Emerson, Lake, & Palmer 55th Anniversary- Carl Palmer, the late Greg Lake & Keith Emerson

Emerson, Lake, & Palmer released in late November 1970 was Progressive Rock’s first supergroup, owing to the progressive pedigrees of keyboardist Keith Emerson (The Nice), cherub-faced choirboy Greg Lake (King Crimson), and percussionist Carl Palmer (The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Atomic Rooster). Melding the intricate music, chops, and complex arrangements of classical composers, while substituting grand piano and the electronic synthesizer for the ubiquitous electric guitar, was challenging stuff both for a rock trio as well as the listener then. The degree of gusto with which Emerson, Lake, & Palmer embraced this bold experiment is still breathtaking fully fifty-five years later.

If you had asked any follower of the white hot London music scene in 1969 prior to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer to wager on who would emerge as the most innovative bandleader, the smart money would have been on Jimmy Page’s Led Zeppelin, King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, and the featured soloist fronting a three piece called The Nice, the impressive keyboard player Keith Emerson. On piano and organ prior to forming Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Keith Emerson really had no peer then performing in British colleges and clubs, and he was among the very first to embrace Bob Moog’s unwieldy electronic synthesizer, determined to explore the musical possibilities of the daunting electronic monster.(Carl Palmer (l), Keith Emerson (c), Greg Lake (r)

With The Nice, Keith Emerson quickly developed a reputation for dazzling live audiences with breathtaking keyboard virtuosity on progressive rock material that seemed light years beyond “Be Bop a Lula”, so when Emerson surprised everybody by announcing his departure in order to team with King Crimson’s bass guitarist/singer/songwriter Greg Lake and Crazy World of Arthur Brown/Atomic Rooster percussionist Carl Palmer, the music press saw Emerson, Lake, & Palmer as prog rock’s first supergroup. Carl Palmer and the late Greg Lake tell the tale of the groundbreaking 1970 debut containing “Knife Edge”,”Take a Pebble”, and the hit “Lucky Man”, plus the ahead-of-its-time opus Tarkus in 1971, with archival comments from the late Keith Emerson in part one. –Redbeard