ELP poster by Tadanori Yokoo

Five years ago I wrote a piece here pondering the musical question: “Emerson, Lake & Palmer, do they suck?” I wasn’t really trying to do a troll post per se, but naturally I realized that taking that sort of mildly confrontational approach might rile up some strong feelings in readers, and generate some extra page views in the process. In that earlier posting I listened to each core ELP album in chronological order over the course of a weekend. I found it difficult going and said as much. There were dozens of comments, most of them telling me how stupid I am and how I’m not intelligent enough to be able to properly appraise ELP’s superior musicianship, etc. A few agreed with me, but they seemed to be the younger ones. (You never want to slag off Rush online unless you welcome a torrent of abuse being hurled at you and the same seems to be true of ELP fans. Those old dudes will CUT YOU.)

This wasn’t the first time that I’d attempted to get into ELP.  Oh no. I had several of their records when I was a little kid. I had bought them at a yard sale for 25 cents each, but apart from their fantastic album covers, the music did not appeal to me at all. Clearly they had no appeal for my neighbor, either, as he was selling them off four for a dollar. More than anything else, I think their albums just confused me. At that age I was still figuring out what I liked vs. what I didn’t like. As “differentiation” was still a new concept to me, it wasn’t, well, obvious why so many people liked them when I didn’t. ELP was even tied with Led Zeppelin for tour grosses in 1974. They sold over 25 million records. They were HUGE.

When I was 12, Emerson, Lake & Palmer played a gig in my hometown which was famously recorded for the King Biscuit Flower Hour radio show. I could have gone, but turned my nose up at the offer of a free ticket. By then I was into punk and ELP were the enemy. Ridiculous, I know, but that’s the kind of kid I was. Music and perceived tribal allegiances were so important then and I was militant in my tastes, even at that age. By the time they were on my kiddie radar screen, Emerson, Lake & Palmer had already gone from being the supergroup exemplars of “progressive” rock to being a known quantity unable to take their limited formula anywhere new. Everyone knew exactly what it meant when ELP were referred to as “dinosaurs.”
 

 
As I got older I might pick up a used ELP album if it was in good shape for the sole purpose of (once again) trying to figure out “Do I like this or do I hate this?” And I still couldn’t decide. I think I wanted to like them or at the very least to understand their appeal to others. Nevertheless, the answer to that question would always be “some of it is undeniably brilliant, but...”—and it’s a rather big twerking but in the case of Emerson, Lake & Palmer—each of their albums contain tons of uninspired, noodling-around filler material. The ratio of filler to brilliance on their records hovers around 60/40 if you ask me. Too much showoffy, note-crammed Yngwie Malmsteen-ish “virtuosity” as opposed to actual good songs. My marathon ELP listening session only served to amplify that perception. In other words, the filler nearly smothered the good stuff. From that earlier post:

At their best, ELP could be sublime. No really. Carl Palmer is a truly great drummer. Keith Emerson is a keyboard god. Greg Lake, that man could sing! At their worst, they sound like three goofballs whose best idea was to rip off B. Bumble & The Stingers’ “Nut Rocker,” play it on the Moog and add an orchestra! Their problem isn’t their musicianship, it’s the fact that they have terrible, terrible tacky taste.

My wife politely inquired at one point “What the fuck is this shit?” When I told her, she rolled her eyes, shook her head and walked away from me, disappointed.

I’m rarely that negative on the blog. Normally I only write about things I’m enthusiastic about. I have trouble with the notion of a rock group playing classical music. It’s ultimately silly—who really prefers to listen to Tchaikovsky played on a synthesizer, bass and drums over a full orchestra???—and kinda pointless. I mean, why not write your own symphonies? Much of ELP’s material was highly derivative, almost novelty songs. They DID cover B. Bumble & The Stingers’ “Nut Rocker” for Chrissakes!
 

 
So here we are again, five years later. I was offered a review copy of the new four LP release of the Emerson Lake & Palmer: The Anthology box set. For whatever reason I felt like suiting up and going in once again, like maybe it was on me and that I was the one still not getting it, so I accepted the challenge and decided to take a very open-minded approach to the task…

Much more after the jump…

 
If the early works of prog-metal eclecticists Lucifer’s Friend aren’t on your radar, you’re missing out. Their incredible self-titled debut sat comfortably between Sabbath, Purple, and Zeppelin, and easily equaled all three bands on the mohs scale, establishing norms that would eventually serve as an acknowledged influence on plenty of underground metal to follow, especially doom. (The horn parts on “Ride the Sky” also sparked a still unsettled debate over whether they or Zeppelin ripped off “Bali Ha’i” first…) Their second album, Where the Groupies Killed the Blues, spiked that sound with tricky, meandering, jazz-inspired passages, adding another layer of depth. It was pretty much all downhill from there—I’m Just a Rock ‘n’ Roll Singer was a disappointing stab at commercial hard rock that just sounds like better-Styx-meets-worse-Grand-Funk, and though they’d rebound with 1974’s Banquet, they never again reached their early heights. The predominately German band’s lone English member, singer John Lawton, bailed in the mid-‘70s to join swords-and-sorcery-rockers Uriah Heep, and the band continued with various lineups until 1982. A 1994 reunion under the name Lucifer’s Friend II wasn’t worth the trouble, and they released another reunion album, Awakening, earlier this year. I haven’t heard it, but the fact that keyboardist Peter Hecht isn’t on it doesn’t bode well. I could be wrong.
 

That’s Lawton on the left. You can disregard him for the rest of this post.
 

 
Contemporary to the band’s early, top-shelf work, Lucifer’s Friend minus Lawton had a lesser-known symphonic rock project called the Pink Mice, whose two albums, In Action and In Synthesizer Sound, are both worth digging for. Both albums are entirely comprised of rock versions of classical pieces, but unlike ELP’s tediously bombastic, showoffy take on that shopworn prog conceit, Pink Mice actually ROCK. Check out their update of Beethoven’s indelible “Für Elise” and “Moonlight Sonata.” Shit gets hectic about five and a half minutes in…
 

 
Here’s “Anita’s Dance, ” from Edvard Grieg’s music for Peer Gynt, act 4. Awesome, but even though a million other prog bands have done it, I wish they’d also recorded “Hall of the Mountain King” from act 2. You’d know it if you heard it.
 

 
More Pink Mice after the jump…

Yes, Relayer, 1974
 
The art of Roger Dean is synonymous with prog rock, and for very good reason. Dean’s dreamy scapes and ethereal use of line and color are such an integral part of the genre, a Yes album cover has just as much cultural resonance as the music itself (and has arguably inspired many imitators). Born to an engineer father in the British Army and a mother who studied fashion design, Dean was primed from an early age not just towards aesthetics, but with a regard for space and balance of form. A childhood spent primarily abroad in Greece, Cyprus and Hong Kong may have cemented his love of the exotic vista.

Now, any ole’ blog could give you a listicle of awesome Yes album covers (and awesome they are), but we here at Dangerous Minds feel the lesser-known creations of Dean are just as fascinating. In art school, he actually studied industrial design, focusing on silver-smithing and furniture design—perhaps predicting his penchant for combining modern and ancient visuals. His professional career began with the sea urchin chair—a sort of bean bag chair with a brain that conformed to the sitter’s body (the way bean bag chars are actually supposed to, but never do).

Dean also designed the “retreat pod” featured in A Clockwork Orange and the distinctive seating for Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in 1968. That same year, he did his first album cover for a band called Gun, a promising piece that hints at his developing style. His first album cover for Yes was Fragile in 1971 and Dean designed the now-classic Yes “bubble” logo, which first appeared on the Close to the Edge cover. His name and reputation has been closely associated with Yes—and prog rock in general—ever since. Dean’s work has still remained diverse in genre however. He even specced out a green “Home for Life” living space that might as well be from one of his paintings.

The man himself is famous for saying, “I don’t really think of myself as a fantasy artist but as a landscape painter,” and it’s the principles of landscape drafting that make his work so fascinating. His anthology, Views is a fantastic collection of his work, and a beautiful study of a seminal artist.
 

Sea Urchin chair designed by Roger Dean, first produced in 1964
 

A Telegraph spread on Dean’s “retreat pod” chair, which was featured in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
 

Gun, Gun (1968), Dean’s first album cover
 

“Earth and Fire, Earth and Fire” (1970), very reminiscent of the windows in Dean’s later architecture
 

The original Virgin Records logo (also known as the “Gemini” or “Virgin Twins” logo) from 1972. A variation on this logo was used for the Virgin spin-off label Caroline Records.
 

Roger Dean’s “Green Castle,” early 70’s
 

“Freyja’s Castle,”  finished on daughter Freyja’s first birthday, 1987
 

Model of Dean’s “Home for Life”
 

Interior view of Dean’s “Home for Life”

 
When you work on a blog, you have to deal with the occupational hazard of Internet trolls on a daily, even hourly, basis. Being told how fat, old, ugly, ignorant, that you’re “on Obama’s payroll” and stupid shit like that throughout the day gets old really fast. Moderating the Disqus thread in the morning means you take your coffee with a nice slice of invective, even for the most innocuous things (like the idiot I banned who reacted to me posting a Neil Sedaka video—Neil fucking Sedaka!—as if I was the biggest fool on the planet, that my shitty taste in music had made me the goat boy laughingstock of the entire Internet, etc., etc. Why all the hate for Neil Sedaka, buddy? Forget your meds that day?).

In any case, this morning, I happened upon an especially inane string of LOL moments courtesy of a YouTube comment thread supposedly about the nearly forgotten early 70s British prog band Atomic Rooster (former members of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown).

What do any of these comments have to do Atomic Rooster? Nothing, not a blessed thing:
 


 
These comments reminded me of Brit wit Adam Buxton’s recent series on Sky HD in the UK, Adam Buxton’s Bug. Bug is ostensibly a show about music videos, but the music videos themselves are really just an excuse to give Buxton a reason to do his hilariously droll comic readings of YouTube comment threads. Here he is reading the thread for Die Antwoord’s “Enter the Ninja” video:
 

 
After the jump, the Atomic Rooster clip for “Devil’s Answer” that begat all this silliness…

 
And that’s a good enough reason to post this fantastic piece of music. The Ash Ra Tempel guitarist’s early 80s solo album has been a massive influence on house, prog rock, techno, ambient, kosmiche and electronica but is worth hearing in its own right too. It still sounds remarkably fresh to this day.

E2-E4 was re-released by Gottsching in 2007, and there are still some copies of this edition floating around if you have the money to spare. It’s worth it - the album is a crate-digger’s classic and I am ashamed to admit that I only have a bootleg vinyl copy.

You can still hear it online, though. At over an hour long E2-E4 is the very definition of “epic,” but if you have the time to spare, and can get past the 6 parts YouTube hurdle, it’s a journey I highly recommend:

UPDATE:
Thanks to Doctor Oxygen for posting the full, unbroken E2-E4 in the comments:
 

 
Thanks to Brian Morrison and Barry Walsh.
 

 
Yes, that’s THE Goblin, Italian prog supremos and soundtrack authors of Suspiria, Dawn Of The Dead, Tenebrae, Deep Red and more. Not only will this be the first time the band have played in Scotland and the North-West, but this will be their first shows in the UK featuring founder member Claudio Simonetti.

I know, right?! I haven’t been as excited about a gig in years!

OK, I know this is only relevant to readers in the UK, but amazingly there are tickets left for both shows (why haven’t they sold out?), so if you live in Newcastle/Gateshead or Glasgow, there’s still time to catch the band in action. I’ve had my ticket for ages - it wasn’t cheap but it wasn’t extortionate (£22 inc booking fee - it’s cheaper in Gateshead) and this is GOBLIN we’re talking about here. Beloved of horror afficianados, prog rock fans, electronica and dance artists, break spotters, goths, metal-heads, sleuths, zombie hunters and Black Forest headmistresses alike.
 
 
 
Tonight Goblin play at The Sage in Gateshead, with support from Warm Digits.

Tomorrow they play The Arches in Glasgow, as part of the city’s Film & Music Festival, with a special occult-cinema manifestation from the band OV.

Tickets are available directly from the venues (follow the links above) or from Ticketmaser (here’s links to The Sage and The Arches).
If you don’t go, here is what you are missing:
 
Goblin - “Tenebrae” live in Paris 2009
 

 
Goblin - “Suspiria” live in London 2009
 

 
Goblin - “Profondo Rosso” aka “Deep Red” live in Paris 2009
 

 
Previously on DM: