“Professional pianists are the only ones who say, ‘I understand why he wanted to kill himself. I would think the same thing’”: Keith Emerson’s partner says his health issues were caused by his fear of letting people down

In 2016 the prog world lost one of its greatest musicians. Keith Emerson was the Hendrix of the Hammond organ, a showman par excellence and a prog rock legend – but offstage he was modest and unassuming. His partner Mari Kawaguchi, son Aaron and daughter-in-law Jo share memories of the man they knew out of the limelight.

“When I first met him, I had no idea who he was,” says Mari Kawaguchi, Keith Emerson’s life partner from 2006 until his death a decade later. She was working at Yale Medical School in Connecticut when she saw a flyer for the Keith Emerson Band playing at Toad’s Place, “this little tiny venue in New Haven.” Having played classical piano since the age of three, Kawaguchi was intrigued – although when the night came, she nearly stayed at home.

“I almost didn’t go because it was raining. I just went to the second half,” Kawaguchi recalls. “I went to the venue and it’s all men in baseball hats with beer bellies. I felt bad for the guitar player who was really shredding – that was Marc Bonilla. So I went all the way to the front just to show them there’s a girl here! I’m thinking Marc must be Keith Emerson because he’s the leader of the band. Some guy was playing keyboard in the darkness on the left.

“After the show all the people around me were like, ‘You have to stay and meet the band.’ So I stood in the line. First was the drummer, then the bass player, then Marc. I’m telling him, ‘Your band is great!’ Next was Keith, really quiet, but smiling really wide. I’m like, ‘Oh, what did you play in the band?’ People around me were like, ‘You don’t know who that is?’”

Despite that unpromising introduction, Emerson was smitten. “He gave me his phone number, his address and how to contact him,” she laughs. “‘Wow, this guy is really friendly!’ He joked about that later: ‘Oh yeah, I gave her my social security number and inside leg measurement.’”

With a promise to meet again at the next show in Pennsylvania, Emerson walked Kawaguchi back to her car. “I thought, ‘How romantic.’ As we were hugging, saying goodbye, the kids from the college were like, ‘Get a room!’ He said later he felt like a teenager. I went to see his show again, he invited me to England, introduced me to his family, and that was the beginning.”

Despite Emerson’s lofty status in the pantheon of prog rock, his musical heart belonged to jazz and classical. “He loved jazz so much,” says his daughter-in-law Jo Emerson. “We always told him, ‘Just release a jazz album; just do jazz.’ He didn’t think he could. I don’t know why.”

But Emerson’s musical knowledge was encyclopaedic. “We used to play Name That Tune with jazz on Spotify,” says Jo. “We would choose some random, obscure tune and play literally the first few notes. He would be able to name the tune, the composer, the year it was made, the record label – and he’d always have an anecdote that went with it.”

In that light, it’s unsurprising to learn that it was the acclaim of jazz and classical musicians that Emerson valued most dearly. Kawaguchi remembers them going to see jazz guitarist Kevin Eubanks, famous as the leader of The Tonight Show band for Jay Leno, at the Baked Potato in Los Angeles. “During the break, I told Keith, ‘Let’s go say hi to them.’ ‘Oh, they wouldn’t know who I am!’”

Undeterred, Kawaguchi took Emerson backstage to meet Eubanks and his band. “I said, ‘Hey, this is Keith Emerson,’ and they froze! All of them are like, ‘I grew up listening to your music!’ The drummer was literally in tears – ‘It’s been my dream to meet you!’ He gave him a big hug. Kevin asked Keith, ‘Are you going to be here for the second set?’ ‘Sure, we’ll stay.’ And they started the second set playing ELP’s The Endless Enigma arranged in a jazz quartet version. Our jaws just dropped. Moments like this were the most meaningful for Keith.”

It happened again when the pair saw the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in the Hollywood Bowl with conductor Gustavo Dudamel. The setlist included Emerson’s Malambo and ELP’s Fanfare For The Common Man, with Dudamel mentioning Emerson by name – unaware he was in the auditorium. “Keith is sitting in the audience, mouth wide open, and he said, ‘I wish my mum could see this,’” remembers Kawaguchi.

“Believe it or not, Keith was the most insecure musician. He often said to me, ‘I’m not good; I’m a fraud, I’m a fake; I’m not as talented as these musicians.’ No matter how much I said, ‘That’s bullshit,’ it couldn’t come from me. But if it came from a conductor and a famous jazz musician, that meant a lot.”

At home in Santa Monica, the only instrument in their apartment was an electric baby grand piano that Emerson played with the volume turned down. Kawaguchi attributes his habit of practising softly to his experiences as a child, when his critical father would seize upon any mistake, however minor. “He learned to practise with a very low volume on a real piano so his father couldn’t hear,” says Kawaguchi.

Nonetheless, when the muse was upon him, Emerson had to let it out. “Sometimes he’d wake up at three in the morning: ‘I have to get to the piano!’ And he’d start playing this beautiful melody. ‘Did you come up with that?’ ‘I didn’t do it. I don’t know where it came from – it’s not from me, it’s from somewhere up there.’ He always said that. I’ve heard other composers say the same thing; that’s why I always say he was from a different planet.”

When ELP reformed in 2010, Emerson was already dealing with focal dystonia, a nerve disorder affecting the fingers on his right hand. As the trio rehearsed at Shepperton Studios, he felt enormous pressure to live up to the fans’ expectations. “It was a nerve-racking time for him,” says Kawaguchi. “Any shows he did, he was very, very, very nervous before them. He had to be alone; he had to meditate to overcome the nervousness and anxiety.”

Emerson, Lake & Palmer -Tarkus / Pictures At An Exhibition (Live At Montreux -1997) HD - YouTube

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“He was very nervous because of his fingers,” says his son Aaron Emerson. “I was there; I thought it was great.” As for the proposed reunion tour that never came to pass, he says, “What I heard was that Greg Lake and Dad wanted to, but Carl Palmer didn’t. He said, ‘Let’s just leave it here.’”

For Aaron, ELP remains an (endless) enigma, because it seemed to be purely a professional arrangement. “It must have been hard for him when there’s only three of you and you’re not friends and you play music,” he says. “They never hung out. They were working partners, they were music writers, but they didn’t have that connection together. Maybe that’s why it worked, but they never hung out socially, and I find that weird because that’s what I’d want.”

As the focal dystonia worsened, Emerson eventually lost the use of three fingers on his right hand, which compounded his worries about letting his fans down. “He was competing with himself; with the 25-year-old Keith Emerson,” says Kawaguchi. “When I talk to my professional pianist friends, they are the only ones who say, ‘I understand why he wanted to kill himself. If my fingers didn’t function any more, I would probably think the same thing.’ People always say, ‘But he could compose; he could teach.’ No. To him, the playing was his number-one thing, and if he couldn’t play, that was it for him.”

Yet away from the pressure of the spotlight, Emerson could relax, unwind and play for the sheer joy of it. “What’s weird is when we went to some bar where there was a piano – ‘Let’s just play for fun; no fans, no critics’ – his fingers came back,” says Kawaguchi. “When we went to Japan in 2013, we went to this tiny dive bar, and the amateur musicians, all my friends, were jamming. Keith started jamming with them. His fingers were fine because he didn’t have this anxiety: ‘I’m being judged, people are watching me, I have to please people; people have paid lots of money.’

“He was free to do whatever; he could make mistakes and just laugh about it. I have a recording of it. Someday I might release that because it was probably the best, longest Tarkus piano solo he ever did, and it was in a tiny dive bar in Japan.”

“I honestly didn’t know much about his focal dystonia with his fingers,” says Aaron. “He didn’t talk about those problems. Then I started to notice in videos that the last two fingers were curling. When we saw him at the Barbican I was like, ‘Why is there another keyboard player on the stage?’”

That 2015 concert featured Emerson performing with the BBC Concert Orchestra, surprising Aaron and Jo by conducting the orchestra on his Glorietta Part 1 and Part 2. Even at that late stage of his career, he was still expanding his horizons. “Before the show, he had somebody come to the house once a week and teach him how to be a conductor, when he was 70,” says Jo.

The legacy lives on in Emerson’s grandson Ethan. “He’s like Keith: music is his whole life,” Jo reports. “He was very inspired by Keith when he was alive because he used to give him piano lessons once; even when he was in America, he would give him piano lessons on FaceTime. Ethan loved having that person to show off to. Even now, he’s still really inspired by him. Keith always told the children that ELP stood for Everybody Loves Potatoes!”

In Santa Monica, Kawaguchi introduced Emerson to the joys of karaoke. After some initial reluctance, he came to love the chance to entertain the unsuspecting punters, taking his grandson along to a bar at the end of Brighton Pier one afternoon. “There was a football match on a big screen over the stage, but at five o’clock it was karaoke time,” says Aaron. “The game was still playing but he wasn’t having any of it. He got up on the stage, pulled the screen down in front of the game, and started singing. I thought, ‘We’re going to get murdered!’ But there was no hostility, just confusion, like, ‘This guy really has balls!’”

“He never took himself seriously,” says Kawaguchi. “Every day was filled with laughter. Even the day he died, earlier that day, we were joking around, laughing. That was our life.”