by David Weigel
He would move on, recording the sort of soulful music he had wanted—the antithesis of Crimson. “The King Crimson weapon is musical fascism, made by fascists, designed by fascists to dehumanize, to strip mankind of his dignity and soul,” he said later. “It’s pure Tavistock Institute material, financed by the Rothschild Zionists and promoted by two poncy public school boys with connections to the city of London.”65
That—well, not all of it, but some of it—was what kept the world interested in Fripp. Even as the latest iteration of his band was rending itself apart, the guitarist was giving more interviews about King Crimson’s philosophy. “Some people say our music is pretentious,” he told Music Now. “I would say the music is arrogant. It is presumptuous to hold an opinion, but on the other hand it is better to be like that and hold an opinion than to have no opinion at all. If you record that opinion then your music is arrogant. But I am right in thinking that pretentious means trying to be something you are not. Well, I wonder what we have tried to be that we are not.”66
At the close of 1970, the question was bound up with optimism. King Crimson was now largely Fripp’s project, partly Sinfield’s project. It was, definitively, falling out of the cosmos. Other “progressive” bands, celebrated by the same music press, were filling the black sky. Sinfield would hear Fripp repeat a theory he’d come up with—the parable of the “good fairy”: A positive spirit flitted from band to band, acting as muse just long enough to produce some great work. When the work was complete, the muse moved on.
“You don’t have to believe in God, but a musician believes in music as if it was a God,” Fripp would say, in one telling of the theory. “One would have to say with that band that something took place outside of the band, and the words I’d use would be that music leant over and took us into its confidence. Music played that band for a short period of time. In King Crimson, we called this our ‘Good Fairy.’ We knew it had nothing to do with us. And yet, despite the foibles, weaknesses, animosities, and limitations of the members of that remarkable group, something exceptional occurred. Despite the people.”67
4
MOOG MEN
The supergroup needed a name. Neither Greg Lake nor Keith Emerson appreciated the term—“supergroup”—or its associations. They had not yet played a note in public, and already they’d been categorized, branded, oversold, their union announced in the front of the April 4, 1970, issue of New Musical Express.
But they were ambitious. Emerson had wanted to bring on Mitch Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix’s drummer. Mitchell, in the process of bombing the audition by talking about the bodyguards he needed, suggested that Hendrix himself might want to join. Emerson didn’t buy it. Hendrix had been telling people that he wanted to work exclusively with other black musicians. It was a hell of a story, though; more press buzz followed. “I think what appealed to and amused them more than anything,” recalled Emerson, “was that ELP would have been HELP.”1
“ELP,” for Emerson, Lake & Palmer—that was Emerson’s preferred name for the band. They’d hired Carl Palmer, a supernova drummer for Atomic Rooster, who’d been deeply bored with that group. “I realized that the first album was trash, but I thought I must give it longer,” Palmer told Sounds. “So I did, but a couple of weeks later Greg called up and suggested I had a blow with them.”2
Yet after the group was formed, after EG management agreed to take them on, Lake continued to fight the name. “We should have a group name, one that is marketable,” he told Emerson. “One name that personifies, exemplifies all the individual energies of this band.” He pitched “Triton,” then “Sea Horse.” Emerson didn’t budge, to Lake’s great frustration. “Why should your name come first?” griped Lake.3
Lake never came up with a workable alternative; ELP it was. Emerson was ready to flog the band in the music press, bringing around reporters who’d been helpful promoting the Nice. Palmer did his part.
Lake joined Emerson for an afternoon meeting at the A & R Club in London with Richard Green, an NME writer who had flowed forth with praise for Emerson’s old band. The talent showed up. The journalist didn’t. It took half an hour for Emerson to spot Green at the wrong end of the bar, three sheets to the wind.
“Now, let me see,” said Green, digging out a battered notebook. “You two are getting a ‘supergroup’ together?”
Lake, who’d been ready to leave, eyed Green contemptuously. “We don’t like the ‘supergroup’ take,” he said.
“What do you like?” asked Green.
“Well, for one, we like punctuality and accuracy.”
A few questions later, Lake was out. Emerson did what he could to salvage the promo but knew, as he would write years later, that “a bad seed had been sown and its spores would blow.” The rock press’s impression of ELP had calcified. The band would “have to contend with the media’s general disaffection for the group’s entire career.”4
He was overstating the problem. For the first few years, into the mid-1970s, ELP was an object of obsession by the music press. They became, in the words of one critic, the band that took “rock to college.” King Crimson had worked Holst into its stage show; ELP would experiment with classical themes, with studio technology, with the most outré stage antics anyone had yet tried, and then reveal the process for the waiting press.
This was where the Moog came in. Emerson was still with the Nice when, as he told it, a record store owner in Soho pulled out a copy of Switched-On Bach. The Nice had turned Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 into a tight rock song, “Brandenburger,” with Emerson battering out the melody on his Hammond. The clerk assumed that Emerson would want to see what Walter Carlos, an electronic musician who would later become Wendy, had done with the same song.
Emerson contemplated the cover. A Bach-a-like (not Walter Carlos himself) stood in front of a box of mysterious technology, occupying the desk of a well-appointed study. “What is that?” he asked. “That’s the Moog synthesizer,” said the clerk.5
The clerk spun the record. Carlos’s keyboards, processed in a fashion Emerson could not recognize, made up the entirety of the track. There were no drums, no acoustic sounds to breed familiarity. But there was a song. Emerson had plenty to think about. “Some other tracks sounded almost comical,” he’d say, “like a load of elephants farting counterpoint with whoopee cushions in accompaniment. I became more interested in how the effects had been achieved with electronics, rather than air forced through a tiny space.”6
But he remained interested in what the Moog could do. After ELP had recorded “Take a Pebble” and “Knife Edge,” pieces that allowed the musicians to show off their skills in extended solos, Emerson entered the studio to hear Lake “strumming away to what sounded like a Country and Western tune in three-four.”7
The song was “Lucky Man,” a simple ballad with fantastical lyrics that Lake had written as a teenager. The verse, just a repeating G-D pattern, told the story of a wealthy man with “white horses” and a “gold covered mattress” who died on the battlefield, pointlessly. “No money could save him,” sang Lake. The chorus was a croon over sorrowful minor A and E chords.
“There seemed to be an awful lot of strumming at the end,” thought Emerson. He spotted a toy in the studio—a Moog synthesizer. Eddy Offord, the producer who’d been elbowed aside a bit by Lake, joined Emerson in trying to untangle the machine. They grabbed the cables (the cover of Switched-On Bach had shown no such cables) and jack plugs and started sticking them into holes in the hopes of something strange and beautiful coming out. “The portomento knob seemed to be a load of fun during the level check,” said Emerson. “You could ‘slur’ notes. I made a mental note to use the effect when they ran the tape.”8
Lake and Offord played back “Lucky Man,” and Emerson went to work on the knobs. His Moog did not appear on the track until the final chorus. At first, it was a low hum, an underlayment for the rest of the song. As Lake’s multitracked vocals sang out, the Moog started rising, then suddenly slurring; the tu
ne hit the ceiling, then fell back down, rising and falling as the knob twisted.
Emerson figured he would need another take. “I thought it was the most mediocre solo I’d ever played,” he remembered.9 Here he was, a virtuoso who slipped incredibly delicate figures into fast rock songs, and here was a solo that meandered around the track.
The solo stayed. Lake and Offord adored it. Shortly thereafter, a Moog arrived at the studio with a note from Robert Moog himself: “I understand that you want to tour with your instrument. As an experiment, we have built a pre-set box that will enable you to have up to eight different sounds.”10
The touring machine, while more portable than the one in the studio, was a monolith. “It was prone to tuning shifts if the surrounding temperature deviated more than 10 degrees either way,” said Emerson. “I had a frequency counter built in with a digital readout so that I could immediately reference the situation of all three oscillators whilst playing in performance, but it required more than dexterity to utilize. Playing away with my right hand while tuning the Moog with my left was something I’d have to get used to during the next six years.”11
He adapted quickly. ELP made its live debut on August 23, 1970, a Sunday night, at the Plymouth Guildhall. The full spectacle was reserved for the next weekend, night four of the five-day Isle of Wight Festival. “Most bands, you get a chance to develop a bit before you get really thrust in the public arena,” Lake would say. “ELP was sort of instantly out there.”12
The band would play in the evening, Moog onstage, a row of cannons hazardously close to the bank of photographers. “Take a Pebble” was the only original in the set; the band concentrated on classical covers, starting with “Pictures at an Exhibition” and continuing with songs played frequently by the Nice. “The sound we were making left the stage and kept going,” said Emerson. “There was no ambiance and no feedback from an audience that appeared to be having one huge picnic breaking down the perimeter fences.”13
“Emerson is one of the few experimentalists who makes rock usage of electronics work for him and not the other way round,” wrote Chris Welch in Melody Maker. “He controlled his £3,000 worth of Moog Synthesizer with cunning skill and produced effective if expensive bleeps, howls and rhythmic squeaks. The applause was almost as deafening as the cannonade which blew the spectacles off a man sitting in the firing line.”14
“Today we believe in getting the audience to an even bigger better orgasmic peak than ever before,” Emerson told Sounds after the Isle of Wight. “To get tighter and tighter. As it is, the ESP of the group is amazing. Carl blows my head off some nights because he knows what I’m going to do four bars ahead.”15
Emerson, Lake & Palmer hit the shelves in October. King Crimson’s debut album had peaked at number five in the UK charts, and it made the top twenty in the US. Lake’s new band came in at number four in the UK and number eighteen in the US.
ON THE LAST DAY of 1970, the British High Court received a writ that confirmed what Beatles fans had known all year: the Beatles were breaking up. Paul McCartney was suing to dissolve the band—or, as the killer legalese termed it, the “partnership business carried on by the plaintiff and the defendants under the name of The Beatles & Co.”
None of the Beatles would revisit the psychedelic pop or conceptual suites they had popularized at the end of the 1960s. That would be left to the progressives, which was lucky; the success of ELP helped along two waves of bands. The first had gotten their starts in the London scene and evolved with it. The second had developed outside of London, in but not of the milieu, finding their way to deals with Charisma or Harvest or Island. Within the UK, the record industry was signing and promoting any “progressive” band with an audience.
Yes was the immediate beneficiary. The band parted with Peter Banks in April 1970, after a gig at the Luton College of Technology that the guitarist would remember as not particularly great. The task fell to Jon Anderson, confronting Banks in the dressing room as Chris Squire watched.
“I think it would be better for you and the band, if you left,” said Anderson.
Banks boiled over. “Don’t give me any fucking reasons!!!” he snapped, packing his gear in a huff.16
It was rotten timing for a tantrum; Banks had no other ride back to London. He endured the 30-mile return trip, then found other gigs, but did not stop stewing about Yes. Critics gave him no credit for the sound of the band. Squire and Anderson couldn’t summon a kind word about him. Said Squire of Banks, “He made a bad business decision—not to show the same enthusiasm as everyone else around Time and a Word. He was not a very happy participant in the Time and a Word album. We were going in slightly different directions than the one he wanted to go in. . . . No one in Yes has ever been kicked out.”17
Anderson blew off one question about the firing by telling a journalist that Banks was “more interested in his clothes” than in Yes. Banks would remember the insult for decades. “It was a really cruel, childish thing to say,” he wrote in his memoirs.18
And Banks’s replacement was being courted with great warmth. Guitarist Steve Howe had left Tomorrow, which had never built on the success of “My White Bicycle,” and had been playing with a five-piece psychedelic combo called Bodast. They couldn’t get a deal. Yes already had one. As Howe remembered it, Squire pitched him over the phone with tales of Yes’s success. “It’s real big-time,” Howe remembered Squire saying. “We’ve got loads of bucks to buy new equipment and a record deal and everything.”19
The band never hesitated to tell journalists: Howe was a natural, a major step up, the savior of the band. “I feel ten years younger,” said Bill Bruford.20 Howe was a soul mate, a rock musician who was happiest when he strayed from the norms of rock. “I was one of those people who dug in and said, ‘I’m not going to play blues,’ ” Howe would say.21 “I liked to play jazzy bits, like in ‘Perpetual Change,’ which Peter had been doing also,” said Howe. “I’ll give Peter his credit: He was utilizing different styles. But I felt, ‘Aye, yeah, I can replace Peter.’ ”22
Over the summer, under Eddy Offord at Advision Studios, the band started to lay down tracks for its third album. “All our new songs tend to last for at least ten minutes,” Anderson told an interviewer. “At the beginning we were consciously trying to do something different, now we work out new arrangements because we enjoy it.”23
The new compositions started off simpler than the songs written with Banks. “Yours Is No Disgrace” started with simple block chords—E, A, E, A, D, A—in sync with a bass line and a drumbeat from Bruford. It sounded like the start of a TV show, because it sort of was. “We just changed the chords and moved everything around,” Howe admitted years later. “Our idea was orchestral: We’re going to start with something, and then we’re going to play a theme, then we’re going to stop, then we’re going to sing, and then we’re going to play more music.”24
The song became a suite; the thud-thud-thud intro segued into a Chris Squire bass run, which segued into Anderson’s lyrics (ninety seconds into the song) over Kaye’s keyboard atmospherics. It was typical Anderson dream factory material. Only later did the song clearly become about the Vietnam War. “My idea was a soldier crawling out of the mud, not wanting to be there, and if he was going to be dead tomorrow, why not rape and plunder and kill and fornicate? It’s not his disgrace, it’s the evil bastards that put him there.”25
The songs on The Yes Album were grounded, based on recognizable musical forms: four long suites broken up by short pieces. “Clap,” a Howe solo piece written upon the birth of his first son, was plunked in as one of the tasters. (It had been recorded on July 17, 1970, at Howe’s first appearance with the band. Banks could only seethe.) Howe supplied a section of an unused Bodast song, “Nether Street,” for a layered piece to be titled “Starship Trooper.” In Yes’s hands, Howe’s sliding G–E-flat–C melody was titled “Wurm” and piled high with Tony Kaye’s keyboards.
The whole record was like that. “We were always loo
king for a couple of lines to go against each other, a bit of counterpoint,” Bill Bruford would tell an interviewer. “That was all a very art school-classical-art rock type thing. Counterpoint was unknown in rock, there was no such thing as that. To have contrapuntal lines like that . . . that was considered all very tricky. But bear in mind nobody wrote music at this point.”26
The “Your Move” section of “I’ve Seen All Good People,” which would become the only single from the album, began with Squire, Howe, and Anderson singing together, an a cappella preview of the song’s vocal hook. Then came Howe, plucking and strumming a twelve-string laud, an earthier and more classical sound than had appeared in any Yes song before that. The structure built from that—Bruford hitting his bass drum for a “heartbeat” effect as Anderson sang his transcendental vocal at the higher end of his range.
“Every time I would think ‘cause his time is time in time with your time,’ I was trying to say that I will do anything that is required of me to reach God,” Anderson explained to one interviewer. “I think that whoever is listening to it should feel the same thing, that they are in tune and in time with God.”27
The song ended with block chords from Kaye’s Hammond organ; this, according to Anderson, was meant to symbolize that “religion as it stands is subsequently destroyed and there is hope for real understanding.”28
Exactly halfway through the piece came the straightforward show-off rock of “I’ve Seen All Good People.” It was the mysticism twinned with rock dynamics, colored by improvisation, that Yes had always put into its live shows. In February 1971, when the record hit shops, Atlantic bought full-page ads in Melody Maker and the New Musical Express. Michael Tait, the band’s tour engineer, took it upon himself to slap posters up in London record shops.