Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Beyond the Beginning

ELP was the first progressive band that caught my interest back in 1973, and it was initially for the music of Greg Lake that I was hooked. For maybe two decades I never again listened to ELP, or indeed any of the bands that I got into in the mid-Seventies. I followed the trends of the day, punk, new wave and finally bland pop, through the Eighties, until the Nineties came and I found music so goddamn awful that I made a conscious decision to retrace my steps and rediscover the music of my youth. In the meantime a lot of the early bands I'd come to believe were immature - simply because I'd been a kid at the time and they must have been immature for me to have liked them. So I had to discover them all over again. The only exceptions to this were the real classic bands - the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull. I got a compilation of ELP and was shocked to discover that apart from the Greg Lake ballads I really didn't know the music at all. Worse yet, my family couldn't stand the discordant Emerson instrumentals and I had to often switch it off. But I became hooked and now own just about everything by ELP. From there I also expanded into other progressive bands, firstly King Crimson, Yes, Genesis - but to me ELP represents the very heart of what progressive music is all about. It is the best. I was a bit apprehensive about this DVD considering some of the negative reviews, but for once a DVD exceeded my expectations. I normally spend more time reading the negative reviews, as glowing positive tributes are really not to be trusted. I look for balance and objectivety. A notable highlight for me was Carl Palmer. I normally don't pay much heed to drummers, but Carl (along with Keith Moon) are the only drummers I find noticeable. His drumming is quite unbelievable. I expected virtuosity from Emerson and an excellent voice from Lake, but I'd had no expectations of Palmer. He is amazing. The most important feature of ELP is the one I haven't yet mentioned, and that is the quality of their compositions. I have long believed that the secret to success of many bands is the intensity of competition between composers, such as Lennon and McCartney, and Lake and Emerson. Although I now prefer the Emerson compositions, I still believe ELP would be nothing without the balance between the Lake and Emerson songs. Endless, frenetic, discordant Emerson compositions might just be unlistenable, but interspersed with pretty Lake compositions, and it's a masterpiece.

I'm a musician, and music fan in general. I love progressive rock (ELP, Yes, early Genesis -- the usual suspects) as well as many other types of rock, other genres, etc. This is probably my 5th ELP DVD, and it finally gives me what I've been waiting for -- the band in its magnificent early-to-mid 70's heyday. Never mind the grainy video quality and jumpy edits of some of the footage -- who cares? The point here is not to show off your plasma TV or surround system -- the point is to witness a historical artifact of sorts, a window back in time to an incredible (and sadly lost) era of true musicianship and vision in the world of popular music. It was a time when musicians (and yes, they were virtuoso musicians then, with no shame attached to the title) could experiment and create astonishingly fresh and innovative music, to a public that was not brainwashed by media empires, and who eagerly accepted the works of these gifted masters. It wasn't "uncool" to be a recognized craftsman with your instrument (or voice). It wasn't "required" to conform to the mass media's idea of "what pop should sound like". It wasn't necessary to stick to the same production techniques, the same in-your-face compression on every band's vocals, the same drum loops and sampled blasts of noise used over and over (loops and samples didn't exist; there were actual humans who actually played their instruments). I won't attempt to repeat what has already been said about this DVD -- but one of the things that most impressed me was the Bonus Footage on Disc 1, called "ELP rehearsing in 1973" (!). It actually showed the band in the studio, painstakingly going over an intricate passage from Brain Salad Surgery's "Karn Evil 9, 2nd Impression. From our vantage point of the present, one tends to look back upon works like these as "immortal; set in stone; eternal". But the reality was that they were written, and orchestrated, and arranged, by actual guys in their early 20's, joking around in a studio, and coming up - note by note - with pieces of music that would be destined (unbeknown to them at the time) to become classic and, yes, immortal. It would be like "seeing" a young Mozart sitting in his music room, composing one his great works, one note at a time, and seeing just how "human" he really was -- how young, how silly, how brilliant. That's what this was like -- it injected a dimension of humanity and reality into a piece of music that I tend to think of as "larger than life". It's also funny how we tend to think of our heroes as "aging as we do", and thus always being our contemporaries. Of course, in the chronological sense, we all do age on the same timeline. But the Keith Emerson that composed Tarkus was a young, brash guy in his mid-20's. The Greg Lake that penned "Still...You Turn me On" was - to me, now 46, just a kid. It's strange that a 46-year old's "heroes" are all "kids"...! Buy this DVD. Don't get it for the immaculate picture or the razor-sharp editing -- they aren't there. Instead, look at it as a window into the musical past -- a past of stupendous freedom and creativity that, with the onset of an interconnected, Internet-based, individuality-smothering society, may never be again.

やはりついつい目が行ってしまったのは1972年の日本公演．東京12チャンネルの生中継と再放送をかぶりつきで見ていました．ディスク２には『展覧会の絵』の前にちょっと間があいたときの「おらーどーしたー」の声がまんま入ってます． インタヴューでも日本公演の思い出に時間が割かれています．ライナーにも書いてありますが，大阪での騒ぎも触れられていました． 当時ＬＰ１枚やっと買うことができた値段で充分満足することができました．小生も第１期クリムゾン総出の'Cat Food'（これも口パクだそうですが）を見てみたかったと思います．

I am also on my second set, and it is freezing up part way through disc #1 (as did the first set that I ordered). There must be a manufacturing defect. Thank goodness for Amazon's no hassle returns policy though.

国内盤が高かったのでこちらを買いました。 もしやと淡い期待をかけましたが間違いなくリージョン１でした。残念。 内容については、やはりどこかで見たことがあるものがほとんどで目新しいものは無かったようです。 ただまとめて見られるというのは便利かもしれません。 画質は元が元なんでしょうが、あまりよくありません。 特にカル・ジャムの映像はブートに毛がはえた程度でちょっとがっかりしました。 コンセプトとしてはレッド・ツェッペリンの二番煎じなんでしょうが、あちらほど入魂というわけでもなさそうです。 ２枚のディスクで映像がほとんど使いまわししているので、ボリュームのわりには満腹感がありませんでしたね。 クリムゾンの映像は期待外れ。Top of Popsの"Cat Food"出してくれないですかねぇ～

配達まで約一ヶ月、３０年来のハードコアなファンなので本当に楽しみしていた。ただ、地域制限で日本では聴けないものを買っても仕方ないし、売る方もなァ。まさかと気が付かなかった方が悪いんでしょうねぇ。 でも諦めずに日本で視聴できるものを探そう