Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [26]
I was stunned, but I managed to mutter something about how those clubs are where most scuffling American jazzmen, lacking either the money or propensity for gimmickry necessary to channel their music through ten thousand monster amps, are forced to play—
“No, they don’t have to play there, those are places they make themselves play—”
—because of the racial, social, and aesthetic conditions prevailing in this country, where quite naturally the watered-down and con-trivedly “palatable” floats the marketstream better than the uncompromising—
“People like Buddy Rich manage to get out and play bigger places. I’m sure that if I were a jazz musician I would never let myself get restricted.”
I’m sure that if you were a “jazz musician” you would be white and no matter how many whooping teenies you could marshal you’d still have to learn how to improvise on some level beyond the sort of hackneyed rock progressions, scales, and Hollywood-burnished cops from the most obvious classical sources, i.e. you’d have to somehow progress as a musician way past the level of Heaviness you’ve attained in your present affiliation.
Keith Emerson never played an interesting solo in his life. Hell, might as well admit it all the way, they’re not even solos, they’re just some guy racing all over a keyboard like Liberace trying to play Mozart behind a Dexamyl OD. To make the crucial distinction, trained fingers might as well be trained seals unless there's a mind flexing behind them.
But that's beside the point, finally. Because this success saga has nothing to do with reality. None of this ever had anything to do with music, either, and even less now than ever before, as the emphasis shifts with subtle firmness from “show” to “spectacle.”
So who cares anyway? That's what I asked Lake and Palmer, referring to their incredibly elaborate stage setting even more than the histrionics that go on within it, which in fact are fairly low-profile except for Emerson. Do you, I wondered, think you’re more theatrical now, and why so?
Palmer: “No, not really. That may be an elaborate set to you; to me it's very basic, it's what I need to perform the way I perform. My drums are not just a piece of engineering, they’re set up medically correct for my body to function the right way behind that drum set, which is just something I have to take into consideration now.”
Oh, kind of like a splint, you mean. That's cool. So where, speaking from the driver's seat, do you draw the line between music and pure effect?
“There's only one kind of effect we do that involves electronics. That's with Keith's synthesizer and the computer at the end of the show. And that effect is created by synthesizers, but music has been written around it, or rather music has been written and that effect was added, because it gave a visual thing as well as an audial thing.”
Okay, your grandeur is established—but isn’t there a point at which you do all this stuff merely for crowd reactions?
“No,” insists Carl. “I do it because I like to be in front. In what I do. On that stage right now I’ve got a hand-built drumset that's engraved, and I’ve got the first percussion synthesizers. I don’t do things for the reaction, I do them because I like to be the first, whether I believe in it 100 percent or not. If I’m doing it, someone else does.”
Yeah. But don’t you ever find that you reach a point where whatever emotional content the presentation might have is overrun and washed away by the technology?
Greg Lake: “Good question. No … no.