Thankfully, the great show continues: Emerson Lake and Powell get The Complete Collection, featuring a three-disc remaster of their one firehouse 1987 prog album, the rehearsal “Sprocket Sessions,” and a live in-concert recording.
Just listen to the first nine-minute cut, “The Score.” This is torched progressive music that remembers how to rock. In its prime, prog (despite its obvious nod to classical pretensions), cut a pretty great Persian rug into threadbare vibrant electricity. Yeah, Yes’ “Roundabout” still can “make the white queen run so fast,” and “send an instant karma to me.” That’s cool stuff.
Emerson Lake and Palmer rocked (albeit with the odd time signature here and there!) with the “Tarkus’ side-long suite. Others like Vander Graff Generator didn’t rock the universe: Peter Hammill and company just created a new form of musical physics. But then, to get sort of biblical, Works Volume 1 came to pass.
It was a Red Sea crossing, what with Keith Emerson’s concerto, Greg Lake’s acoustic sanguine songs, Carl Palmer’s jazz big band stuff, and not quite counting a final side of pretty great and dramatic ELP music, the two-album set drifted away from the pomp and fury of earlier fireworks. And then live albums, a record of outtakes, and a disastrous tour with a 72-piece orchestra also came to pass.
Let’s be honest: Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Love Beach (despite its title and quasi–Bee Gees three tanned hairy chests on the cover!) just didn’t carry as much new wave/punk street cred as albums like Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model, Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food, Wire’s Chairs Missing, and (of course) the Clash’s Give ‘Em Enough Rope.
So, when released in 1987, Emerson Lake and Powell still suffered from that echoed memory and continued stiff post-prog rock music competition. And that’s a shame because Keith, Greg, and Cozy Powell pulse with tough dynamics here, the likes of which hadn’t been heard since Brain Salad Surgery. Sure, there’s an ’80s shimmer. “Learning to Fly” is concise prog rock, with Greg Lake’s voice in full drama, Powell’s solid percussion, and Emerson in keyboard-fueled spark plugged tension.
Following the before-mentioned “The Score,” the six-minute plus “The Miracle” pumps with its urgently heavy take on the Genesis Abacab/Mike and the Mechanics vibe. There’s more: “Touch and Go” burns with more Hammond cylinders that stir the cinders of the great drama of early ELP.
Of course, this is an album of the ’80s, and the melodic “Love Blind” plays a very popular melodic poker hand with even more keyboard virtuosity.
“Step Aside” is a jazzy piano-graced side step, which is much preferred over the hoedown hoke of “The Sheriff” stuff or the odd duck “Jeremy Bender.” “Lay Down Your Guns” is, quite simply, a lovely Greg Lake ballad that’s laced with the passion that equals the best of Sir Elton John’s thoughtful tunes.
The best is saved for the final prog-rock-classical siege. Their epic Gustav Holst-inspired “Mars, the Bringer of War” hurtles prog fire and brimstone over its almost eight-minute conflagration of marching rhythms, pulsing aggression, and, thankfully, some really decent progression rock final grooved (and always necessary!) somber reflection.
The Complete Collection features two bonus tracks are incidental. There’s a big keyboard work up of “The Locomotion.” Meanwhile, “Vacant Possession” is a nice enough slow melodic ballad with a great Greg Lake vocal. And this first disc adds, for true aficionados, the single version of “The Score.”
Now, for those of us who waved the tattered prog aegis during the ’80s and were sustained by bands like Marillion, Twelfth Night, It Bites, Pendragon and countless care packages from the Wayside catalog, the Emerson Lake and Powell tour rehearsal tapes – known as “The Sprocket Sessions” – are (to get all biblical again!) manna from heaven. You know, Greg Lake once produced a great band called Spontaneous Combustion, and he and his bandmates take that match-tip spark into this gig warm-up and to quote Deep Purple, burn the place to the ground.
They play new tunes like “The Score,” “Learning to Fly,” “The Miracle,” “Love Blind,” “Touch and Go,” and the album epic “Mars, the Bringer of War.” The abridged “Tarkus” sucks the dense melodic oxygen out of the room, yet the flame still scorches through “Knife Edge.” There’s an instrumental bit from the end of “Lucky Man,” and Lake gets a quiet moment for “Still You Turn Me On.” And they end with the drama of (the brilliant!) “Pirates.”
Thankfully, there’s also a grand reprise of the finale of Pictures at an Exhibition, during which Greg Lake gets to sing about being “born in life’s fire,” with added wisdom that “in the burning all are yearning” and of course, “death is life.” And, just so you know, I am eternally grateful to ELP for “still turning me on” to Mussorgsky’s classical masterpiece, with the piano version preferred.
Not only that, but Greg Lake’s added lyrics to the original piano suite template, gave my friend Kilda Defnut and me the green light to spend our own creative pocket change while adding our own words to other classical touchstones/ The best of the bunch, if I recall correctly, was the appendaged lyric to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 (also known as the Fate Symphony), which matched its four-note dramatic melody with our sincerity expressed but admittedly pocket change words that sang, “I love you so.”
All of this seemed like a good idea at the time, but let’s just say that prog rock opened a lot of doors – some of which should have been kept politely, yet happily, closed.
The final disc of The Complete Collection is a live recording, with ample audience applause. The new tunes listed in “The Sprocket Sessions” are included, once again. This is nice, as they are powerful additions to the Tarkus canon. “Knife Edge,” “Pirates” and “Mars,” burn black holes, and “From the Beginning” gets a true acoustic workout, as does “one you might remember,” called “Lucky Man.” “Fanfare for the Common Man” (to quote Lewis Carroll) “galumphs” quite nicely. There’s also a medley of “Karn Evil 9 (1st Impression)” that morphs into the Nice’s “America” and “Rondo.”
This music seeps into any prog lover’s soul as it embraces the classics, folk, rock, high-voltage originality, the entire universe, and perhaps (if the truth be told!) a tad of over-blown pomposity that’s prone to quasi-philosophical lyricism. Sure! But then that soul, with slightly altered Kilda Defnut’s long-ago appendaged words to the big Beethoven riff – that indeed, with the “cadence and cascading” bliss – certainly sings, “I love this so!” And by the way, it’s important to note, no animals were injured and no flags were burnt in the recoding of this album!
Greg Lake, in his autobiography Lucky Man, says of the original release: “I think Emerson Lake and 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.” I concur, but up the praise card ante with the addition of Emerson Lake and Powell’s rehearsal tapes and the live recording on The Complete Collection. I believe that Mars, the Bringer of War (wherever he happens to be these days) would certainly agree.
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