“He was a master of the instrument.”
He created wildly original music, produced new sounds and revolutionised the keyboard player’s role. Oh, and he invented progressive rock…
If the keyboard embodies prog’s spirit, then Keith Emerson embodied the keyboard. He wasn’t the first musician to place the instrument front and centre in rock music, but he was the one who showed it could be just as innovative and powerful as any guitar. Emerson was a craftsman, artist and showman in one: a genuinely revolutionary figure who helped usher in the progressive rock era – an era that has endured to this day.
“Keith Emerson invented progressive rock,” says Lee Jackson, bassist with Emerson’s first great band, The Nice. “I know, because I was there when he was doing it. We didn’t call it that at the time, but that’s what it was.”
“Keith was a genius, no doubt about it,” says Yes/Buggles keyboard player Geoff Downes, an avowed fan of Emerson.
“He absolutely broke down the barriers not just for what you could do with the keyboards, but how you could do it.”
Whether it was with The Nice, ELP or his solo work, Emerson found a way of merging his musical influences – classical, jazz, rock’n’roll – and turning them into something new.
“He was a complex balance of many styles,” says Keith Wechsler, who first met Emerson in 1994 and became his engineer, producer and keyboard tech.
“He would sometimes write in a classical style, but then he’d also write Brain Salad Surgery and Tarkus and things that were much more rock.”
Emerson’s talents were apparent early on. Lee Jackson first met him in the mid-60s, when both were members of Gary Farr & The T-Bones, a soul-influenced pop band based in Brighton. “You could see it coming with Keith,” says Lee Jackson. “Gary Farr said, ‘Wait until you see my keyboard player. I found him playing in the jazz clubs in Brighton.’ The sheer technique and brilliance of his playing was already there. I thought, ‘I’m gonna latch onto you, lad.’”
Even early on, Emerson was pushing at the boundaries.
The T-Bones would play an instrumental set before they were joined by Farr himself. “Keith
“Keith didn’t want to be known as a rock star – he wanted to be known as a composer.”
used to play something for Gary and say, ‘Why don’t we do this as a number,’ and Gary would say, ‘Nah, it’s too avant-garde,” says Jackson. “And it was
Blue Rondo à la Turk, the Dave Brubeck number.”
It was that kind of frustration that led Emerson and Jackson to put together The Nice in 1967. Initially a four-piece featuring guitarist Davy O’List, they were slimmed down to a trio when O’List began missing shows, leaving Emerson’s keyboards to do the job of the guitarist.
“Keith called me and Brian [Davison, drummer] in and said, ‘How do you fancy carrying on as a three-piece?’ We’d done most of the songs in the repertoire. I think he was glad to see the back of having a guitarist.”
Emerson’s next band, ELP, would bear that out. One of the first genuine supergroups, they were ostensibly a collection of musical equals all pushing back the boundaries of what rock music could do. In reality, their sound was defined
more by Emerson’s keyboards than anything else – a mix of rock’n’roll volume, classical grandiosity and technical dazzle.
“There was always jazz or classical music on at home,” says Aaron Emerson, Keith’s son. “He’d never really listen to his contemporaries, like Yes or Genesis. He listened to a lot of Oscar Peterson, Jimmy Smith.”
Those influences fed into
ELP. While their music was undoubtedly anchored in rock’n’roll, Emerson was determined to push back the boundaries of what was expected from the form.
Emerson played many instruments during his career, but he was most famous for his association with the Moog – the groundbreaking keyboard created in the 1950s by Robert Moog.
“He had a relationship with the Moog,” says Wechsler. “He expanded the ability of what someone could do from the Moog, and that comes from the sound that comes out of it and the character you could develop with it. He was a master of that instrument.”
Just as a concert violinist has their coveted violin, so Emerson had his favourite keyboard: a giant modular Moog he played, on and off, for most of his career.
“The world’s most dangerous synth,” says Wechsler with a laugh. “It weighed 600lbs in a road case and it took six people to get it onstage, but it was an iconic part of what Keith came to be known for. When he played the Lucky Man solo on it, it would blow the clothing off the crowd.”
Emerson wasn’t as hung up on the nuts and bolts of the instruments he played compared to many of those he inspired.
“I would not say Keith was the most technical about what was going on inside,” says Wechsler. “The internal workings, the programming, the precise dialling of every knob… He could dig in, but his playing was much more emotional and intuitive.”
That emotion spilled over into his performances. “He saw Hendrix smashing up his guitar and that’s what he wanted to do,” says Aaron Emerson. “He wanted to bring the keyboard up at the front of the stage and be the showman.”
Emerson had introduced an element of theatre into gigs as far back as The Nice. His party trick was to jam a knife into his keyboard mid-song, partly for the spectacle but also to wrench new sounds from it. Equally famously, the idea was suggested by Lee Jackson’s bass roadie, the future Motörhead frontman Lemmy.
“Keith had these little plastic things you had in your shirt collar that he’d stick in the gap between two keys to form a chord, and it would go [pathetic noise] ‘Meep’,” says Jackson. “Lemmy said,
‘What you need is a knife,’ and he produced this Hitler Youth dagger. So Keith got a plank and scored a keyboard into it and just started practising so he could hit the crack between any keys. And it took off from there.”
The man onstage was a world away from the man offstage.
“He was completely different,” says Aaron Emerson. “He was very quiet and reserved and very gentle. He didn’t like going to the big parties. But onstage, something would flip. It was like Clark Kent and Superman.”
Emerson’s onstage antics would have been a gimmick if he didn’t have the skills to back them up. “He had tons of technique and study and craftsmanship, and that had evolved into artistry – you take those tools in your arsenal, and you use them for emotional effect,” says Wechsler. “I witnessed Keith playing the Stones Of Years part of Tarkus hundreds of times, and every time it would be radically different and yet still the same.”
Emerson’s relationship with his ELP bandmates was famously combustible over the years, both together and apart (a tour with Greg Lake in 2010 was almost abandoned after a backstage fist fight on the first night). While the trio undoubtedly had a set of egos that were the equal of each other, Keith Wechsler insists that Emerson was no dictator, musical or otherwise.
“Of course, he was in bands where he had to do large amounts of the musical talking,” he says.
“But he wasn’t the sort of person who had to be solely in charge. In the Keith Emerson Band, it was definitely the partnership with [guitarist] Marc Bonilla that made it work. The duty was definitely shared. It was exhilarating to watch them play.”
Aaron Emerson remembers playing with his father on a handful of occasions, most notably at the Hammersmith Apollo in the 2000s. “I was just standing on the stage, watching him play, and he said, ‘Come on.’ So I got up and had a go. I do remember doing the solo, and after a while he went, ‘Okay, that’s enough…’”
Emerson Sr may have been one of the iconic figures of rock’n’roll, but he wanted to be respected for much more than his work with ELP or The Nice. While he’d always written classical music – either indirectly with his bands or directly as a solo artist – he never felt he’d got the respect he deserved for that side of his writing or playing.
“He didn’t want to be known as a rock star – he wanted to be known as a composer,” says Aaron Emerson. “He loved writing scores. He’d write out all the parts for all the different parts of the orchestra. Towards the end, he was taking conducting lessons, and for his 70th birthday he conducted an orchestra.”
Of course, Emerson will forever be inextricably linked to the instrument with which he made his name. A condition with his hands that made it hard to play reportedly played a part in the depression that would eventually lead to his suicide in March 2016. It was a sad end for a legendary talent, though the music he made and the groundbreaking approach with which he made it live on.
“He originated so much that other people picked up and ran with it,” says his old friend and bandmate Lee Jackson. “But when it came to keyboard players, Keith was right at the top.”