Emerson, Lake, and Palmer- Anthology- Carl Palmer, the late Greg Lake & Keith Emerson

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. With The Nice, Keith Emerson quickly developed a reputation for dazzling live audiences with breathtaking keyboard vituosity 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, and 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