Welcome back my friends...

I've spent the day today reacquainting myself with an old friend.

Before leaving this morning to pick up my car at the garage, I grabbed my copies of the first two Emerson Lake and Palmer official bootleg boxes. 15 total discs of shows from 1971-1977, mostly focusing on 1972 and 1974, with one brief excursion each to 1971 and 1977. Generally speaking sound quality is...variable, and I'm being kind.

But I didn't buy these expecting stellar sound quality.

You see, I am an avid collector of live music, and ELP is a band generally speaking somewhat less frequently or positively presented in a live setting on record in major release format. Yes, there's the 3-LP WBMFTTSTNE release from 1974 (IIRC), which is highly regarded. There's the somewhat less well regarded In Concert/Works Live release. There's Live at the Royal Albert Hall, which is actually better presented in the 3rd bootleg box to the official single CD release. And then there's a spate of re-releases or King Biscuits or live releases from the late 1990s, near the end.

I know when the bootleg boxes were announced there was a general feeling of disappointment over quality...the packaging is slight (although the boxes themselves are nice and sturdy), the sound quality, as I mentioned, is variable. Each show is listenable, so it's not as if you are getting discs of noise and distorted static...at the same time, the first two boxes can't be confused for multitrack board recordings by any stretch of the imagination. Having said this, the third box does include a pair of nice FM broadcasts from 1992 and 1993...after the height of their career, but solid performances indeed, and ones I listen to frequently. I still don't have the fourth box...but I should pick it up at some point.

Anyway...

These shows, these performances...raw and rough as they are...show a band that had no peers at the time. There is an almost palpable energy oozing from the speakers like some primordial force. Ignore the rough quality and pop in the Buffalo 1974 show, and be blown away by the sheer cacophony and ordered chaos that is this performance of Ginastera's "Toccata." I'd wager you'd be blown away. This is a band before the rot had set in...still hungry, still wanting to take over the world with their bastard mix of jazz and classical and blues and rock, with the wildest, dirtiest, most distorted Hammond organ on the face of this or any other planet.

It amazes me today that of the big six bands (Crimson, Yes, ELP, Tull, Floyd, Genesis), ELP is most often overlooked. Perhaps it's because of how precipitously they fell...picture Love Beach or In the Hot Seat. Even at their most pop, Genesis never hit quite as close to rock bottom as either of those. Yet, even on those two releases, there are moments of redemption (the former gives us "Memoirs of an Officer and a Gentleman," while the latter gives us "Hand of Truth," and on the Japanese release, "Hammer it Out") worthy of note and attention.

I only saw ELP live once...in 1996, opening for Jethro Tull at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel NJ. Despite their opening length set (only played 65 minutes, if memory serves), they put on a great show. Keith wasn't riding the Hammond, or plunging daggers into it, and Greg's voice was not the teen aged choir boy voice he once had, but the performance was stately and solid. They certainly blew Tull out of the water on this particular night...at least, that's what this audient's ears remember.

It's a shame they couldn't pull their egos together one last time to create a proper send off album. It's a shame that right now, the tepid, mostly vapid In the Hot Seat will be their final studio recorded output. It's great that all three musicians remain active, but...when a good bit of each's set is based around ELP material, one can't help but wonder...



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