The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  There was no shell for Lake to crawl out of. He entered the recording sessions with a surplus of swagger. For him, the pause after the exhausting worldwide tour reinforced his need to assert his place in the musical cosmos. “Keith can relate to Carl musically but neither of them can relate to me musically,” Lake had told journalists Rick Sanders and John Wells. “My art is as far away from what they do as a painter is. . . . I think if you can have any gift in music, the greatest gift is to be a singer.”58

  Yet Lake was making this art with a collaborator, Peter Sinfield—and the collaborator was less impressed than the singer. “Greg always wanted to be as great as Keith Emerson,” argued Sinfield. “Unfortunately, his guitar playing was pretty basic and folky. From a technical point of view, he was never going to be as great a star as Keith Emerson. He resented that, thinking his singing would make up for it.”59

  The Sinfield-Lake collaboration, uneasy as it was, produced a real hit: “I Believe in Father Christmas,” an atheist hymn for guitar, which Emerson adorned with a section from “Troika,” the third movement of Sergei Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé suite. It was a number two hit, a near-winner of the British Christmas chart race, which progressive groups did not tend to win.

  It was the only piece of ELP music released in 1975. In February 1976 the band relocated to Montreux, Switzerland. Emerson was bored, with no entertainment apart from his Kawasaki 1100 motorcycle and his Jet Ski around a private lake. “My contacts had grams of coke shipped in from Zurich inside the covers of album sleeves,” said Emerson. “But with no one to share, it was wasted along with myself. . . . The best one was nestling in a box set of The Complete Organ Works of JS Bach, but it was never enough.”60

  It was worse for Sinfield, who had been assigned the task of matching lyrics to a musical suite. The band, initially, asked for a song cycle about mercenaries; Sinfield talked them down to one about pirates. Even then, he found himself delivering material to Lake and being waylaid by random taste. “I was in Montreux, and I was saved by the roadies,” recalled Sinfield. “I went up in Greg’s chalet, way up the mountain, and delivered the lyrics. Greg went, ‘I don’t know, maybe a six, not good enough.’ Five days later, I head back up the mountain. Now, Greg says, ‘That bit you wrote about the rose and the pistol, that was good.’ Well, I happened to be looking over the edge of his chalet. And I thought, Perhaps that will do. Perhaps I will jump now.”61

  Lake also wanted the use of an orchestra. Emerson asked how much it would cost. “Don’t worry about that, sunshine,” said Lake. “You just go and write the fuckin’ music while I have a chat with Stewart.”62

  Carl Palmer’s music was less cumbersome—and easier to push aside. He and the composer Joseph Horovitz produced their own “percussion concerto,” put on tape in collaboration with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It would stay in the box for twenty-five years. Palmer put forward an adaptation of Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite, “The Enemy God Dances with the Black Spirits,” and that was given the orchestral treatment. “We were going to record ‘The Enemy God’ with the group originally,” he said, “but found that it sounded better with an orchestra, so I immediately recorded it that way.”63

  The budget for the recording sessions ballooned accordingly. “When we were recording ‘Pirates,’ ” recalled Sinfield, “Greg said, ‘I’m not coming to the studio today. Keith didn’t come yesterday; he said he had a cold, so I’m not coming in ’til Friday.’ To teach him a lesson. This is ridiculous! The studio’s sitting empty at £500 a day. But that’s how stupid and childlike big rock stars can get. Small people with big ideas.”64

  Material piled up, but there was no outward sign of dread. ELP were using space, time, and money to take progressive music to its natural, higher plane. When Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records, arrived in Switzerland to listen to the tapes, the band played him a cover of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man that stretched to nearly ten minutes, each member of the band playing over the hard-fought orchestra. “That’s a hit, man!” he said.65

  There was no question that it would sell. It just wouldn’t sell in the form of solo albums. The new music—Emerson’s concerto, Lake’s popular songs, Palmer’s jazz experiments—would be sides of a new ELP album. The fourth side would consist of “Pirates” and “Fanfare.” Instead of atomizing, the band would unite behind a statement. “Say Keith would have released a solo album,” Palmer argued to Sounds reporter Barbara Charone. “Later, perhaps I’d release an album. But what happens is you blow each other out, steal each other’s sales. You lose group unity. See, the public like unity. If they see 3, 4, 5 guys playing together for X amount of years, they see unity. It’s like a family, right?”66 The album was to be packaged in a barely adorned sleeve, and a simple title. “I’d suggested The Works of Emerson, Lake and Palmer,” Emerson later admitted, “from all the coke sent to me in box sets of The Complete Organ Works of Bach.”67

  As the album was being compiled, Emerson relocated to Nassau, in the Bahamas. It was there, powered by “three grams of coke, accompanied by three bottles of Cognac,” that he looked across the water and decided to swim to England. “We realized that it was quite a long way,” Emerson would say, “but we had a compass.” The effort failed. Keith Emerson was pulled wheezing from the water. January 14, 1977, was the last day that he would use cocaine.68

  Just two months later, Works landed in record shops. There was not, at first, any dog pile by the critics. Rolling Stone judged the album’s orchestrations to be “flaccid” but suggested that “the final side triumphantly demonstrates that as an ensemble ELP has lost none of its expertise.”69

  In May, Atlantic released the single of “Fanfare,” and gave ELP its biggest hit—the third-best-selling instrumental rock song of all time. Aaron Copland had graciously cleared it, and given it something close to an endorsement. “I allowed it to go by because when they first play it, they play it fairly straight and when they end the piece, they play it very straight,” he told the BBC. “What they do in the middle, I’m not sure exactly how they connect that with my music but they do it someway, I suppose.”70

  The number one song in Britain was Rod Stewart’s cover of “I Don’t Want to Talk about It.” In America, the Billboard chart had been conquered by the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” ELP’s music, thrown into that mix, was as radical as ever. And the band played up that impression, as it began to promote its unheard-of new touring strategy. It would stalk North America with a full seventy-piece orchestra. Three buses would carry them from gig to gig.

  The band’s own sound system, as Sounds noted, blasted out 72,000 watts and weighed 25 tons.71 After welcoming ELP back, the music press was being bludgeoned into awe. Emerson, who’d blanched at Robert Moog’s departure from the company he had founded, had taken on a GX synthesizer that was moved and reassembled by “eight roadies.”72

  “The wave of the future is not in smash-bang, nor is it in electronics,” Lake told Rolling Stone. “It is in musical expression. And just as we once opened doors for other groups electronically, we’re now going to do it musically. Where we once had six hands, we now have 140.” “Some of the percussionists are so good I’d like to cut off their arms,” said Palmer.73

  On July 2, the three artists appeared on the cover of Sounds, standing on an anonymous rooftop. Emerson and Palmer, clad in leather jackets, were pictured in conversation. Lake had his eyes trained on the camera. The cover line was a dare: “Would you pay two million dollars to see these men?” Above their heads, above the magazine’s title, the reader was promised a story about the Sex Pistols. But the tone of the piece was triumphant. Given a preview of the new ELP tour, the music paper found its snark arsenal running dry. “Visually the stage looks incredible, with the orchestra circling above the band in Stanley Kubrick type silver enclosures,” wrote Barbara Charone. “They all wear t-shirts that say ELP in bold silver lettering. Conductor Godfrey Salmon towers above them, moving his baton and occasionally shaking a
ss.”74

  The orchestra appeared to be a masterstroke. “We didn’t want to come zipping back with the same old show,” Palmer told Sounds. “An orchestra seemed like a natural progression. It was the only way we could reappear after 2 and 1/2 years. But it’s not a permanent musical direction. It all works but ELP would work without the orchestra. The orchestra just puts the cream on top of the cake. Actually, just the cherry right in the middle.”75

  The band gave Rolling Stone extended access to the tour, and reporter Charles M. Young came away skeptical but moved. “The orchestra, ELP’s biggest excess ever, has had the effect of smoothing over their other excesses,” he wrote, after seeing a “short-of-sellout crowd” be entertained in Cincinnati. The band made no attempt to explain away the scale, and the risk, of what it was doing. It was blowing a fortune to send an orchestra around North America. “We’re risking everything we ever made and everything we’re ever likely to make on this tour,” Lake told Rolling Stone. “I’m talking about our families, our possessions, everything we believe in. We’ll have to sell our houses in England if it flops.” “If we lose money, so what?” asked Emerson. “There’s no way we can make money.”76

  And the band did lose money. The shows were transcendent, and Emerson held off illness with a nightly “vitamin cocktail” that he credited for grand, newfound energy. After a while, he wondered if the front rows could see the marks on his arms. “I could almost read their minds—‘no wonder he plays so fucking fast,’ ” Emerson remembered. “Sometimes the doctor could find a vein, sometimes he couldn’t. When he couldn’t find one in my arm, he’d find one in the back of my hand.”77

  Fripp saw ELP at one of the Madison Square Garden gigs. “As I’m walking past this barrier I see Robert, and I was shocked,” Lake would tell Sid Smith. “So I asked him what he was doing there and said to the roadie, ‘Get him out of the crowd and get him back into the dressing room and look after him.’ ”78

  After the show, Lake recalled, “we went off in the limo, and we’re going down the road. I said to him, ‘You know, Robert, one day we ought to get our guitars out and play together again. It’s been so long since we did that.’ ” “I don’t think so,” said Fripp. Lake told his driver to pull over. He opened the door for his former bandmate. “Out you go,” he said. “I thought, why was he like that?” Lake recalled later. “It must have been jealousy. There was ELP, selling out three nights at Madison Square Garden, and you couldn’t get arrested in King Crimson at the time.”79

  The guitarist remembered it differently. He went to every show at the Garden; Lake invited him to a dinner for the band, held after the triumphant final performance. “Greg was vibrating with various suits,” said Fripp, “and at the end of the evening, sat me down to talk with him. Greg presented, in strong terms, the idea of a KC69 reformation.” Lake gave Fripp a ride to his New York home, and only at the end did he ask about the reunion. Fripp said he’d call.

  “That’s it? You want me to call you?” asked Lake.

  “You already know my answer,” said Fripp.

  “You mean, ‘no’?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I was really hoping to see him again last summer, but, apparently, he didn’t feel like it,” Fripp told an interviewer in 1978. He and Lake had drifted apart. That was that. And ELP? “They are part of rock industry’s dinosaur structure.”80

  ON FEBRUARY 5, 1978, a line formed outside of a Soho, New York, art space called the Kitchen. Robert Fripp was playing, for the first time since the collapse of King Crimson. No music had been published under his name since Gerald Ford’s presidency. His music with David Bowie and Peter Gabriel had been overpowered by their gigantic personalities; his collaboration with Daryl Hall was locked in a vault.

  At the Kitchen, at the appointed hour, Robert Fripp walked out with an electric guitar and a tape machine. “He said that the performance was conceived as a ‘salon piece’—improvisations intimately and informally presented—and reserved the right to be boring and unintelligent,” wrote John Piccarella in the Village Voice. Fripp sat down and began to play music that might have been called ambient. Fripp had a better name, simultaneously more branded and more silly. This was “Frippertronics.”81

  “The music is organized around drones, and Fripp’s performance let us in on the process by which these backgrounds are created,” wrote Piccarella. “A guitar note is picked with the volume off, and then swells into the foreground as the sound level is turned up. There it is augmented by another note, until a layer of tories and trills is built into a repeating loop of tape. The guitar is then switched out of the tape loop and Fripp solos, accompanied by the receding wash of recorded sound.”82

  It was as unclassifiably new as ELP was stodgy, circusy. “Fripp has found a structure of improving consciousness that allows for the repetitive rigor of a composed minimalism like that of Reich or Glass,” summed up the Village Voice. At intermission there was an abstract theater performance called “Mooncowisms,” designed by an artist named Joanna Walton, who used Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” cards to shape an abstract performance around the quotes of great thinkers.

  Walton, at that time, was also collaborating with Fripp on some lyrics for new music. Over the course of 1978, he widened his network and put together, song by song, a solo album. Ideally, it would have been the trilogy in a series that began with Peter Gabriel’s second record and Daryl Hall’s Sacred Songs. Yet Hall’s label was unmovable. Two songs cowritten by Hall and Fripp—“Chicago” and “Mary”—were stripped of his vocals.

  The key part on “Mary,” a song that combined the waving ambience of Frippertronics with a gnostic lyric, went to a new Fripp acquaintance named Terre Roche. Terre, with her sisters Maggie and Suzzy, formed the Roches, a band that might have been mistaken for a folk group until the listener moved in closer. Their music was unpretentious and whimsical, with interlocking guitar parts and harmonies that were never saccharine. Fripp came into their life after the band played at Kenny’s Castaways in New York. “A woman named Charlene whom I’d worked with as a clerk typist at a music business management office called me up and said she’d brought a friend of hers named Robert Fripp to the show,” recalled Terre Roche. “I’d never heard of him, but she said he’d been in a group called King Crimson, and the big red album cover with the wide open mouth came to mind. Oh, yes, aren’t they a really loud rock band that appeal mainly to men?”83

  The sisters were surprised at the man who turned up. “He was a very proper, buttoned-up-to-the-collar type,” recalled Suzzy Roche. “At the same time, when you got to know him, he was goofy in a childlike way. He loved sweets and pastries. He was eccentric. And he wanted to record us the way we actually sounded.”84

  Fripp embedded with the band. He did not want to alter their sound on record, but he played with them to develop their natural sound. Everything he learned, they were welcome to. “He taught us these exercises for the guitar, which both Terre and I did for years,” said Suzzy Roche. “They were much like meditations. They were extremely useful in a couple of ways; they involved going back and forth between two strings with a pick, going up the neck fret by fret, and then scales. We were surrendering to this very simple-seeming but deep repetitive action, regardless of how you’re feeling about it, without any expectation of what might come of it.”85

  The King Crimson sound, the pomp of progressive music, was far behind Fripp now. On his own songs, Joanna Walton’s lyrics and George Gurdjieff’s teachings gave the music even greater distance from rock’s norms. “Mary” was the rare song named for a woman that—thanks to Walton—had nothing to do with puppy love. “She was, among other things, a Reichian therapist and wrote the song about one of her patients,” explained Terre Roche.

  With the Roches, Fripp brought in Larry Fast to add synthesizer textures, and Tony Levin to play bass. Fripp’s own guitar, and influence, were almost wholly removed. The sound was as labeled on the finished album: “audio verité.” One of t
he few exceptions came when the band was playing back “Hammond Song,” a mysterious, romantic song based on strummed C and F chords. At the second chorus, the three sisters sang in harmony, and Fripp played an impromptu guitar solo, perfectly in tune. “He was sort of just fooling around,” said Suzzy Roche. “He just played that solo, and we said, ‘Oh, wow, that’s great!’ He said ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly put that over your song.’ But that was a beautiful solo he played. I believe it was the first take. And it made it on the album.”86

  The Roches would be released in April 1979; on the cover, the record buyer was informed that it had been “produced in audio verité by Robert Fripp.” Two months later, Fripp released the long-fiddled-over solo album Exposure. The title track had appeared on Peter Gabriel’s second album, as an instrumental, with Tony Levin’s bass carrying a melody and Fripp’s guitar in full waterfall burble. The “completed” version of the song featured lyrics, of a sort. Terre Roche howled the title, and a male voice spelled it out in monotone.

  That set the tone for the album, which was not supposed to sound like anything Fripp had done before—or any prior music recorded by anyone. Fripp and Hall had composed songs that fit the 7-inch pop format, but bent in upsetting, disorienting directions. Van der Graaf’s Peter Hammill had stepped in to record some of Daryl Hall’s parts, which only added to the jaggedness of the sound. “I May Not Have Had Enough of Me but I’ve Had Enough of You” was a tangle of chords matched with lyrics that circled in an endless loop.