The seeds of ELP were sown in December of 1969, when both the Nice (which featured Keith Emerson on keyboards) and King Crimson (which featured Greg Lake on bass and vocals) performed together at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. Both bands had been at the forefront of the British rock scene at the end of the decade, and were fast gaining popularity in the States. The Nice had enjoyed several hits, known more for the wild stage show that was a showcase for Keith Emerson. Emerson was a keyboard wizard and had been tagged the "Jimi Hendrix of the Hammond organ." King Crimson had exploded out of nowhere in 1969, moving in a matter of a couple of months from club obscurity to big stars. The band's debut LP In the Court of the Crimson King had become an instant smash, and established the band in the new format of FM rock radio. Keith Emerson remembers this period:
Keith: The final months of the Nice were quite traumatic, really, because the Nice had just broken America. And we actually had offers of tours which for the band members would have been very lucrative. But internally, within the band, things weren't really happy. There was a lot of things interfering with our progress, slightly drug-oriented, I suppose. I was just not really happy with the way things were going. So I was looking for another bass-player and singer. I heard on the radio a recording of King Crimson, playing "Cat Food" and I'd heard a lot about the bass-player, Greg Lake, and what a great voice he had. By chance, the Nice were on the same bill as King Crimson in 1969, at Fillmore West and I had the opportunity to approach Greg and ask him if he'd be interested. Things really grew from there.
Greg: The chemistry of the band was unique and special. Even the forming of the band was interesting. I mean, the first person we met in fact was Mitch Mitchell, the drummer for Jimi Hendrix, and it was at one point a session arranged for Jimi and Keith and myself and Mitch to play together. And that didn't happen in the end, partly because in the meantime we'd met Carl Palmer and also shortly thereafter Jimi actually died, and so it never came about.
Emerson and Lake eventually found Carl Palmer, a nineteen year old drummer, formally trained in percussion. Palmer had been in The Crazy World of Arthur Brown before forming Atomic Rooster with Vincent Crane. Here is Keith Emerson:
Keith: I'd auditioned lot of English drummers but they didn't seem right, and I was almost going to go to America to look for an American drummer, before somebody suggested Carl Palmer. I remember Carl coming along to a session, rehearsal thing, set his drum kit up and we launched into a blues and that was it really. We said, well that's the band.
Carl Palmer remembers the first time the band played together:
Carl: I think I ended up in the rehearsal room on a recommendation from Keith Emerson's manager, Tony Stratton-Smith. He is a lovely man, who's since passed away. I think that's how it came about, the rehearsal, the audition, call it what you will, but I can't really recall too much that went on. I know that we talked quite a lot about music, about things we liked, things that we disliked individually and I do recall that at that meeting, Keith and myself had various jazz records which we both bought at a very young age. So it seemed to be that we had similar tastes. It's very hard to sort of say exactly what kind of things we listened to as individuals. I didn't really speak to Greg too much on that side, I think, we might have played a couple of pieces, it might have been like a twelve bar and something else. It was a very very simple sort of rehearsal-cum-audition, I must confess.
ELP's early rehearsals were done at Island Studios on Basing Street in London in June. The band had signed with Island Records for Europe and Atlantic subsidiary Cotillion Records for the US. The recording commenced in July 1970, with Greg Lake producing. The album, simply entitled Emerson, Lake and Palmer remains one of the most popular rock albums of all time. Songs like "Take a Pebble," "Knife Edge," "Tank" and "The Barbarian" fuse the band's contemporary hard rock with a subtle nuances of European classical music and American jazz. But according to Keith, the making of the first ELP album was no small feat:
Keith: It was like pulling teeth, it was the hardest album. I think in order to get the album finished, the second side, which is mainly instrumental, because Greg and I had not really learned how to write together. I was writing music and Greg was writing lyrics and somehow we weren't managing to gel as a writing team. It was very, very hard.
Carl: So, I thought the album is very, sort of, very daring, you know, in it’s day. We each had a kind of feature, there was "Lucky Man" from Greg and there was "Tank" from myself and "The Three Fates," which was the name of the piece which Keith recorded. So I really did not know what to expect from the album. It was definitely something which was daring, it was up front and I suppose it was very fresh at that time. Things like "Knife Edge" and "Barbarian" are still key tracks which we play today.
It would be the album's final recording, an acoustic folk ballad called "Lucky Man," that would launch the group on radio around the globe. Ironically the song was added as a filler track, designed to increase the overall running time of the album. Needless to say the band was quite surprised when it became an international hit. Greg Lake discusses the song:
Greg: It was a song I wrote when I was very young. You know, when I'd just really got my first guitar, my parents had bought me my first guitar, and I wrote this song. Interestingly enough in its entirety, everything, it never got changed ever. You know, not because of any reason that I wouldn't change it, it just kind went down like that, you know. It was complete and it got recorded 8 or 9 years later, when ELP was in the middle of - or actually at the end of recording its first album. I find that we want one track short and then the records were final and you had to have 20 minutes a side, or whatever it was, and we were one song short and it was the end of the budgeted studio time and so there was this terrible blank-faced stare, you know, around the studio: "Anybody got any more songs?" And that was all, "Lucky Man" was all there was to do and, I don't really know what it's about, it's a child's vision of what it must be like to be rich and have the nice things in life: "He had white horses and ladies by the score, all dressed in satin and waiting by the door."
Before they even had an album out, the band began playing shows. But unlike most young bands, who start in clubs, ELP made its first global debut at a 3-day music festival, that was the European equivalent of Woodstock. Although they performed one warm-up show in a small theatre, ELP made its debut for the world at the Isle of Wight Pop Music Festival on August 29 for over 500,000 British fans. Since their first album had not yet been released, the audience was not familiar with the music, but responded with thunderous applause nonetheless. The Isle of Wight, with its all star line-up that included Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Free, Sly and the Family Stone, would be a very unnerving experience for the young band, who certainly rose to the occasion. ELP is remembered today for thrilling the audience by firing off cannons on either side of the stage during the climax of its 20-minute version of its classical opus Pictures at an Exhibition. The band further caught the attention of the rock world when it performed its final song, a frenzied version of the old Nice song, "Rondo." For the ending Emerson dragged a Hammond L100 organ to the centre of the stage and proceeded to mount it and extract strange tortured sounds by stabbing the keys with 18-inch daggers. Emerson explains how the dagger routine got added to the act:
Keith: Basically it started when I was playing with a band called the VIP's - they were otherwise known as the V.I.Pills. We were in Hamburg and they had a lot of tablets and so they gave me one. I was awake for 2 nights, offered to drive the bandwagon from France to Germany, crashed the bandwagon. Played onstage that night, went kind of berserk and the band said: "That was really great, you should really do that again". One thing led to another, really. We had as our roadie a guy called Lemmy, who's now the lead singer with Motörhead. I was actually sticking screw-drivers in the keyboard at that time, to hold down notes. I think it was Lemmy who said: "If you're gonna like stick a knife in your hammond organ," he said, "you'd better get a proper one," and he gave me a couple of Hitler youth daggers, because Lemmy has the biggest collection of Nazi war paraphernalia. And that's really how that started. ELP would spend much of the summer of 1970 rehearsing and writing material for its debut album. Having been born out of three established and popular bands, ELP became one of rocks earliest super-groups, often compared from the architectural standpoint to America's Crosby, Stills and Nash.
Keith: Well, the super-group tag was provided by the media. It was as much an over-used word as psychedelic was, I suppose. They kind of aligned us to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, because we, too, used our surnames for our band name. So I guess that because CSN&Y were referred to as a super-group, the tag followed and stuck with us as a consequence. But I think it is an apt description. We were a band formed from three other very successful bands.
Greg: It was one of the first bands that ever had this regrettable title of super-group, you know, which I suppose is fair enough. We do come from well-known bands, but what it does, it thrusts you under the spotlight on day one and you never really get the chance to organically develop the band in the way that one would normally do, you know you normally go out, play a few shows somewhere quiet, get yourself together, you know. The second show ELP played was the Isle of Wight Festival.
Carl: There were lots of silly names which we put into the pot. Things like "Seahorse", I can't remember half of them, but at the time we just thought that using our surnames would be an honest way to put the game, put the actual group to the front.
From: http://ladiesofthelake.com/audiofiles/elpstory.html
