Best Musicians I've Seen - 2

OK, the second choice I didn't have to give more than a second's thought to: the best keyboards player I've ever seen was Keith Emerson.

A lifelong friend and I fondly remember one of the first gigs we ever sent to see: Emerson's band The Nice at the Liverpool Phil around 1969. We were already aware of Emerson, who had a reputation and was sometimes called the "Hendrix of the keyboards", from his antics on Top Of The Pops, when The Nice had a  minor hit in 1968 with an unconventional cover of America, the Sondheim-Bernstein song from West Side Story. You know, the bouncy song of Puerto Rican immigrants:

I like to be in America
OK by me in America
Everything free in America
For a small fee in America.....

Except Emerson's take on the song was very different. Schoolmates were agog the next day about the chap who stuck daggers into his (Hammond) organ, ostensibly to hold notes down but more probably just for effect.

Even though I was there at the time, I didn't know the full story behind the song till recently and it's remarkably topical. The Nice hadn't been gigging in their own name long, as well as earning a crust as P.P. Arnold's backing band (you know, she had a hit with The First Cut Is The Deepest, a Cat Stevens song; she also sang backing vocals on the Small Faces' Itchycoo Park) when Emerson conceived the idea of a cover version of America. The band were driving back from a gig in June 1968 when they heard that Robert Kennedy had been shot and killed. Emerson is quoted as saying "That got me thinking. JFK had been shot, then Martin Luther King. It seemed to me that America was ruled by the gun. It's even in their constitution: the right to bear arms." In the era of the protest song, Emerson conceived it as "the first protest instrumental", stripping away the lyrics and using an angry, aggressive sound. Bass player Lee Jackson added a single spoken word line at the end to give a clue and "hammer home the song's bitter irony":

"America is pregnant with promise and anticipation, but is murdered by the hand of the inevitable"

This line was taken from one of the band's songs from their first album, but with the first word changed from "dawn" to "America". It was spoken by P.P.'s 3 year old son. The "bitter irony" was lost on me, as I always wondered what the hell this line was about and didn't have a clue that it was meant to be a protest song about guns.

But there's more. The song was released as a single in June 1968 and, despite being six and a half minutes long, got some radio airplay leading to an invitation to appear on ToTP. The band were asked to cut 90 seconds but  refused. (However, they did appear, I remember it!) But the Nice were also booked to play at an anti-apartheid gig at the Royal Albert Hall with a bizarre variety line up including Sammy Davis jr, jazz stars Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine and the cast of Till Death Us Do Part. The US ambassador was in the audience, though it's not clear if Emerson knew that when he decided to drape a stars and stripes flag behind the band, with a view to setting fire to it at the end of the set, which finished with America. He couldn't get his matches to light but Warren Mitchell provided a lighter. "Up it went" said Emerson. "Everyone went silent. We'd been going down well till then".

The band were quickly ushered off stage. Driving home they found out from Radio Luxembourg that they had been banned for life from the Albert Hall. On the upside, they got loads of publicity and the next evening in Norwich punters were queueing up to get in.  The single climbed the charts, though only to number 21.

The American authorities were less impressed and, on the eve of the band's first US tour later that year, they were summoned to the American embassy and made to swear "on a stack of bibles" (as if) that there would be no more flags burnt. The tour went ahead and Emerson claims to have burnt one more while in America, to the discomfort of his band colleagues.

But Leonard Bernstein wasn't pacified, saying he "loathed what they'd done" and that they had corrupted his work. Emerson met Bernstein a few years later. He says he's met many of the composers of songs he has covered "and got on with them all. And then there's Bernstein.....I'll leave it that he liked my leathers, if you get my drift." (Bernstein was openly gay, Emerson liked wearing leather jackets and trousers).

Many years later Emerson said "It was done to highlight what a corrupt society America was - and still is: if you don't like the president, shoot him."

Emerson wasn't classically trained though his parents were musicians and he had piano lessons from the age of 8 from "local little old ladies". He would walk around with Beethoven sonata scores under his arm, but the fact that he also played Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis meant he didn't get bullied.

Emerson scored a piece with orchestra (I know, several groups did, including Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother and Jon Lord's Concerto for Group and Orchestra, the group being Deep Purple, but  for me Emerson's Five Bridges Suite is the best) and covered many classical pieces (Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Mussorgsky) amazingly convincingly with a 3 piece band (The Nice, then ELP). Not that he met those composers - unless it was in the great concert hall in the sky: sadly Emerson took his own life in 2016, ironically with a gun. He suffered from depression, reportedly because he had nerve damage which hampered his playing and made him worried about performing, but internet trolls might also have been a factor.

The comparison with Hendrix wasn't just about showmanship - Emerson was a virtuoso.  Indeed I can't think of many keyboard players have been anything like as talented in the rock pantheon; Rick Wakeman (who I've also seen)? - maybe.

Emerson's main instrument of choice was the Hammond organ, which he used majestically and abused relentlessly. Not just with daggers, but dragging it around the stage then tilting it backwards then letting it drop at specific points in the music, producing an enormous crashing-hissing sound, probably associated with the amplification, I guess. Remember, kids, this was in the days before synthesisers. Well almost, because Emerson was fascinated by the earliest synthesisers, in particular the experimental inventions of Dr Robert Moog. Emerson was apparently the second person in Britain to buy a Moog synthesiser.

And it wasn't just virtuoso playing and wailing feedback noises that gave Emerson the Hendrix of the Keyboards monicker. His party piece in live performances was to vault over the Hammond, pull it towards him and play the keyboard from the wrong side, backwards as it were, while perfectly holding the tune. Then letting it crash to the floor before resuming his position at the front of the instrument.

Emerson was a very accomplished pianist and  some of my favourite pieces of his work are on the grand piano. Some are played "straight" as it were, but in live shows he would stick a microphone inside the lid and drag it across the strings, with some finger plucks thrown in. Indeed I laboriously edited an example short MP3 clip to add before finding that, as anyone who uploads to youtube knows, it has to be in MP4 format. Yes, I realise you can run a converter but many of them are notorious for putting malware onto your PC so some more research is needed first. If you know a reliable one please do let me know.

I saw Emerson 3 times, once with The Nice and twice with Emerson, Lake and Palmer. While still admiring his playing, I was never a fan of ELP who struck me as pomp rock rather than prog rock. While Lake and Palmer were arguably more competent musicians than their predecessors in The Nice (Lee Jackson and Brian Davison)  it didn't gel for me. And, while Lake was more prolific than Jackson at writing, the band still struggled to come up with material, other than stuff plagiarised from the classics, just as in The Nice. For example, the concept for their second album, Tarkus, was a mutant cyborg armadillo with caterpillar tracks and tank style gun turrets. Eh? I always assumed Lake was culpable for the concept, as he wrote the lyrics, but apparently the idea came from Emerson and a graphic designer and Emerson had to cajole Lake to get him on board. The band shelved their subsequently released competent adaptation of Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition because their record label thought this riduculous tosh was 'more commercial'. Hmm: ok, it was a number 1 selling album, but it's still tosh. It's not just me: while some say it is one of "prog's greatest epics" the reviews at the time were generally unfavourable, including one in Rolling Stone which said "Tarkus records the failure of three performers to become creators. Regardless of how fast and how many styles they can play, Emerson Lake and Palmer will continue turning out mediocrity like Tarkus until they discover what, if anything, they must say on their own and for themselves".

So, as I do, I will listen again and again to Rondo 69, recorded live in America from the 1969 album The Nice - funny, that, as I also listen to Colosseum's live version of Rope Ladder To The Moon again and again (see Best Musicians I've Seen - 1, 30 September) and I don't listen to many live recordings over and over.

Emerson's vituoso playing and visual showmanship, together with his fusion of rock with classical, mark him out as a unique talent; possibly the only one to make such fusion attempts really work. Two other classical adaptations are very much worth hearing. The third movement of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony (Pathetique) is available as band and band plus orchestra recordings. Both are very special but how Emerson, backed only by bass guitar and drums on the band only version, produces something that sounds remarkably like the range of simultaneous melodies of a full orchestra on just his keyboards is a wondrous feat. The other piece was picked up by Emerson when another hero of mine, Roy Harper, turned him on to the Intermezzo from Sibelius's Karelia Suite.  My uncle, whose taste for rock music went no further than Elvis Presley but who was partial to a bit of Elgar, thought it one of the most amazing and wonderful pieces of music he had ever heard. And so do I. Thanks, Roy.

And thanks, Keith.

Sources: teamrock.com (http://teamrock.com/feature/2016-12-10/story-behind-the-song-america-by-the-nice), ultimateclassicrock.com (How Emerson, Lake and Palmer turned a kooky concept into Tarkus), Wikipedia, and lots of my own stuff.