ELP legacy lives on
CARL PALMER continues to embrace – and update – prog-rock group’s repertoire
It was July 2010 and Carl Palmer was ready to pull the plug for good.
He and his equally celebrated bandmates, Keith Emerson and Greg Lake, had just played a 40th-anniversary set — their first live gig in 12 years — at London’s High Voltage Festival.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer first disbanded in 1979 and reformed between 1991 and 1998. But this festival reunion was the last time for the trio, as far as the drummer was concerned.
“I said it to Keith and Greg after the concert: that that would be the last time I would be playing with the group,” Palmer remembered during a recent telephone interview.
“I didn’t think the group had maintained a standard, which disturbed me a little. I did rehearse for five weeks to try and do everything I could to make the group sound as good as it possibly could, but I believed we weren’t playing as well as when we had stopped (in 1998). If we had been, I would have been happy to continue. But I didn’t want to tour, produce or play with anything that was second best.
“We always had a very high standard, and my philosophy was to maintain that. I believed we should leave the dream intact,” Palmer said. “That one concert was a thank-you to all the English people who gave us our start. Obviously, it would have been nice to play around the world, but it just was not possible in the shape the group was in — mentally and physically being able to tour and travel. I decided this was the best place to end it. So I did.”
In the course of our conversation, Palmer did not romanticize or wax nostalgic. Asked about the leap of faith he took when approached by Emerson and Lake to join their fledgling supergroup in 1970, he did not mention chemistry, as he has in at least one interview, cited on the website Sing365.com.
Business, Palmer said, was really the deciding factor. A meeting with Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegun convinced him the music they were creating would fly in the marketplace, he said.
“I wanted to see how serious they were about this art form, bringing it into America,” he said. “Basically, America and Canada were, like, blues and jazz. That was about it. And this was a group driven by keyboards, playing classical adaptations, with a choirboy type of voice. How would this go in America? This needed money to go behind it. It needed to be promoted and set up properly. I was convinced by the record company’s enthusiasm for wanting to bring this art form into America and Canada.”
Although Palmer listed ELP’s 1977 concert at the Olympic Stadium as one of the most memorable moments of his career, it’s clear that not all looking back is rose-tinted for him. It rankles him, for example, that his pioneering electronic drum solo in Toccata, from the 1973 album Brain Salad Surgery, is still mistaken by some as Emerson’s work. “This is just one piece of history that is not in place where it should be,” he said, urging his questioner to go back and listen to the recording.
And yet Palmer’s attachment to the prog-rock trio’s back catalogue is still evident on stage, while he tours with Carl Palmer’s ELP Legacy. (Palmer also still tours regularly with Asia, which plans to record a new album this year, he said.)
Palmer’s trio, with personnel changes, has been together for 11 years, he said, and has released three discs: Working Live, Volumes 1, 2 and 3. In its current incarnation, it is bringing ELP favourites like Pictures at an Exhibition, Tarkus, Fanfare for the Common Man and Knife-Edge into a new setting.
Bassist Simon Fitzpatrick helps Palmer anchor the music, but strikingly, keyboards — such a hallmark of the ELP sound — are out, replaced by Paul Bielatowicz’s guitar.
“We’ve reconstructed certain things,” Palmer said. “I thought this was a new, fresh and exciting way to bring ELP’s music to the younger fans. I think the music is still very, very important. To present it in this different way is exceptionally challenging, but it has worked remarkably well. All of the arrangements are slightly different. They’re not meant to be the same. We’re meant to move forward.”
The show, Palmer said, features film footage to illustrate the compositions. The Twist of the Wrist art exhibition is also part of the tour. The images in the exhibition were obtained by Palmer playing in a dark room, with LED lights attached to his drumsticks and a photographer capturing the patterns created by the drummer’s motion.
Palmer said visuals have always been important to him. They’re part of the reason Drum Crazy, known in some countries as The Gene Krupa Story, a 1959 film biography of the legendary drummer, made an 11-yearold Palmer want to take up the sticks.
“When you have a lightbulb moment, it’s to do with image. It’s to do with impression,” he said. “I’m a very visual person, so it wasn’t just the sound I was attracted to. I was attracted to the shapes. I was attracted to the whole demeanour of the guy. The way it was projected, with the lighting, the shadow on the wall of him playing, the way he dressed, the way he looked. And then, of course, there’s the sound of the drums on top of that! When you’re 11 years old, all of these things impress you.
“If we’re lucky in our lives, we’re in that moment in time and all of those things happen to trigger. And they did with me,” he said. “I walked out of that movie theatre and I said to my dad, ‘That’s what I would like to do.’ And I’ve walked down that path ever since.”
Palmer’s path, and the journey of prog-rock musicians in general, was a source of derision to a generation of punk rockers who came along in the late 1970s to tell the world that rock music certainly had nothing to do with Yes, Genesis and ELP.
Palmer’s bandmate Lake, in a Gazette interview last year, pushed back at the punks (“a few idiots wearing tartan kilts and putting gel in their hair. If that’s a cultural movement, then I’m the president of f---ing Korea”), but Palmer was far more conciliatory.
“The punk movement was a social movement,” he said. “It meant that anyone could pick up an instrument and play, and however you played — as long as the energy and the excitement were there — was accepted, even if you only knew two or three chords. It wasn’t just them rebelling against prog-rock musicians being virtuosos; it was them just rebelling in general. And they came out with this exciting music. As far as I’m concerned, it was needed.”
The rock press was no friend, either. “These guys are as stupid as their most pretentious fans,” wrote Robert Christgau, one of the more well-known critics of the era and creator of the Christgau Consumer Guide, assigning a C minus to ELP’s 1972 album Trilogy.
Progressive rock “is not easily accessible as music,” Palmer said. “People don’t understand it quite as easily as they would understand hard rock and wall-to-wall verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle-eight-chorus type of songs.”
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has studiously avoided progressive rock, recognizing only Pink Floyd, Genesis and Rush since its inaugural inductees were honoured in 1986. Seeing ELP in there seems a long shot at best.
“It would be nice to be in there, but it’s not imperative,” Palmer said. “We know what the music meant. We know what the fans said about it. We know how many albums we sold. We know the popularity of the band. It’s one of their losses if they don’t pick us up. But it’s not important.”
Carl Palmer’s ELP Legacy performs April 26 at 8 p.m. at the Gesù, 1200 Bleury St. Tickets cost $52, and are available at the box office or through Admission. Call 514-790-1245 or visit admission.com. For more information on Carl Palmer, visit carlpalmer.com. For further details about the Twist of the Wrist art collection, visit carlpalmerart.com.