The third entry in Dave Weigel’s excellent and informative history of progressive rock:
With more gigs came more pomp. Ian Dove, one of the New York Times’ rock writers, approached ELP’s December 1973 Garden shows the way a reporter might write about a fully loaded nuclear submarine. The gear — tell us about this gear. ELP had arrived in Manhattan, Dove wrote, with “over 200 separate items of equipment, valued by customs at just over $100,000.”
Among them:
- “Thirteen keyboard units” for Keith Emerson, including a “brand new prototype Moog synthesizer.”
- A $5,000 Persian rug, “for bass player Greg Lake to stand on while playing.”
- A drum kit as complex as a painting by H.R. Giger — he’d designed the nightmare cover to ELP’s most recent album, Brain Salad Surgery — crafted in stainless steel, topped off by an “old church bell from the Stepney district of London,” surrounded by Chinese gongs. If a stage was equipped right, the kit could rotate 360 degrees while Carl Palmer pounded out the solos in “Tarkus.” Cost: $25,000.
Band members got a little tired of talking about all this. Lake showed up for a Rolling Stone interview in cheap jeans and pronounced touring “incredibly tiring.” The excess was the sacrifice the band made for you, the fan. “It is very hard to get something across to 10,000 people with just a piano, a bass, and a set of drums,” Emerson told the Times. “It works fine in smaller places and the recording studio. I always compose on the piano. But in the large arenas where we have to play, everything gets lost.”
Where we have to play — a magnificent early example of the humblebrag.
