Lucky Man

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Lucky Man Page 9

by Greg Lake


  The pace of the tour started to pick up dramatically and the shows came thick and fast, so much so that after a while we began to lose touch with time and space as we passed through so many airports and cities – they all started to become a blur. The only thing that seemed constant was the show itself. Indeed, part of the skill of touring like that is to make the show as streamlined and uniform as you possibly can so that it becomes rather like a well-run circus, where everyone knows exactly what they have to do each night in order to make the show run like clockwork.

  One of the very strange things I discovered was to do with the length of the show. Because of police curfews and so on, it was always important to know the length of the show, so every night our production manager would time us using a stopwatch. The incredible thing was that, even taking into account the spoken announcements and various improvisations that would obviously vary from night to night, the shows, which were approximately two-and-a-quarter hours long, were very rarely any more than thirty seconds adrift either way. Somehow, we had obviously built in an unconscious instinct for time.

  Although there were continuing rumours about Dee Anthony’s involvement in the mafia, there was only one time when I witnessed a direct connection between him and anyone from that world. It was during the early days of ELP, at the beginning of September 1971 during our second US tour. At the time, we were staying at the Loews Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Early one morning, the phone rang and I leaned over half asleep to pull the phone down on to the bed and lifted the receiver. There was a male voice on the other end.

  ‘Is that Greg Lake?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I know where you’re playing tonight and I am going to kill you.’

  Then the receiver went down and I was listening to the dial tone.

  That night ELP were scheduled to play in a place called Gaelic Park, an open-air venue over in the Bronx. It was surrounded by tall buildings and overground subway structures. It would have provided the perfect place for a sniper with a rifle.

  At first, I thought that it must be a joke, but I did not recognise the voice and the man had sounded absolutely serious. I wracked my brains over and over. Why would anyone want to say that, let alone actually do it?

  I decided to phone up Dee and tell him what had happened. His initial reaction was that it must have been one of the roadies playing a prank, but he heard me out and he soon started to suspect that the threat was genuine. Dee told me not to leave my room. He would come right over.

  After about ten minutes, there was a knock on the door. I heard Dee’s voice in a half-whisper saying: ‘It’s all right, man. It’s me.’

  I opened the door and Dee came in, sat down on the edge of my bed and gave me a hotel key. He had booked the adjoining room to mine and said that if anyone was to knock at my door, then I was to go through the connecting door into that room and hide in there.

  He told me he was leaving but would return in a short while. He assured me that he would get this taken care of.

  When the door closed behind him, I was alone once again reflecting on my fate and who could possibly have made such a menacing call.

  After twenty anxious minutes, there was another knock on the door. I immediately dashed over to the door to the other room. When I opened it, there – to my absolute surprise – was Dee.

  ‘It’s okay. It’s okay,’ he said and ushered me back into my room. He explained that we were being visited by two gentlemen whom he thought could help.

  There was another knock on my door. Dee jumped up and I heard a voice call out: ‘Dee, it’s Wazzle!’

  Dee immediately opened the door and there stood a man who was at least six-and-a-half feet tall, towering over Dee and built like a wall. He hugged Dee as though he were a long-lost brother.

  It was then that I noticed that behind him stood a short and slight gentleman dressed smartly in a long black overcoat and a matching fedora hat. He entered the room and asked me politely to sit down.

  ‘Where did you go last night?’ he asked. ‘Did you get into any trouble?’

  ‘No. There was no trouble,’ I said. ‘I just went to this club and then left with a girl who I had met there.’

  ‘Where did you go then?’

  ‘We came back here for some drinks in the bar and came up here, and she left sometime at around 2 a.m.’

  ‘Do you still have the girl’s name and telephone number?’

  She had left her name and number on a piece of paper on the table so I leaned over and handed it to him.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll be back later.’

  Dee accompanied the two men as they left and they stood in the corridor for a few moments discussing the situation. Dee then came back into the room and told me that he felt confident that they would resolve the problem.

  I was now becoming increasingly fearful about what might lie in store. I asked Dee what was making him feel so confident. He just smiled and said, ‘These guys have ways of dealing with problems like this. Relax. Don’t worry about it.’

  Dee sat in the armchair and turned on the TV. I lay on the bed. We waited for events to unfold.

  An hour passed and then there was another knock at the door. Again, I rushed into the adjacent room. I could hear laughter through the connecting door and Dee saying: ‘No! I don’t believe it.’ Then he came over towards the adjoining door.

  ‘Greg,’ he said. ‘It’s all over.’

  I went back into my room and the shorter of the two men explained that the girl I had met at the nightclub was actually a hooker and that her pimp had followed us both back to the hotel. It was he who had made the threatening call.

  The immediate feeling of relief I felt was quickly replaced by a feeling of dread. What did they do to the guy who made the call? Sensing my concern, the short man reached out and put his hand on my arm reassuringly. With a mischievous smile, he opened up his overcoat to reveal an armoury of hand guns and silencers that had been cleverly concealed in the lining.

  ‘We bought him a train ticket to Atlanta,’ he said. ‘And told him not to come back to the city for at least two weeks.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Wazzle added. ‘We had to go in and get him out of bed!’

  They started laughing. They had at first paid a visit to the girl and persuaded her that it would be in her best interests to tell them everything she knew. She immediately gave them the pimp’s address. Somehow, they had then managed to acquire the key to his apartment and had crept in and found him asleep. I cannot imagine the shock he must have felt when, only a couple of hours after he had made the threatening phone call to me, he was himself awoken from his slumber – and looking down the wrong end of a revolver.

  After a few hugs and Italian kisses on the cheek with Dee in the corridor, both men left. Then Dee popped his head back inside the door and said; ‘Enjoy the rest of the day. Forget what happened and just look forward to the show tonight.’

  When the door closed, I fell back on the bed. I was drained and shaken by what had happened, and stunned by how quickly Dee’s associates had managed to deal with it. It had been a bit like one of those white-knuckle rides that go all the way from sheer terror to an overwhelming sense of relief in a matter of minutes.

  That night we played Gaelic Park and it was a great show – vintage early ELP where we used more Hammond organ than synths. It was at shows like this that we established our deep bond with the people of New York (and, thank goodness, I believe that a bootleg recording of that actual show still exists).

  ■ ■ ■

  The US tour came to a close with a show at Madison Square Garden, New York, on 25 November 1971. Apart from the sheer thrill of playing at one of the world’s most historic venues, on that night I learned from Dee Anthony some words of wisdom that would remain with me forever.

  Shortly after arriving at the Garden, we went up on stage for the sound check before going back downstairs to the dressing room to wait for show time. This period between the sound
check and the show is always a dead time so I usually try and use it to get a little extra sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, however, I could hear the noise of the audience as they began to make their way into the arena – just a few voices at first but then later on the sound changed to a kind of constant low hum being generated by the thousands of people that were gathering there.

  About twenty minutes or so before show time, Dee came into the room and asked me if I would like to take a peek out at the audience from behind the curtains. At first, I wasn’t that keen, but he explained to me that the Garden was a bit of an unusual building and that he thought it might be good for me to see how the audience actually looked before walking out there to perform.

  In the end, I agreed, so we both set off along the corridors and made our way to the backstage area. Now the distant hum that I had heard back in the dressing room was very present as the true scale of the arena started to become apparent. We made our way up on to the stage and stood behind the curtains at the point where both sides met in the middle. Dee pulled them back just enough to see through and beckoned me to take a look. I looked through and was awestruck by what I saw.

  For its capacity, Madison Square Garden is a very compact building, so in order to accommodate the 22,000 people the seats rise up in steeply raked tiers, one upon the other, towering up above and all around like a massive gladiatorial arena.

  After watching my reaction, Dee smiled and said, ‘Never forget, there is really only one person out there.’

  When I asked him what he meant, he explained that to every single person in the audience, as they look up at the stage their perception is one of direct communication between themselves and the artist, and that has to be reciprocated. In other words: although you may look out and see all 22,000 people at once, what you are actually looking at is 22,000 different, individual people, each of whom deserves your attention.

  ‘You are only ever playing to one person – you’ve got to act as if you are singing just for them,’ Dee said as we turned and made our way back to the dressing room.

  Throughout my entire career I have never forgotten these words of wisdom and I believe that together with Don Strike’s advice about performing songs – i.e., four for the audience and one for you – this ranks as the best piece of advice I ever received during my fifty-year career.

  The success of the US tour was matched by sales, with both Tarkus and Pictures at an Exhibition reaching the top ten of the Billboard 200 album charts. We returned to the UK to finish off the year with a short tour during which we played twenty shows in just eleven days.

  We had been looking for somewhere special to perform in London during this tour and our first choice was the Royal Albert Hall. However, some years earlier during his days with the Nice, Keith had been banned from playing there after he burned the American flag on stage in protest against the war in Vietnam. As a result, our final appearances on that tour were six shows that took place on 13, 14 and 15 December 1971 at the more intimate Pavilion Theatre, which later became part of the Trocadero entertainment complex in Piccadilly Circus. It was Carl’s idea to play there. The Pavilion was an old cinema – only a 1,000-seater – and hadn’t been used for a live show since before the Second World War. Maybe because it was an old theatre and cinema, Carl surprised us by launching into the Nice’s ‘America’ from West Side Story for the finale, before diverting into ‘Rondo’.

  By then, we had already started to record the fourth ELP album.

  CHAPTER 8

  Trilogy

  I am often asked to choose my favourite ELP album, and I find it difficult to answer. If I were forced to choose, however, it would have to be Trilogy. This record was made at a time when the band was on fire. By the time we started recording at Advision Studios at the end of 1971, we had been together for long enough and played enough shows to have found our own distinctive musical identity, and at the same time music technology was advancing. We also completely trusted each other as musicians, both in the studio and in live performance. The stars were aligned.

  The album is less dark and difficult than our previous albums but it has a strange, beautiful quality about it that is unique. I don’t know of another album that sounds like it.

  There were two important factors that influenced our thinking at the time. The first was our desire to create original music that had not been heard before. People have long since used the term ‘progressive’ to try and define our music, but as I said about King Crimson, this was never a term we used ourselves. We were just driven to achieve the highest possible standards for ourselves.

  The second factor was the emerging technology. When we started work on Trilogy, tape machines had just moved up from sixteen to twenty-four tracks, and it was soon possible to synchronise – or ‘slave’ – two machines together to enable forty-eight-track recording. We no longer ran short of tracks or needed to bounce tracks together. Above all, we now had the freedom to experiment with overdubs and this allowed us to orchestrate our recordings in a way that had never been possible before.

  Another crucial technological development at that time was the upgrading of the Moog synthesiser. It now had the capacity to perform in a polyphonic mode rather than simply a monophonic one. This meant that multiple notes could be played simultaneously rather than just one single note at a time.

  We also felt we no longer had to prove anything. Tarkus, the live album Pictures at an Exhibition and the tours to Europe and the United States had shown that we weren’t only as good as our first album. This confidence allowed us to take risks and venture deeper into our ambitions to create a visionary record.

  I was often amazed by the depth of hatred some critics felt for this record. For them, Trilogy was pretentious and pompous. And it wasn’t enough simply to dislike the band or find the record boring. They were compelled to produce pages of vitriolic ranting. ELP seemed to have a special knack when it came to infuriating music critics to a point where they lost self-control.

  Most bands had drawn on the influence of American music such as the blues, soul and gospel. Because we took inspiration from a European tradition instead, some music critics interpreted this as an attempt by us to look highbrow, to show off. This was definitely not part of our thinking. Both Keith and I were fans of American music in all of its forms (including country and western, in my case) but this territory had been visited far too often. We felt that it was time for a change and simply drew on music that we also liked.

  It is interesting to note that ambitious, European-influenced music has so far been ignored by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I honestly don’t think anyone can deny the impact this form of music has had on the rock culture of the USA. A real museum should reflect history, and not be run like a radio station that chooses its playlist based on current local popularity or some programmer’s own taste.

  It’s not just about personal or career recognition. My frustration is more to do with the huge part that Americans have played in nurturing this form of music, from industry legends such as Ahmet Ertegün, Dee Anthony, Frank Barsalona and Bill Graham to the millions of fans of ELP, King Crimson and other so-called progressive bands throughout the USA. In fact, in the case of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, we spent so much time touring the States that people in the UK often mistakenly believed we were actually American!

  Trilogy was released on 6 July 1972 in the UK and reached number two, and it went on to be our biggest-selling studio album in the United States, peaking at number five. The single ‘From the Beginning’, my acoustic folk song in the tradition of ‘Lucky Man’, was a Billboard top-forty hit and became a very strong airplay track in the United States. Like ‘Lucky Man’, it features a great Moog section from Keith and drums from Carl, so it was very much a band song rather than a solo by me.

  The European influence and the dynamic possibilities it gave us were a key element of ELP’s popularity with the general public. One moment our music could be intense, powerful and ferocious and the next it co
uld be beautiful and gentle. The title track starts off as a wistful piano ballad but explodes into the three of us blasting in unison, while ‘Living Sin’ grows into a strong, earthy and animalistic song.

  Keith and Carl were happy for me to play the guitar on the tracks in principle but, when I did, there was no bass. Keith tried to add bass with foot pedals but it wasn’t the same and our sound was diminished by the lack of a proper bass part. As a result, I had limited opportunities to play guitar on these songs but this enabled Keith to fully explore the synths and new technology to find different colours and instrumentation, as he did on the opening track, ‘The Endless Enigma’, and ‘Abaddon’s Bolero’. European music is simply more rich, complex and colourful than the blues, which sticks to a rigid, repetitive sound. Guitar and vocals, that’s the sound of the blues; European music is the sound of a 100-piece orchestra, a French horn section, a string quartet, a choir and harps.

  This is not to say that we did not share American influences, and the two final tracks on the album show that clearly. ‘The Sheriff’ is obviously inspired by the Wild West, in terms of both the music and my lyrics. There was usually a bit of fun and humour on an ELP record – ‘Jeremy Bender’ and ‘Are You Ready Eddy?’, for instance – which didn’t really suit the press stereotype of us as pretentious, and ‘The Sheriff’ was light-hearted. It clip-clops along as it tells the tale of the sheriff’s pursuit of Big Kid Josie. We also turned to Aaron Copland’s classical/country ‘Hoedown’, from his ballet score for Rodeo, but there the scope and scale were European.

 

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