From the Beginning: A Biography of Emerson, Lake and Palmer Pt. 2
At the height of their success, ELP released a triple live album, Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends (Manticore, August 1974). It was recorded on the Brain Salad Surgery tour and became their last album for three years. During this period, the ever-present limitations that the group put on the members' individual aspirations came to the surface. Their first album had, after all, been a combination of solo pieces with group works, and this remained the case throughout their albums up to Brain Salad Surgery. Keith Emerson's compositions were becoming more pure classical works requiring an orchestra, while Greg Lake's songs relegated the other musicians to backing musicians and Carl Palmer was the peacemaker caught between the two. A series of solo albums was avoided, because each required an album's worth of material and was unlikely to sell on the scale of ELP records. Instead the compromise was a double album, Works Volume 1 (Atlantic, March 1977), that consisted of each member having a side of solo material and a fourth and final side comprising band pieces. Needless to say, the band material, Fanfare for the Common Man and Pirates, was by far the strongest and most cohesive. Coming after a succession of five consistently strong studio albums, culminating in Brain Salad Surgery, the record was massively disappointing. The impetus provided by Brain Salad Surgery was lost and, in the meantime, the revolutionary movement of punk rock, along with disco, had seen the baby thrown out with the bath water. The band hired a 70-piece orchestra for some concerts of the Works tour, but eventually had to dismiss the orchestra due to budget constraints that almost bankrupted the group. Works Volume 2 (Atlantic, November 1977) was a collection of solo experiments, single a and b-sides and outtakes dating back to Brain Salad Surgery. The next album of new material, Love Beach (Atlantic, November 1978), despite having a number of different and interesting ideas, was completed for contractual reasons, given a regrettable name and packaged in an inappropriate Bee Gees-style album cover. Ironically, however, it gave the band a hit single in For You.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer split up in 1979, with Greg Lake embarking on a guitar-led solo career with Gary Moore; Keith Emerson withdrawing from the band scene to compose some excellent fim scores; and Carl Palmer forming his own group PM, before joining another successful progressive rock supergroup, Asia. During the interim, different permutations of ELP worked with each other, either as Emerson, Lake and Powell or 3 with Robert Berry. Greg Lake even had a brief spell with Asia. A renewed interest in heavy and prgressive rock from the rise of grunge, along with the creation of Victory records as an offshoot of Atlantic, saw the return of the Manticore in the early nineties . . . but that is another story . . .
Lineup
Keith Emerson: keyboards
Greg Lake: vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, bass
Carl Palmer: drums, percussion
Discography
1970 Emerson, Lake & Palmer
1971 Tarkus
1971 Pictures at an Exhibition
1972 Trilogy
1973 Brain Salad Surgery
1974 Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends... Ladies and Gentlemen
1977 Works Volume I
1977 Works Volume II
1978 Love Beach
1979 In Concert '73
1992 Black Moon
1993 Live at the Royal Albert Hall
1993 Works Live (In Concert '73 re-released)
1994 In the Hot Seat
1997 Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970
1997 Live in Poland
1997 King Biscuit Flower Hour Presents: Greatest Hits Live
1998 Then & Now
2001 The Original Bootleg Series from the Manticore Vaults: Volume One
2001 The Original Bootleg Series from the Manticore Vaults: Volume Two
2002 The Original Bootleg Series from the Manticore Vaults: Volume Three
2006 The Original Bootleg Series from the Manticore Vaults: Volume Four
2010 A Time and A Place
2010 High Voltage
2011 Live at Nassau Coliseum '78
2011 Live at the Mar Y Sol Festival '72
Originally written in April 2012