Old Enough to Forget

Once again I doth findeth myself on the receiving end of an earful of baffling wonderment and wtf-ishness. For the purists who grew up with ELP, I realize this album was released overseas in the fall of 1971, but over here it was 1972, and if you were here in North America then it was 1972 for you too. As far as I'm concerned, this is a 1972 release, as that’s what was stamped on the centre of the record. Here we have a live album that astounds with the sheer scope of what this trio was trying to accomplish. Recorded live at Newcastle City Hall on 26 March 1971, the little hall's capacity for an all-standing audience is apparently around 2,600 people. I suspect they played to a full house. With only two albums under their belt, their self-titled debut and Tarkus, proposing a live album only a year or so after arriving on the scene was pretty ballsy. What they wanted to record was their arrangement of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s piano pieces, which he penned to describe...

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 odd ball bands who managed to find an audience that was moving past the psychedelic meandering jam bands and was looking for musical...