ‘Battlefield’, which I wrote by myself. On ‘Tarkus’, Keith showed that he was taking the Moog to another level of inventiveness and Carl showed his drumming prowess – I’m not sure that there was another drummer in the world who could have done justice to it.
‘Tarkus’ became something of an ELP classic, and some of the six shorter pieces on the second side also became favourites – the jokey ‘Jeremy Bender’, with its country-style piano, was a regular of our live performances, and I like ‘Bitches Crystal’. Keith and I co-wrote all but one of the tracks on the second side, and Carl co-wrote three of the tracks, including the rock-and-roll closer, ‘Are You Ready Eddy?’, our little tribute to the engineer Eddy Offord.
Some of the tracks relate to the direction we had started to take with ‘The Barbarian’ and ‘Knife-Edge’ on the first album, but on Tarkus the whole dark atmosphere and sound, as well as the musicianship, were more developed. On the first album, you could say that we were three individuals working together but obviously with different histories in different groups. Now, we started to sound like a band. We sounded like us.
Amazingly, in the light of how it takes some artists months or even years to record an album, we recorded the whole album in about two weeks – I think that reflects how well we were working as a band by that point. Everything was just flowing. I was the producer once more, and I felt that we were capturing something of the creative spirit of the band by working fast.
Tarkus was released on Island Records in the UK on 14 June 1971 and it became the first number one record I had ever made.
By then, we had already embarked upon our second European tour, which opened in Southampton on 4 March 1971.
Having recorded our second album, the band had really begun to find its feet and we had more than enough material to draw upon in order to keep the shows fresh and vibrant. The UK dates were mainly the usual city halls and so on but, despite being relatively small, these were fantastic places to perform in – it was in those time-honoured venues that we really began to develop the whole theatrical concept of the band’s performance.
Even though all of those city-hall shows were great to play, the most memorable one on that particular tour was at Newcastle City Hall on 26 March 1971 when we recorded our live adaptation of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Keith played the opening ‘Promenade’ section on an old Harrison & Harrison organ permanently installed above the stage in the hall.
Mussorgsky wrote the work in 1874 after seeing the paintings of his recently deceased friend Victor Hartmann at an exhibition and at his friend’s home. In the very early days of Emerson Lake & Palmer, Keith suggested that we could do our own version live and both Carl and I really liked the idea. It quickly became one of the signatures of our live performances but we had never recorded it in the studio. A film of our performance of ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ at the Lyceum in London in November 1970 had been released but it was shockingly bad, both in terms of the filming and sound quality, and we wanted to redress the balance by releasing a proper live recording that would capture the energy of the band.
There was some talk of releasing the Newcastle City Hall recording as Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s second album, but the record company was not convinced that an interpretation of a whole classical suite was going to sell, despite how it had gone down in our live performances. The idea was shelved for the time being, but after th
e success of the second album and tour, it was released in November 1971, reaching number three in the UK album charts. As well as ‘Pictures’, the album included the live encore of ‘Nutrocker’, inspired by Kim Fowley’s version of the march from Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker. William Neal, who created the Tarkus cover, did another great one for Pictures at an Exhibition, relating the idea of a gallery of paintings, blank on the outside but with the revealed artworks inside the gatefold.
The success of our adaptation helped tear down the walls of prejudice and bigotry that had until then helped maintain the belief that you had to be either extremely clever or upper class, or preferably both, in order to be able to enjoy classical music. It was perhaps the first time that a young rock audience had ever been offered up an honest, serious attempt at performing a piece of classical music with a rock sentiment and a rock feeling, but not in a corny, piss-taking way. It was a real attempt to make it sound good and relevant, and they appreciated it.
Following the reaction and enthusiasm shown that night by the young audience from Newcastle, and the surprising success of the record, it was clear that, at least to some small extent, the world of classical music would never be quite the same again. The sale of formal, orchestral versions of Pictures rose significantly after our record was a hit, and they were being bought by people who had never listened to classical music before.
Now, of course, classical music is used from everything from mobile-phone ringtones to the warm-up music for sporting events in stadiums to TV adverts. We all pretty much now take it for granted, but it wasn’t like that in the early 1970s when we released Pictures at an Exhibition.
Despite the fact that we never actually foresaw that kind of musical liberation taking place, and that it was an accident rather than intentional – we were just playing music we wanted to play – our contribution to that has now become quite a rewarding legacy for us. Personally, I’m not really convinced that I have any great talent or that I have ever had any specific plan – I just want to entertain – but we were there in the right place and at the right time. I’m just a lucky man.