by Greg Lake
I wrote the title track with Gary, and we also wrote ‘I Don’t Want to Lose Your Love Tonight’ together and recorded his song ‘A Woman Like You’. Triss Margetts and Tony Benyon worked with me on ‘Haunted’, and we recorded ‘Famous Last Words’ written by Chris Bradford, Andy Scott and David Most. I wrote the rest of the album, and like the first one, produced it. It was not as heavy or guitar-driven as the first solo album – it has a more melodious feel, and I think some of those songs have stood the test of time. It didn’t sell well – there was no tour and virtually no promotion – although like the first album I have noticed in later years that some writers have reappraised it very positively.
I went up to Chrysalis’s office one day to meet the president, Chris Wright, and listened to him express his disappointment at my sales figures. He then asked me if I could possibly write another ‘Lucky Man’? I knew in that single moment that my relationship with Chrysalis was definitely not destined to endure.
Of course, no artist likes to feel that they have come short of expectations or disappointed anyone, and at that time I had no perception of what was or was not a realistic expectation in terms of sales. Now, I think that if Chrysalis had been more committed and had been prepared to work hard for the success they wanted to achieve, then the future could have been different. However, in the music business, the same as it is in life, one simply has to accept the good along with the bad and move on. I do not harbour any regrets or resentment.
I always had time for new acts and younger people kicking the arses of bands like ELP that dominated the music season in the early and mid-1970s. When I was a young boy, I can remember begging my dad to stop playing his Bing Crosby records. If young people didn’t come forward and try to get rid of the older geezers, then there would be no fun in music and, creatively, it would die. I was not a fan of everything that happened in the punk era, but I liked the Sex Pistols and Never Mind the Bollocks. There was a point to it.
I felt disconnected from the musical culture of the 1980s, though. It seemed to me that the real essence of rock and roll had been lost. Still today, there is little sense of true creative musical identity in the work of many artists – when you listened to Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and hopefully ELP, you knew who it was immediately because they were naturally distinct and innovative. In the 1980s, creativity and passion seemed to be replaced by product. Fashions and genres, maybe starting with the New Romantic movement, were now more important than the music itself. There were too many trends that ended up being a bit ephemeral – here today and gone tomorrow. Too many artists of my generation were releasing gratuitous solo albums, borrowing from the new trends, just to try to remain relevant.
My own solo records went in the wrong direction, too. I had played with keyboards throughout the 1970s, but I’m a guitar player and so I desperately wanted an opportunity to play with other guitar players. But, as far as the record business and the record-buying public were concerned, that direction wasn’t the best thing for my career – purely in terms of popularity, it was a real mistake.
After those two solo albums, I had no appetite or inspiration for creating popular music in what I saw as an increasingly phony, media-driven world. My philosophy at the time, as indeed it still is today, is that if you have nothing worthwhile to say then it is better to remain silent. I was happy in Dorset with my family, fishing and tending to the land and the river.
I had also come to accept that nothing I could do in the future was ever likely to match up to the worldwide success and recognition Emerson, Lake & Palmer and King Crimson had achieved. It was not realistic to expect to find the same level of success with a third group or as a solo artist – hardly anyone in the history of music has achieved that. I still loved music and playing the guitar but now I did this purely for pleasure. It felt so different from performing as a professional musician. I didn’t have to be competitive or try to meet a challenge.
This reclusive period of my music career didn’t last long, however.
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In late 1983, I received a call from Carl Palmer. He asked if I could do him a small favour. I thought he wanted to borrow a guitar or something so I immediately said: ‘Sure. What is it?’
He told me that Asia had encountered a problem.
Carl had co-founded Asia in 1981 with John Wetton, who was in King Crimson after I had left, and two members of Yes – the guitarist Steve Howe and the keyboardist Geoff Downes. For those that like the labels ‘progressive’ and ‘supergroup’, the formation of Asia was a dream come true. While progressive rock was supposed to have died with the advent of punk, new wave, disco, New Romanticism and all the other genres, Asia had bucked the trend and their debut album was top of the US album chart for nine weeks in 1982, but their sound was more like commercial rock music.
When Carl phoned me, Asia were under contract to play a huge MTV and Westwood One Radio Network simulcast of the band’s sold-out show at Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan arena. MTV had even chartered a Boeing 747 jet to transport a number of prizewinners to see the show.
But there had been a problem with their singer and bass player John Wetton. Would I be prepared to step in and take John’s place for that event and the rest of the Japan tour?
John and I grew up close to each other on the south coast of England and were good friends. It felt disloyal to step into his band. However, Carl explained that he had spoken to John and he was happy for me to take over his role for these shows.
I then asked Carl when these shows were scheduled to take place. There was a brief silence.
‘Well,’ Carl eventually muttered sheepishly, ‘they’re due to start in two weeks.’
‘Please tell me you’re not serious!’ I replied. ‘How can I learn the entire Asia catalogue and then perform it live on satellite by then? I’d love to help but I just can’t see a way to make it happen.’
A few hours passed by and then the phone calls began to come in from Asia’s label, Geffen Records. John Kalodner, Brian Lane and finally David Geffen himself pleaded with me to at least give it a try. They were so financially committed to this project that there would be serious repercussions if it collapsed.
In the end – and against my own better judgement – I agreed to help Carl out. He was my close friend, after all. And Geffen offered me so much money there was no way I could refuse it.
Over the next two weeks, I worked day and night to get the material under control. John Wetton and Geoff Downes are excellent songwriters, and the songs had catchy hooks, so the learning process was smoother than I had expected it to be. But to learn someone’s entire set and all the nuances, all the cues and all the little points, to remember all the chord shifts and make the lyrics sound the same as the record – it was a huge undertaking. I would not want to do it again.
When it came to the show, I had a lyric prompter but I got through it. Miraculously, the satellite broadcast on 6 December 1983 went off without a hitch.
My time spent with Asia, however, was not enjoyable. To me, a band should have an underlying bond rather like a family, and I think that in Asia’s case, Geffen’s A & R man John Kalodner had more or less brought the band together in the first place. I have never been one of those artists who flit between bands like jumping on and off a roundabout. I always liked Carl, but Asia were a funny bunch at that time. Everyone was trying to fire everyone else. There were huge conspiracies. You would walk down the corridor and there would be people plotting to fire each other in every room you walked into. It was hilarious.
Also, I simply did not want to go in that corporate rock direction. I could see that would be a fast way to finish me off in creative terms. So after the Japan concerts, I said, ‘If this band’s going to have me in it, it would at least need to have some authentic musical foundation.’
And that was where we parted company.
In 1985, Keith Emerson and I were offered a recording contract by an old friend, Jim Lewis from Polygram Records. The proposal was that we
re-form Emerson, Lake & Palmer to make another album, but Carl Palmer was still involved with Asia and wasn’t available.
Keith and I were not initially inspired by the idea from an artistic standpoint, but we had nothing better to do at the time and there was a substantial sum of money on the table. Jim Lewis reassured us that we could go ahead without Carl, given that Keith and I wrote most of the material in ELP. We did indeed also have a backlog of songs we had written since the band had broken up.
So we decided to audition various drummers and almost hired a very good one called Tony Beard, who went on to play for Mike Oldfield and all sorts of other artists. But word about what we were up to had already begun to spread around the industry and one morning we received a phone call from Cozy Powell.
We had known Cozy for many years through his work with Jeff Beck, Rainbow and Whitesnake – and he and Keith both loved motorcycles. We agreed to meet up with him at Keith’s house in Sussex for a jam.
Cozy’s style was different from that of Carl Palmer. He was a heavy metal drummer, far more solid and earthy than Carl, whose playing tends to be fast, light and technical. Keith and I were both impressed by the power and simplicity Cozy brought to existing ELP material such as ‘Tarkus’, ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ and ‘Karn Evil 9’. The three of us were excited about the possibilities for this new era of the band.
The press immediately fell on the fact that Cozy’s last name began with a ‘P’ and were convinced that this was the reason he was chosen. This was certainly not the case. He could have been Cozy Smith or Cozy Jones: we would still have hired him. It was just a fortuitous coincidence. We were a bit embarrassed about it, actually. (As Cozy said in an interview in Creem in 1986: ‘Porcaro, Phillips, Peart, Ian Paice is another one . . . there’s a lot of drummers whose names start with P.’ Keith once joked that we also checked out Ringo Parr.) The truth was that Cozy simply fitted the bill.
It was a pleasure to work with him, and he enjoyed it too. People like to think that Keith and I were perpetually at war with each other, which wasn’t true. Cozy would be asked the leading question of what it was like to work with us, but he said it was the most pleasurable working relationship he had ever had.
I was pleased to be working with Keith again. The end of the original ELP was not one of those band break-ups where there is a lot of recrimination, bitterness and mudslinging. The three of us just felt simultaneously that we had been pushed too hard and too far, especially through the touring, and we did not want to keep on going out and flogging ourselves, purely for commercial reasons. Since the band had split up, while I was doing my solo albums and Carl was in Asia, Keith had done a reggae-influenced album in the Bahamas and composed the film soundtracks to Inferno and Nighthawks.
The veteran engineer Tony Taverner and I co-produced the recordings, which were made in 1985 and 1986, and all the songs involved Keith and I working together on the writing or arranging. We lost some of the material when Keith’s studio, in a converted barn, was destroyed in an accident involving an out-of-control tractor carrying some logs, and we had to move to another studio.
We resisted the temptation to follow the fashionable adult-oriented rock style, which had been so successful for Asia and Yes, who had re-formed in 1983 and had their biggest-selling album ever. We did not want to sound exactly like we did back in the 1970s – we were Emerson, Lake & Powell now, not ELP – but we wanted to stay true to our ethos of pushing boundaries and exploring new sounds. The further we went along, we realised that the latest technology in the hands of someone like Keith could be extraordinary.
We didn’t try to streamline the ELP sound into deliberately short, radio-friendly tunes. The self-titled album’s opening song, ‘The Score’, was a nine-minute piece that included a reference to the famous line from ‘Karn Evil 9’: Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends . . . Another song on the eight-track LP that topped the seven-minute mark was ‘The Miracle’, which remains a highlight for me. Also, we continued our tradition of combining rock and European classical music, and the album finished with our adaptation of the Holst piece ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’. I had a fondness for this piece ever since we used to play it as an encore in King Crimson, and Cozy had a long relationship with it too. However, Keith was always wary of performing pieces of classical music that were too well known and so for a while we were in two minds whether to include this or not.
We still left room for a couple of radio-ready tracks, including ‘Learning to Fly’. ‘Touch and Go’ was the first single from the album and it narrowly missed reaching the top forty in the United States – although it charted higher than some Emerson, Lake & Palmer songs even at our peak – while reaching number two on the rock radio chart.
Released in May 1986, the album went top forty on both sides of the Atlantic. It seemed that Emerson and Lake together had a bright future once again, along with Powell. Of course, some reviewers had their knives out as usual, and Cozy had a taste of what it’s like when journalists just want to criticise you as individuals and don’t even mention the music. I think he was shocked.
Highlights of our US tour included playing at Madison Square Garden again on 20 September 1986, which was recorded, and, for Keith, appearing on Late Night with David Letterman, where he played the Nice song, ‘America’, which we had incorporated into our live set along with some King Crimson songs.
Overall, though, the tour was badly handled by our US management at the time – it was not well coordinated and encountered various complications that were outside of the band’s control. As 1986 drew to a close, we were losing momentum and shortly after the tour ended, so did Emerson, Lake & Powell.
Cozy was certainly a great player and I am proud of what we achieved together. I think that Emerson, Lake & Powell is a decent album – as well as ‘The Miracle’, ‘Touch and Go’ and ‘The Score’ seem to have stood the test of time and I still enjoy listening to them today – but the chemistry was never quite the same as it was in the original ELP. Even though the line-up with Carl Palmer had itself begun to lose its chemistry following the two Works albums, I look back on those early ELP recordings – Emerson Lake & Palmer, Tarkus, Pictures at an Exhibition, Trilogy, Brain Salad Surgery and Welcome Back, My Friends . . . – as the definitive era of ELP, and Carl was a huge part of that.
CHAPTER 15
Three Again
In 1991, Emerson, Lake and Palmer – the original trio – were invited to a lunch with an old friend of ours, Phil Carson. We knew Phil from way back when we were signed to Atlantic Records and he was running the company in Europe, and it was Phil who had the foresight to release ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ as a single back in 1975.
At the meeting, Phil explained that he was about to form a new record company called Victory. He had teamed up with some Japanese investors who were interested in the possibility of becoming involved with Emerson, Lake & Palmer – there was an enduring love of the band in Japan ever since that amazing but crazy tour in 1972. The idea at the time was that we should possibly build on Keith’s experience and pursue a film-score opportunity – which really meant creating a concept album for a movie. The idea of creating film soundtracks together as a band was completely new to us and seemed quite appealing.
Of course, you never know precisely when the right movie is going to come along so it was suggested that, in the meantime, we start writing and building up a reservoir of material that we could draw upon.
On the first day that we got together to rehearse, we stood by our instruments, getting ready to play. As usual, just in order to get everyone fired up, we decided to play through something familiar from the back catalogue. On this occasion, we chose ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’. As we played, I instantly thought to myself just how special this band was in terms of its chemistry – we had such a powerful sound for only three players. We weren’t always compatible as people, but as Carl recently said, ‘When we played music together, it was the best time of our li
ves . . .’
People often talked about ELP having such a powerful sound for a trio, and other three-piece bands such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream and the Police were also able to create a lot of power. I think that this is because the human brain can only process up to perhaps three individual pathways of information – or types of sound – simultaneously. Beyond that you sometimes just hear a mass of sound, and the individual instruments can get lost in the ensemble. When it comes down just to three, you can still hear the full power of each individual source in equilibrium, without needing to diminish the sound of any one of them.
The rehearsals continued for some weeks, during which we began to develop quite a number of interesting ideas. Very soon it became obvious to everyone involved that we had enough material to form the basis of a completely new album. The question then was, do we wait until the right film comes our way or do we simply get on and record the songs that are ready to go?
In retrospect, I think that the whole idea that Phil Carson had put forward of ELP doing a film score was just a rather attractive carrot in order to get Carl, Keith and myself motivated to make another album together. In any event, it worked and there we were, just a few weeks later, with the backbone of a new Emerson, Lake & Palmer album ready to record.
The next question that arose was about who was going to produce the album. I had produced all of the early ELP recordings and each one of them had gone platinum, so I felt that the obvious thing was for us to repeat this successful formula, where I would sit in the chair but they would have their input too. It wasn’t just ego – I thought it was a good way to help recapture the spirit of the early days. However, Keith and Carl did not want me to produce the record. They had worked together in 1988 in a band called 3, after the Emerson, Lake & Powell album – it hadn’t worked out too well but perhaps they had got used to working together in a different way to the early ELP days. Whatever the reason, they insisted that we use an independent, outside producer. I certainly did not want anyone to feel obliged to have me produce the record so I immediately agreed that we should look elsewhere.
