In 2016, marking Keith Emerson’s death at the age of 71, Prog looked back on the composer’s early years leading up to the formation of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
Keith Emerson once admitted that he began to play piano while at school as a means of survival. “I was very studious and I kept in the background,” he said. “I used to walk around with Beethoven sonatas under my arm. However, I was very good at avoiding being beaten up by the bullies – I could play Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard songs, so they thought I was kind of cool and left me alone.”
His love of music was wide-ranging, and he was particularly influenced by the jazz great Dave Brubeck in his formative years, which can be heard on 2015’s Keith Emerson Trio album. Recorded in his parents’ living room in 1963, this very early example of his style takes influence from boogie woogie and classical music.
By 1965 he’d had moved from Sussex to London, and joined Gary Farr And The T-Bones. He started to merge his influences, ranging from Brubeck and Fats Waller to Bach, Aaron Copland, Oscar Peterson and Shostakovich. He was also becoming increasingly adept on the Hammond organ, with which he’d become so closely associated.
When The T-Bones started to fall apart, Emerson briefly joined British R&B band The VIPs. During a gig with the group in France, he began to develop a more flamboyant approach – when a fight broke out in the crowd, he was told to keep playing, coaxing some unusual sounds from his Hammond by rocking it back and forth and climbing on top of it. It stopped the fight, and he was encouraged to carry on playing in this manner at subsequent shows.
In early 1967 he was invited to form a band to back American soul singer PP Arnold. He agreed, as long as the band in question could also play their own set; and so The Nice were born. In August that year they landed a major break when they appeared at the National Jazz & Blues Festival in Windsor. Their performance attracted significant attention, and when Arnold decided to return to America, her manager Andrew Loog Oldham took them on.
Over the next couple of years – first as a four-piece and then, after guitarist Davy O’List left, in their more readily recognisable form as a trio – The Nice became of one the most celebrated bands in the burgeoning progressive movement, releasing four albums, as well as achieving a hit single with their version of Leonard Bernstein’s America.
Their performance of the piece at the Royal Albert Hall in 1968 created huge controversy. “It was a charity event,” said Emerson, “and I decided to burn the Stars And Stripes when we did the song. It didn’t go down well, and we were banned for life from the venue.”
Around that time he started to stick knives into the Hammond. “You got a great sustain from sticking knives between the keys,” he explained. “At first, I used ordinary kitchen knives. But Lemmy – who was a roadie for us – said that if I was gonna do that then I should use proper knives. He gave me some of his collection of World War II German knives, which were much bigger.”
Emerson also began to use the Moog synthesiser, with became another mainstay of his career. “I heard Switched On Bach by Wendy Carlos and I was fascinated by the strange sounds. So I bought a Moog and I was the first rock musician to tour with one. It was a bloody nightmare, but Robert Moog, who invented it, helped me enormously.”
In 1970 he Emerson decided to move on and The Nice split up. “I felt there was nothing left for us to achieve,” he explained. “I wanted to put together a new band to take what The Nice had done to another level.” He chose to work with former King Crimson bassist/vocalist Greg Lake and child prodigy drummer Carl Palmer, who’d previously been with Atomic Rooster. And so Emerson, Lake and Palmer were born.
ELP helped shaped progressive music in the 70s, and they were also one of the biggest rock names of the era. Emerson became a unique showman who upstaged the guitar heroes of his generation. Whether rocking his keyboards back and forth, leaping across the Hammond or playing from a prone position with the instrument on top of him, he transfixed audiences.
He even played a grand piano that levitated and spun above the stage on ELP’s 1973-’74 American tour. “We used it for the first time at Madison Square Garden,” he recalled. “People in the audience were so astounded. In 1974 the California Jam came up, and we had to do it there – when the piano went up it was literally over the heads of the audience.”
With ELP, Emerson was responsible for introducing a new generation of fans to the music of great classical composers such as Copland, Mussorgsky and Bartok. He also displayed great diversity as a composer himself. Despite the onstage theatrics, Emerson wanted to be recognised more for his artistry than as an entertainer.
“First and foremost, I am a composer. When I think of entertainers in music, I think of people like David Bowie, who created characters onstage. I was nothing like that. If I had to choose between artistry and entertainment, I’d have to say that I’m more of the former. But I’d like to be known as a composer before anything else.”
