The Tapes Archive

Listen to the Keith Emerson interview.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer brought Mussorgsky, Copland and Tchaikovsky to rock ‘n’ roll audiences. And that worked extremely well in the 1970s.

After 14 years apart, the trio is back together and about to find out whether its classical rock will work in the 1990s. Keith Emerson, probably rock’s most talented keyboard player, is moderately optimistic, although he says today’s audiences seem to want music that’s effortless.

“When you’ve got a boy growing up and he wants to attract a female, he sees on MTV that if you wear your baseball cap back to front and you go skipping and dancing, you get lots of chicks,” Emerson says in a telephone interview promoting ELP’s concert Monday at Deer Creek Music Center.

“It’s almost like the younger generation is saying, `It’s got to have a rhythm. You’ve got to dance to it.’ And this is a whole reflection on the way kids are. In my time, you’d impress the opposite sex by playing some good jazz runs. There’s a lot more depth there.”

Mixed success

That’s one of several frustrations Emerson faces as ELP tries to spur interest in its new record, Black Moon, and tour. 

Since 1978, when he, Greg Lake and Carl Palmer broke up their supergroup, Emerson has had mixed results trying to find outlets for his music.

He composed several film soundtracks, including Sylvester Stallone’s Nighthawks, but many people insisted on comparing his solo efforts with widely popular ELP records such as Trilogy, Tarkus and Brain Salad Surgery.

“What I was finding was, whatever singer I did find was always being compared to Greg and whatever drummer I did work with was always compared to Carl,” he says. “And at the end of the day, when you’re writing and composing, you want people to hear your music.”

Emerson also found that keyboards were rarely considered appropriate for rock.

A sales job

“It’s still not a guitar, and I think that in the age of corporate rock ‘n’ roll, they look at the keyboard and say, `It still doesn’t have much of a place in this business. Keyboards tends to belong more to jazz and classical than to rock ‘n’ roll.’

“I disagree, but I’ve a bit of a heavy job on my hands telling them otherwise.”

Finally, Emerson _ whose organ-stabbing, piano-spinning Phantom of the Opera antics helped make him such a memorable performer _ found that he often was better remembered for what he did than what he played.

“Guys who sit behind desks in record companies, I don’t think they have any understanding. Whenever I’ve met any of these record executives, 

Many tunes, actually. Emerson expanded rock’s boundaries, adding everything from classical to ragtime to the landscape. 

As a keyboardist who recognized that guitars ruled rock, he compensated by offering volumes of musical ideas.

“I never felt ELP was a rock band, per se,” Emerson says. “We played in the theater of rock and we used a lot of the vehicles to do that. I think we’re still very much the same way. We do what we feel we have to do.

“I do like the symphonic form when it comes to writing conceptual pieces. But I don’t use it the same way as the classical musicians use it.

“I like a melody to develop and go through modulation. I like exploring different ways of playing a theme _ very much the same way jazz musicians like to take old songs and put some different chords behind it and you listen to it in a completely different way. I find that fascinating.”

Emerson continues to use that format on Black Moon, which includes his arrangement of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.

The record originally started with Emerson working on a movie soundtrack. He was asked to use Lake and Palmer, who also had found limited interest in their work since ELP’s salad days.

They began swapping musical ideas and quickly created five or six songs. Victory Records liked the work and signed the band.

“We became more relaxed, and a lot of this album was composed in the studio amongst the three of us,” Emerson says. 

“In the ’70s, I would write a lot of material on my own and arrange a rehearsal with the band and teach it to them _ and they’d pull it apart.

“It was very hard in those ’70s days to spend a lot of time writing and then you take it to them and they completely pull it apart when you think you’ve written the best thing you’ve ever done. I wasn’t about to get into that this time.”