The bands Emerson, Lake & Palmer thought they towered over: “We thought we were the best”
If there’s one band that endures as the textbook definition of 1970s prog-rock, it’s the Emerson, Lake & Palmer power trio.
There’s an unmistakable difference between progressive and prog. The former was an intriguing successor to the psychedelic expanses explored by The Beatles or Small Faces at their most lysergically far out, the likes of Soft Machine or Pink Floyd further immersing themselves in the unveiled cosmic terrain and crafting deep and headily stimulating conceptual works. Even over 50 years later, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon still glows with gripping interstellar traverse, a marvel of the progressive era and a commercial behemoth in the all-time biggest-selling album ranks.
Then there’s prog. It’s become well enshrined in musical lore to the point of being stale, but prog’s story cannot be told without punk’s lighting a fire underneath. While enjoying their early 1970s heyday, grand narrative visions and compositional scope proffered by the likes of Yes or Gentle Giant wowed The Old Grey Whistle Test crowd, but bored the kids, who had their appetites whetted by glam’s glittering sugar rush but hungry for rock to reignite the energy that forged its big bang twenty years previously.
In the same year that Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols left a smoking crater on the UK charts, ELP had returned after four years away to a very different music world. The leading forces of prog with the unwieldy blusters of Tarkus and Brain Salad Surgery, the explosive urgency of the simmering new wave couldn’t have been less impressed by 1977’s Works Volume 1, and indeed viewed it as exactly the stuffy bloat they were rallying against. A wholly unsexy, classically inspired double album, the suite of prog indulgences lifting pieces from Prokofiev and Bach, and boasting an 18-minute piano concerto in three parts as its opener, couldn’t have misread the room any harder.
Still, it did alright, Works Volume 1 breaking the UK top ten despite rock’s upending around them. Drummer Carl Palmer had always acknowledged a certain creative misfire after such time away, but never at the expense of their prog pedigree, in the studio or on the stage.
“In hindsight, we should have come out as a three-piece after having being missing for nearly three years, and then maybe the second half of that tour showed some musical growth and introduced the orchestra,” he confessed to Rock Cellar in 2016. “But we didn’t do it that way, so we had a lot of missed timing and things which didn’t work. But overall, we had three to four years where we were one of the biggest groups in the world”.
Palmer then confidently reminded that, in their pomp, ELP were a commercial arena-filling behemoth that gave rock’s biggest names a run for their money, “We were definitely as big as The Rolling Stones or The Who or Pink Floyd, or Led Zeppelin. For a brief period of time, we were definitely in that area”.
Except for The Who, even the likes of the Stones and Zeppelin had become tarnished by the classic rock excesses of the day, punk dismissing the stodge that had begun to seep into the bands who had otherwise helped sow punk’s seeds ten years previously. ELP enjoyed no such history; however, their second live show at 1970’s Isle of Wight Festival was replete with live canons in their opulent showboating from the get go.
Palmer always protected their legacy, confident their body of work would endure for discovery by music fans nonplussed about punk’s stripped-down bludgeon. “The music has lived on in such a strong fashion,” he concluded. “It’s very intellectual-sounding music, and to this day, quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten, as they say”.
