The Emerson of Emerson, Lake and Palmer – Put Prog on notice that mayhem was involved.

Opting for a kinetic lunch this Friday. A concert from the Nassau Coliseum on February 9, 1978 by none other than Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

If there was a band that was going to epitomize what 70s Prog were about to many people, it was Emerson, Lake and Palmer, or ELP as time went on. They were a staple in the diet of FM Underground, and along with Yes (and later, Genesis) formed the backbone for a genre of music that took everything a few steps further.

ELP had Keith Emerson – for the most part ELP were Keith Emerson – he, with the most highly charged stage presence in Rock Music at the time, whose onstage love-hate relationship with keyboards took on mythic proportions by sheer decibels. Laid-back, they were not. But each were virtuosos in their own right. Greg Lake, one of the founding members of King Crimson and Carl Palmer, whose tenure with Atomic Rooster put him in good stead for keyboard-based bands that were not run-of-the-mill..

This was during a time Rock was filling arenas, and filling them handily. An ELP concert was a must-see event guaranteed to have your ears ringing for weeks afterward. And even though the basic premise of Prog was about the music, having the extra added bonus of visual pyrotechnics helped the whole genre along and gave it that extra added appeal to the mainstream audience.

This concert is pretty well along in the career of ELP – they were expected to leave an indelible impression and the almost obligatory destruction of at least one Hammond on stage was the thing everyone was waiting for. Interestingly, that we had a period of time in the 60s and 70s where destroying instruments on stage was a common conclusion to a concert – a sort of exclamation point in that no encores were forthcoming or, to get all romantic about it – the band’s way of saying “we gave it our all for you” Either way, it signified the end of an evening and it was time to go home drained, stoned out of your brain or both.

Of the three, only Carl Palmer is still with us and we’re pretty much left with a rich back catalogue of music to be discovered (if you haven’t already) and concerts like this, to remind you an Emerson, Lake and Palmer concert was truly “a show that never ends”.

You almost had to be there, but as consolation, crank this one up and pretend you’re two feet away from the stage. That’s what it was like.

Enjoy lunch and enjoy the weekend.