RS: You paid your mom a tribute when you wrote Glorietta... Keith interrupted that question with a laugh, and told me that she didn't recognize that he had written that piece for her. He told me that her favorite piece was the piano solo, Close to Home. Close to Home is one of the most poignant, almost sentimental piano pieces ever written by a modern day composer. I remember a story told by a woman who was listening to Keith play Close to Home in the living room of Will and Candy Alexander, when she broke down into tears, much like a Tibetan Monk spontaneously combusting. According to Cathy, Keith stopped the playing and went over to Cathy to embrace her. I continued to praise Glorietta, talking about the phrasing and the arrangement. Mentioning Beethoven's famous statement that great music happens 'between the notes', I asked Keith if he could indeed relate to that.

KE: I absolutely can relate to that. Gustav Holst once said 'don't compose anything, unless the not composing of it becomes a perfect nuisance to you'. That kinda fits how I write. It's an annoyance sometimes. You get an idea for a song, a piece of music, a piano piece, an orchestral piece - at the most inopportune moment. When I'm doing this - or answering mail, I'll get this pressure in my head, and I tell myself, I'll do it later. But the pain says go to the keyboard now, and do it. It takes me out of my daily routine. So I go to the keyboard, I jot it down, and go back to what I was doing. Suddenly, it comes up again, and I have to go back to the piano and try that...'oh shit', and finally I'm so totally wrapped up in it, putting that root note with that chord (or whatever) I'm totally wrapped up in it.

RS: So the composition becomes a living thing?

KE: Oh, very much so. It evolves.

RS: So the genesis of a composition begins with a nagging feeling deep within you?

KE: Yes, and you don't want to lose that moment. "Don't compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a perfect nuisance to you". You've got to do it, or you'll lose that moment.

RS: Does the frustration level ever build to an intolerable intensity?

KE: No, it never does unless, when you finish it, something else happens, and you move onto something which is even bigger. No, it's never a nuisance. I consider everything I compose a gift.

At this point, things were going great. Obviously, this wasn't going to be a matter of 'give this bloke an interview so he'll take the frigging site down'. Keith was animated, eager to share. Maybe he was relieved I hadn't asked him to 'pull my finger', and that I was behaving, or maybe it was that the questions were earnest, and was taking him places he hadn't gone in awhile. My questions, jotted down on a legal pad had long since been abandoned, and we were having a real conversation. I imagined how different it would have been if I had been talking to John Lennon. Keith had been right up there with him on my heroes list.

I remember that day in Music Appreciation 101 at Cal State Northridge, when Terry Bowers, a part time operatic tenor and music professor had brought in a copy of Pictures at an Exhibition. This was 1974. He put it on the turntable. I still remember it. Half the class went out to buy the original. When we heard that Felix Mussorgsky didn't have a band, and that he'd been dead for about a million years, we bought the Los Angeles Philharmonic, or London Symphony version of it.

Keith had done the impossible. He had created a transition between pop and classical. We didn't have a name for it then, but progressive rock was spawned during that time. Headphones became a necessary part of living, and by the time Brain Salad Surgery had been released, the state of popular music was forever changed. ELP was a strong force in music. Works Volume I followed a couple of years after, and it became obvious that ELP had become the parts, and not the sum of the parts.

Each side featured either Emerson, Lake, and Palmer as front men, with the others and session musicians as back up. Emerson's side, his Piano Concerto No. 1, harked the debut of a force to be reckoned with in modern orchestral composition. It was pure Emerson. Each movement brought forth a deluge of complexity, at the forefront Keith's'piano not only utilized his percussive Hammond stylings and atonal riffs, but it led the orchestra like a pack of wolves from movement to movement. Tonic and dominant themes poured forth, all flavored with Keith Emerson's style. The final flourishes in the closing measures had all but closed the curtain for me on ELP. It was graduation time, and music took on new meaning of expressionism at the dexterious fingers of maestro Emerson.

Cut to present day, and a re-formed ELP are opening for Deep Purple, playing much smaller venues than ever before, some to be abandoned because of flakey promoters or disappointing ticket sales. Keith however is a trooper. Bounding up on stage with the same enthusiasm as he had shown audiences around the world twenty five years ago, he hammered out the same old tunes, while vocalist Greg Lake sometimes struggled to stay in key. What's wrong with this picture.

I asked Keith about the last tour, and we got talking about Greg Lake's departure from ELP.

KE: We got together for rehearsals, before the last tour with Deep Purple, in Rochester. I was a little saddened when Greg told me he hadn't sung in eight months. But, we persevered with going over all the bass notes and everything like that, key changes, etc. But all in all I was very optimistic about the future, as I think we all were. I'm probably too forgiving sometimes. You have to understand that when you have a commitment to do a tour, you have to keep everything on an up level. I had to constantly encourage "okay, what's the problem - what don't you like, what should we change" you know. At many points in our two week rehearsal, if Greg didn't want to sing, we'd excuse him. I mean, we were committed. If we didn't do the tour, it would have been disastrous. So you've got to keep things flying. So, throughout the course of the tour, the subject of making a new ELP album came up, and we were all gung ho to do. Management, Carl Palmer, Greg Lake, myself - we all thought we could do it. We'd be on the bus driving to gigs, and the subject of production came up. Greg announced to me, on the side, 'I'd like to produce the next album'. So I said wellll...okay. I mean, in the past, in the seventies, on the first albums, Greg always was acknowledged in parentheses as the producer - yeah okay, but there was everyone else. Carl wanted to make that his drums were there, so he would be pushing his fader, and I wanted to make sure that I was heard. So, it was a question of balancing things out fairly, to keep things rolling happily. Everybody had their fair share. Okay Greg, you're the producer - yeah alright. When it came up this time, Greg said "We've had Mark Mancina producing, we've had Keith Olsen producing, and none of these albums have done anything. We've had the greatest success when I was producing." (Keith grits his teeth) ooooh, okay. Things have changed a little bit since then Greg, these are different times. At first I went along with it, but then Carl said to me "no, no - we can't give him that credit automatically." Carl said to me, and the rest of the ELP management said to me "if there is to be any production credit, it should be to you (Keith - ed.)" So I said, I don't want to get into a battle over it, let's just get the album done. Carl said, "why don't we just say produced by Greg Lake, in association with Keith Emerson". Greg was not willing to accept that.

RS: It was either / or?

KE: Well, basically I think that Greg was throwing out a decoy here. He was looking for an excuse not to do it. He knew that none of us would accept him producing the new ELP album, and he stuck to his guns using that as an excuse to get out of the band. And I'd hazard a guess that he's probably secretly happy that he doesn't have to do this anymore. It's sad, it's infuriating to Carl and I. We set the stage world wide to go into the new millenium. I have all the music. Carl Palmer loves the music, he wants to play it. It's just incredibly sad - the fact that we can be out there playing. I mean, I'm not a rich man, and Greg Lake is certainly not. I don't know how he can survive. I don't know how he can be that suicidal. But having said that, I'd love to be there to help Greg. Nothing would please me more than to have him call me up, or send me a tape of a new song he's written. I'd love to help. I know that Carl Palmer feels exactly the same. The fact is we weren't ready to accept Greg as a producer. If Greg had been out there since the seventies, producing other bands, and had a lot of notches on his belt, we'd had gone wow, alright, we'll allow you that credit automatically, in order to get things done. But, Greg had done none of these things, where Carl and I had done all of those things. I had written movie scores, television series, played with other people. Carl had done the same with Asia, with other bands, everything. We weren't about to entrust Greg automatically with a production credit. I mean, we thought Greg - you've got other things to do. You've got to sing, come up with lyrics, play the bass. I'm not worried about how the guy looks. We can all put weight on or lose weight. But the fact is it is so sad, because the guy has such an incredible voice.

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