Lucky Man

by Greg Lake

  Lucky Man

  The Autobiography

  Greg Lake

  Constable • London

  CONSTABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Constable

  Copyright © Creative Musical Arts Ltd, 2017

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-47212-647-4

  Constable

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  DEDICATION

  During my lifetime I seem to have been blessed in so many different ways, but without doubt the greatest of all of these was the good fortune to have met and eventually married the love of my life, Regina, who for over forty years has stood by my side through good times and bad.

  The music business is a notoriously difficult place for any marriage to survive, and it is through her good grace and strength of character that we have been able to endure and it is to her that I dedicate this book.

  GREG LAKE

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Madison Square Garden, 17 December 1973

  Part One

  1. Opening Notes

  2. The Early Bands

  3. Court in Session

  4. Crimson America

  Part Two

  5. Emerson, Lake & Palmer

  6. What a Circus

  7. Rocked by the King

  8. Trilogy

  9. The Rising Sun

  10. Salad Days

  11. A Christmas Intermission

  12. Fanfare in the Works

  13. Outro: Loveless Beach

  Part Three

  14. Life after ELP

  15. Three Again

  16. A Starr and a Crusader

  17. A High Voltage Finale

  18. Songs of a Lifetime

  Eulogy by Stewart Young

  Selected Discography

  PROLOGUE:

  Madison Square Garden, 17 December 1973

  This was the night that every musician in the world dreams about. Here we were, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, the three of us standing together at the bottom of the stairs to the stage, waiting for the house lights to go down and for the show to begin. The air was charged with electricity: the audience was expecting to see the greatest show of their lives.

  All of a sudden, with his hands firmly gripping his headset, the stage manager turned towards us and asked if we were ready to go. We looked at each other momentarily, then gave the thumbs up. Almost immediately the house lights went down as the entire audience began to scream. Then, echoing all around the arena, came the legendary voice of the late and great Scott Muni. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, now get ready! All the way from London, England, to perform for you tonight, here they are! The fantastic, Emerson, Lake & Palmer!’

  As we walked out on to the stage, the screaming turned into a thunderous avalanche that caused the 22,000-seat arena to shake to its foundations. Nothing can quite prepare you for this feeling. This is Madison Square Garden, New York.

  We have all heard the line about New York: If you can make it there you can make it anywhere. When you stand on the stage at Madison Square Garden, it’s like staring out at a gladiatorial arena. It’s an awesome and imposing spectacle – and the New York audience is ferocious. They have seen it all, so to break through there you’ve got to be a little special. If they love you, they love you. If they don’t, it’s not so good! But when we played there on 17 December 1973, they loved us.

  The Brain Salad Surgery album had been released a month earlier and to celebrate the event we had embarked upon our fifth North American tour. By now the show had evolved into a huge production. The question most bands – most great bands – ask is: how can we be better? Better songs, better sound, better visuals, better anything and everything. When you play shows in different venues every night, it all changes: the acoustics, the distance you are from each other, the lighting, everything. I thought one thing we could do was to design our own self-contained stage, with built-in monitoring, so that the sound every night would be the same – because, if the sound isn’t in order, the playing never will be. Ringo Starr told me that one of the reasons the Beatles retired from live performance was because they couldn’t hear what they were doing, which became too frustrating. Hearing your fellow musicians is pretty much everything when you are performing live.

  That was the primary reason why we toured with our own stage set. And along with the sound, we gave a lot of thought to the visual elements that would underpin and empower the music, such as the lighting and the stunts, including Keith riding the organ, stabbing the keys and throwing daggers.

  The set included an enormous circular projection screen, 156 feet in diameter. During the show, it would display eerie skull imagery from H. R. Giger, who had designed the Brain Salad Surgery album cover. There were two sixty-foot proscenium arches, framing the stage and holding 100 spotlights, which were assembled by our crew as part of a load-in that took five hours. Carl Palmer had developed a new hand-engraved, revolving, stainless-steel drum kit weighing in at a remarkable four tons, which by itself took a crew of six roadies over two hours to erect every night. The kit was set up within a frame styled like a Japanese pagoda and complete with thirty-eight-inch Paiste gongs and a custom-made cast-bronze church bell. With the help of our friend David Hardstone and his cutting-edge sound company, IES, we had also developed a brand new thirty-channel quadrophonic PA system with thirty-two speaker stacks weighing thirty-six tons. I had my multi-guitar rack and, of course, my $6,000 spotlit Persian rug. And Keith had a full-size Steinway grand piano, which would float up into the air before spinning around in circles, with Keith still playing it, and then disappearing into a massive cloud of smoke and flame.

  That night at Madison Square Garden was one of the shows that people still come up to talk to me about to this very day. We were just entering the period that many people think of as ELP’s golden era. The band was right on top of its game from a musical standpoint and at the very cutting edge of technology as well. It was also a time when the band still felt like a brotherhood – the spirit was all for one and one for all before individual egos and self-indulgence from all of us began to erode the power of the bond.

  We were entertainers. Every night, we would give everything in order to entertain as much as possible, and when we came off the stage we would be so tired that we would be shaking and trembling.

  As we came towards the end of the show, we performed ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ and during the tubular bells section, right before the huge climax of ‘The Great Gates of Kiev’, we diverted away and I sang the Christmas carol ‘Silent Night’. As I began to sing, the entire stage fell into darkness and, rising up from what seemed like nowhere, the Harlem Gospel Choir appeared, dressed in their maroon and white robes and joining in with their massed voices. I can still remember the hair standing up on the back of my neck. Just to add to the emotion, snow started to fall inside the whole of Madison Square Garden just as the last verse began.

  It was probably the most spectacular single stage production I have ever been involved in.
The audience went crazy and we then went on to finish the climax of ‘Pictures of an Exhibition’ with Keith and the grand piano spinning around in the air before disappearing in a cloud of smoke.

  When the show came to an end, both the band and the audience were completely demolished. It was a magical, once-in-a-lifetime performance. I will never forget the incredible reception we received. It confirmed that New York had taken the band to its heart. Afterwards we mainly felt relief.

  Aaahh. At least I don’t have to go through that again.

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1

  Opening Notes

  I have always seen music as something magical. As a young boy of five or six years old, I heard the medieval tune of ‘Greensleeves’ playing on the radio, and I was emotionally touched by its magical power. I had heard lots of music before, of course – Vera Lynne and all that sort of stuff, which was popular at the time – but that piece taught me that music could really mean something, and that it could touch people personally. I still feel like that when I listen to similar pieces of music to this day – I think it is to do with the way they are structured: there is a feeling of suspension and then relief, which draws you in and makes you react emotionally.

  Looking back, I am quite sure this is what first ignited my interest in playing the guitar. Of course, back then there was no way I could have possibly imagined the incredible journey that I was about to embark upon, or how this shapely little piece of painted wood with its six wire strings would ultimately control the destiny of my entire life.

  I was born shortly after the end of the Second World War on 10 November 1947 and grew up in the small harbour town of Poole in Dorset on the south coast of England. Poole today is a modern, thriving and increasingly wealthy little harbour town with swishy yacht clubs and numerous golf courses. It’s just a little way down the road from Sandbanks, known for its extraordinarily expensive houses, but once just a sleepy little retirement backwater until one fine day when a young lad called John Lennon bought his Aunt Mimi a house there. When I was a young boy growing up, Poole was nothing more than a dirty, rundown Victorian slum whose main claim to fame was its coal-fired gasworks, which nightfall somehow transformed into an eerie Quartermass landscape.

  My grandparents lived adjacent to the gasworks in a Victorian terraced house for most of their adult lives, and my grandfather worked there until he was forced to retire with lung cancer at the age of fifty-five. The cancer was almost certainly caused by the smoke and coal dust that he was breathing in every day.

  When I was seven or eight years old, I stood with my father at the main entrance to the gasworks, no doubt waiting for my grandfather to leave work. I was horrified by the overwhelming stench of gas that hung in the air and by the huge mountains of coal that glittered in the orange flames that burned continually day and night. I thought that if there was a place called hell, then this was probably what it looked like.

  This feeling of fear and my memory of gas came back to haunt me again a few years later when, still a young child, I was held down in the dentist’s chair and a rubber mask was forced over my face as they applied the anaesthetic gas. The fear of gas and dentists remained with me right up until my early twenties when I just decided that enough was enough and somehow managed to overcome it.

  My mother and father, Pearl and Harry, were extremely caring parents who gave me all the love and protection anyone could ever wish for. My father told me that, after the Second World War, he and his fellow soldiers wanted to get back to a normal life as quickly as possible and for most of them that simply meant getting a job, getting married and starting a family. My parents married very soon after the war and I was born a year later, becoming part of what would become known as the baby-boom generation. We lived at 68 Dale Valley Road, Oakdale, in an asbestos prefab on one of the hastily erected housing estates that were thrown up to accommodate the enormous number of new families.

  I had no concept of whether we were rich or poor: we were just getting by, living an everyday existence. The overriding memory I have of my childhood is one of being happy and being loved, and this above all taught me what really matters in life. It was not until much later that I realised just how poor we had been.

  The feeling that you are loved and that someone cares about you is without any doubt the greatest gift on earth. Material things have no ultimate value and even things you may think are important, such as financial success or social standing, all fade into the distance when compared to the importance of having love in your life. To this day, it remains the bedrock on which I have established my own life and I believe it is ultimately what gave me the ability to sing and to write songs.

  I didn’t get my first record player until I was about eleven and the first record I owned was ‘Diana’ by Paul Anka – I’m not sure why. I think it was solely because my mother and I walked into this record shop – we were curious because dedicated record shops had only just started to become popular – and that was the song playing in there at the time. It certainly didn’t influence my own future musical direction. The next record I bought was ‘Lucille’ by Little Richard and that changed everything right then and there . . . boom! I think there has been a little bit of Little Richard inside of me ever since.

  Most young people have a compelling urge to achieve something with their lives but, for many, the realisation of exactly what form that should take doesn’t occur until much later on in life. I count myself as being extremely lucky to have found this ‘something’ at such an early age. I was even more fortunate to have been able to develop that into what is sometimes laughingly referred to as a ‘career’.

  At Christmas, when I was twelve, my mother said, ‘What do you want as a present?’ and I asked if I could have a guitar. She said, ‘No!’ We didn’t have any money, so I didn’t expect it, but come Christmas morning there it was . . . a Rosetti white switch guitar, with a black scratch plate on it. It had an action on it like telegraph wire and it took the strength of Tarzan to push the strings down, but to me it was God.

  If my mum and dad had not decided to spend their precious money – over £7 – on buying me a guitar for Christmas, then I am sure my life would have turned out quite differently. I would probably have been tarmacking roads. I was blessed with parents who reacted positively to my enthusiasm for music.

  When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, people would often comment about how talented I was, but the simple truth was that I was just plain lucky to have found something I really loved doing at such an early age.

  Very shortly after I began playing the guitar at the age of twelve, I wrote the song ‘Lucky Man’. I only knew four chords at the time – D, G, A minor and E minor – and I used all of them to compose the song. I don’t really know what caused me to think of the title ‘Lucky Man’ – maybe it was that I was feeling lucky about having my very own guitar or perhaps it was just that moment in a young person’s life when you know the time has come to emerge from the chrysalis of childhood and begin a new life as a free-thinking adult. It seems quite strange that time and different perspectives have almost given this song whole new meanings, particularly about the Vietnam War, quite separate from the one I had originally intended. In the course of my career, I have learned that people have their own impression of what a song means to them, and that’s a very good thing: they have their own way of feeling that song, and that’s why it’s important to them. There is no point banging on about how the song was meant to mean something else. Making music is like giving a gift – it belongs to other people to make of it what they will as soon as it leaves your hands.

  Most of my education, such as it was, took place at Henry Harbin Secondary Modern School in Poole. I am not quite sure how the term ‘secondary modern’ came about but that school was rather aptly named because it wasn’t most people’s first choice, which was the grammar school (where the smart kids went after the eleven-plus). The number of grammar-school places hadn’t been increased to accommodate the
baby-boomer generation, so even many clever children ended up at the secondary modern.

  One particular occasion at school stands out because it rather typifies the way things were back then. It was the day when the careers officer came around to give the pupils a pep talk about becoming useful members of society and to help them decide what career to choose for their future.

  When the talk finally concluded, a questionnaire was handed out that contained a list of fifty or so possible career choices.

  The idea was that you should place a number beside three career choices, in order of preference, that you thought might be suitable for you. Needless to say, film director, tennis player, brain surgeon or fashion designer were not listed; the list only featured blue-collar jobs like plumber, electrician, carpenter, mechanic and so on.

  Even though I read through the entire list with all the due diligence I could muster, I found nothing that I could possibly envisage doing myself as a career.

  At the end of the allotted time, the careers officer collected up all the papers, quickly scanning each one to make sure everyone had filled in at least three choices. When he picked up my paper, he suddenly stopped dead in his tracks and said, ‘And what’s the matter with you? Why haven’t you filled in your three choices?’

  I told him that I had honestly tried to find something I wanted to do but that nothing on the list had really appealed to me.

  He then said, ‘Surely there must be something you like doing?’

  ‘I like playing the guitar,’ I replied.

  ‘Playing the guitar is not a job!’ he said, mockingly. He then laughingly proclaimed so that the rest of the class could hear, ‘Listen to me, Sonny Jim, you had better smarten up your ideas fast or you are going to end up on the scrap heap of life!’

  The first feeling I had as he uttered these words was a sense of embarrassment, failure and despair, but when I reflected upon the fact that I had honestly studied the list of jobs and that there was simply no way on God’s earth that I was ever going to spend the rest of my life doing any of them, I began to feel a little better.