Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Emerson, Lake & Palmer were never a band I knew a lot about. Like most people, I could name at least one song, maybe two depending on the season. It would be either "Lucky Man" or "I Believe in Father Christmas," but other than that I was more aware of a couple of their album covers. Tarkus was cool and Brain Salad Surgery was mind melting.

The first couple of times through ELP, all I could think was "Man, this is different." Not bad, just different. Challenging in a good way, and when I sit and play this I start on one side and go through to the payoff that concludes the record, "Lucky Man."

While I am not an aficionado of all things progressive rock, I have more than a passing appreciation for complex well thought out musical passages. The early '70s was a strange and wonderful incubator for a lot of really oddball bands who managed to find an audience that was moving past the psychedelic meandering jam bands and was looking for musical meat and potatoes. Yeah I know, back in 1970 (1971 for the rest of us in North America who apparently had to wait and see if we were ready for this stuff) I was all of seven years old and had no idea what was going on unless it was on AM radio. So for me to sit here and wax all pseudo intellectual about a scene I grew up through but wasn't part of is pretty presumptuous.

To be honest this album was about as far away from stuff I was listening to as you can get. Still, being able to move backward through time is a lot of fun. So here I am after about a half dozen plays and I'm really getting into this one. From the opening cut "Barbarian" that was apparently a very heavy arrangement of a classical piece by Bela Bartok from 1911 titled "Allegro Barbaro" (Thank you internet for coughing up that little nugget of information). The twelve minute "Take a Pebble" is a really interesting piece of music, and features a great little acoustic guitar section that then gives way to what feels like an extended improvisational jam but was more likely painstakingly arranged, before resolving to the ending section where Greg Lake sings the song's final verse. The first side closes strong with "Knife-Edge" that is more straight ahead rock with a lot of wicked keyboard work by Keith Emerson, and at the midpoint of the song he's let off leash and goes to town before the song winds down ... literally as the tape grinds to a halt.

Flipping it over the second side is again a showcase for the talents of Keith Emerson as the "The Three Fates" is comprised of three solo sections. The first features a festival hall organ (I can read credits, otherwise I'd have just said it was a churchy sounding thing) and then segues into a solo piano piece and then concludes with a piano trio that was as much a call and response with drummer Carl Palmer that ends with a suitable explosion. It's all pretty interesting and at times a little atonal for me, but not displeasing. I just kept thinking, man the '70s really did have it all. Emerson and Palmer seemed to have so much fun on "Atropos" the final section of "The Three Fates" they just kept going for most of "Tank" until the album's closer "Lucky Man" brought all of the bits and pieces together for a little masterclass in pop magic. This was Greg Lake's showcase, but without the contributions of Emerson, particularly the ending Moog sequence and Mr. Palmer's delicate but driving percussion this would have just been an ordinary rock song.

Admittedly "Lucky Man" was why I picked this up, but in the end I got so much more than I had expected. Who's the lucky man here?

Me.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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