The two albums Emerson, Lake & Palmer wanted to destroy: “Melted down”
It’s impossible to talk about 1970s prog trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer without lapsing into well-regaled music lore of their dizzying rise and catastrophic fall.
Early in the decade, they were touring the world’s arenas with the same commercial stature as The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin. A supergroup successor branched from Atomic Rooster, King Crimson, and The Nice, the three-piece’s grand compositional scope and live extravaganzas came to entrench in the rock world the archetypal prog band.
Along with Yes’ pointy-hatted wizardry, synthesizer mage Keith Emerson’s multi-keyboard racks and drummer Carl Palmer’s mammoth percussion set-up wowed their devoted fanbase.
“How do you spell pretentious? ELP”, so went the joke in the rock biz. By the mid-1970s, fatigue began to creep in at their ostentatious bluster. The kids were bored, raised on a diet of glam’s glitter pop to care about the strutting, overweening pomp clogging the radio.
As well all know, punk’s insurrectionary fire lit its burning flame underneath an ossified rock parody, long forgotten what made it so exciting in the first place, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ is dropped, the rest is well-covered history.
The fact is, it can’t be overstated just how out of step ELP’s standing was in the drastically altered music world of 1977. While still selling shows and shifting units, the music press’ cold shoulder and perennial punchline among the new wave cohort spiked a demoralising wobble to team ELP. They didn’t help themselves. Just as rock’s ‘Year Zero’ exploded across the underground, the lads sought to revive their creative juices by a hopelessly snooze-inducing classical Works two-volume set and live galumph boasting a 62-piece orchestra.
The party was over. The glory days’ ebb toward NME shun was reflected on by Palmer for Prog magazine. Commenting on the subsequent output, the former Atomic Rooster drummer was happy to acknowledge ELP’s career peaks, while not above highlighting their artistic nadir.
“We made bad albums,” he confessed. “In the Hot Seat and Love Beach should be melted down and made into flowerpots.”
Mired in contractual obligations to Atlantic, an effort for a sunnier, more commercial sound resulted in Love Beach’s fantastically bad mulch of flaccid sunshine pap and confused prog arcs matching the awful, bare-chested Bee Gees front cover. An album was eked out in 1986, famous session drummer Cozy Powell filling in for Palmer while he was meeting his Asia commitments, ELP teaming up again for 1992’s Black Moon, then for their final LP hurrah, In the Hot Seat, two years later. It flopped, leaving fans wanting and not even making a presence on the Billboard 200.
Still, Palmer never let such career troughs colour his overall assessment of the ELP, legacy, sticking to his guns and celebrating the gems he and his late colleagues had conjured, in his estimation at least.
“But how many great pieces of artwork are you going to get to create in your career?” he concluded. “I think we managed to do four or five that stand up today, and I couldn’t ask for more than that.”
