(ITS) Greg Lake and Carl Palmer of Emerson, Lake and Palmer are featured in a new three part special from the syndicated radio show InTheStudio: The Stories Behind History's Greatest Rock Bands. The show sent over the following details.
If you asked any followers of the white hot London music scene in 1969 to wager on who would emerge as the most innovative bandleader, the smart money would have been on Jimmy Page's Led Zeppelin, King Crimson's Robert Fripp, and the featured soloist fronting a three piece called The Nice, the impressive keyboard player Keith Emerson. So when Emerson surprised everybody by announcing his departure in order to team up with King Crimson bassist, singer, songwriter Greg Lake and Crazy World of Arthur Brown/ Atomic Rooster percussionist Carl Palmer, the stage was set for "the maximum amount of music by the fewest musicians", as Greg Lake tells us.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer elevated the progressive rock movement by taking the synthesizer out of the science lab and onto FM rock radio, where ultimately millions of listeners would respond in favor. "Lucky Man" from their debut may have been their most famous song, and their fourth album Brain Salad Surgery may have been their best seller, but 1972's Trilogy came at the high watermark of progressive rock's quality and popularity, and has remained a favorite over years of changes in rock music.
The final curtain did indeed come down on "the show that never ends, my friends..." in March of this year with the sudden death of Keith Emerson. The keyboard maestro had been struggling with a repetitive stress injury in his right hand for almost twenty years, according to Carl Palmer. "In July 2010 we played the High Voltage Festival, one of the first Prog Rock festivals�and I noticed that the standard we reached really wasn't where we'd left off�Keith understood immediately. He's a realist. He knew the game was up."
Check out part one here, part two here and part three here.
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