The classic 1972 album Greg Lake wanted Emerson, Lake and Palmer to be remembered for
How do you begin to define something as elusive and open as prog-rock?
Frank Zappa gave it a go once. He’s someone that a lot of people would consider a particular authority on the genre, and so you can pretty much guarantee that his assessment is somewhat accurate. He basically said that prog-rock is whatever mainstream rock music you’re usually exposed to, but with an added element that removes it somewhat from the mainstream.
“I would presume that people would accept this definition,” he said, “Progressive Rock is anything that doesn’t sound like regular Rock. Regular Rock is everything that sounds like itself. All songs which sound the same, everything on MTV, everything on the radio, that’s Rock. Progressive Rock is stuff that doesn’t sound like that.”
Another huge name in the genre was Ian Anderson, the frontman for Jethro Tull. His understanding of the genre seems to supersede anybody else involved in it, to the extent that he remembers hearing bands that weren’t necessarily prog, but acted as a precursor to it. One of the constants in the bands that came before prog and after were the members of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, as even before the trio existed, Anderson remembers seeing Keith Emerson playing pretty forward-thinking music.
In an exclusive interview with Far Out, Anderson spoke about a band called The Nice, who had elements in their music that he thought set the blueprint for prog. As such, once Keith Emerson joined forces with Greg Lake and Carl Palmer, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to many that they started making really out there and versatile music.
“I suppose one of the precursors before it was really being called prog rock,” he said, “Probably at a time when maybe progressive rock had just being maybe mentioned for the first time in the British music press, it would be the band The Nice, which featured Keith Emerson, who went on to be in Emerson, Lake & Palmer, a true prog rock band years later. But yes, I would go with The Nice and their first major album, which…name escapes me. That was something that got me fired up.”
When Emerson, Lake and Palmer started working together, they began building upon this blueprint that their bandmate had set, and it led to the development of a pretty extravagant sound. It’s pretty hard to dislike; however, it wasn’t an absolute reflection of what prog rock could be. The wonderful thing about the genre is what Frank Zappa refers to, the fact that there are those undeniable rock elements, but bands can also add whatever they want in order to change the sound.
It seems that Greg Lake was well aware of how effective this versatility within the genre could be, as when he spoke about his favourite album with the band, he chose perhaps one of their most musically scattered. Trilogy was released in 1972, and it showed us the band at their most flamboyant, but also reflected how well they could play stripped-back, folk-infused numbers.
The blend of these different genres, in the hands of a lot of bands, simply wouldn’t work, but this is the force that Emerson, Lake and Palmer were in prog. They could take things that didn’t belong and make them cohesive, allowing rock music to branch outside of what we would usually consider rock. Trilogy might not be everybody’s favourite prog rock album, but it is Lake’s, and it’s also one of the best representations of this unique sound.
