Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [23]
The Real Paper, April 23, 1975
(Reprinted in June 1975 Creem)
2The New York Times pop critic who was nearly universally reviled for being one of the few to actually pan Sgt. Pepper.
3The L.A. prosecutor's book about the Manson Family.
Blood Feast of Reddy Kilowatt!
Emerson, Lake, and Palmer
Without Insulation!
Emerson, Lake and Palmer must be the biggest group in the world. It's not just that all their albums are chart sensations. What really makes ELP a dinosaur potentate is the sheer scale of the noise they emit. With ELP we’re swatted into the new age of totally Technologized Rock. This is robot music mixmastered by human modules who deserve purple hearts for managing to keep the gadgets reined at all.
I went, I saw, I drowned. There was no choice. Arenas are arctic huge, but ELP has finally met the challenge of the arena and emerged the huger gnats. Three limos, three dressing rooms. Three egos exploding tight as a rapacious cyclotron and slick as Gorgo's dildo. Backstage the equipment crates clog the hallways like mainlined boulders. It takes the roadies five hours to set up, five more to break down later.
The sight of the massed ELP arsenal would chill the follicles of H. G. Wells. Synthesizers, donchaknow, up the bung: “keyboard wizard” Keith Emerson's has not only its requisite computer but its very own TV set. Carl Palmer has the world's first synthesized drum kit, which (but natch) he himself conceived with p’raps a little help from Keith's personal friend Rob Moog (inventor of samenamed instrument). This martial array of percussion also includes a libertine bell and two Arthurian-table sized gongs upon which a Chinese dragon cavorts leering in phosphor. As for Greg Lake, he mostly just switches tween his guitar and bass, but he's got enough amplification behind them two mantas to blow the Pentagon to Patagonia.
If there is an energy crisis, these guys amount to war criminals.
Even they don’t know how much of this shit they’re carting around with ‘em. I tried to pry the techfax outa one of their roadies, but he mumbled so mungish that when I transcribed the tape all I could make out of the murk was: “28,000 … amperes … voltage … watts … ‘ousand more as well… plus which… urrrhhhhh….” Living in cybernetic caves. Elsewhere I glean totings of over 200 separate pieces of equipment, worth over a hundred grand. Including of course a brand new Moog, which is only one of the thirteen keyboards Keith packs for the road. After all, his nickname is Fingers.
You can readily comprehend the anticipation of meeting anybody who could churn it out so relentlessly. Those old stories of Keith Emerson actually stabbinghis poor piano with a knife were enough to make you wanna shake the hand of such an impudent little devil. He flashed nary a dagger this night, but more than compensated when he vaulted off the stage waving what looked like a theremin around, nearly decapitating several coeds and a rentacop to forzak of supra-WHIIINE! Reclam-bering onstage, he capped even his own show by wiping his ass with it: WZZEEEEEE!
So you can further imagine our tragic letdown when we got back to the dressing room and learned that Keith refused to talk to us at all; something to do, it seemed, with a Creem review of ELProduct which Keith had apparently taken personally.
“Yeah, Keith took the review heavy, man,” sighed ELP shepherd “The Big M.” “He didn’t wanna do photos or nothin’.” Historically footnoting, the review in question was Alan Niester's assessment of Pictures at an Exhibition, which perhaps offended Keith by comparing the acquisition of his albums to bubblegum card collecting: “Thus, since I