LISTENING TO - Tarkus - Emerson Lake & Palmer

The mega groups of early seventies 'progressive rock' were a development within what was referred to at the time, with some level of self conceit, as 'serious' rock music. This pretense and delineation was to distinguish it from the supposedly 'un-serious' music that was everything else. 

This trend had its origins in the mid 1960's,when both The Beatles and Rolling Stones changed from being simply a pop band, and wanted to be taken seriously as artists. Giving birth to the first examples of the 'concept' album. But the main harbinger of rocks future direction towards 'progressive' music was Pink Floyd. Huge technical talent, with range and sophistication, plus lots of  flamboyant live shows and musicianship. Once we entered the seventies, a larger than life staging and dressing up directly borrowed from glam rock, became de rigueur. Soon to be followed by the extravagant theatrical staging of Yes, Genesis and Emerson Lake and Palmer.

Emerson Lake & Palmer were one of the first so called 'super groups' composed of already famous musicians from other bands - here it was The Nice, King Crimson and Atomic Rooster, respectively. They filled out huge stadiums with their epic, often portentous and vast conceptual music pieces, with equally ostentatious showmanship to match. The sort of thing punk would quite rightly put two fingers up to, and Spinal Tap would ridicule, for its self indulgence and puffed up self importance. After punk, these guys just kept their heads down, and quietly continued playing sold out concerts to their loyal die-hard fan base in Japan. However, so successfully were these 'progressive' bands lambasted for their cultural elitism and pompous musical conceits, there has not been any significant renewed interest in exhuming this era from its purdah, for nigh on fifty years.. 

One of the prime candidates of my late seventies punk inspired purge of progressive rock from my vinyl collection, was the album Tarkus, by Emerson Lake & Palmer. I was never at the time much of a devoted fan. But recently for some reason. lets put it down to curious nostalgia, I listened again to the opening twenty minute song suite of Tarkus. I was more than pleasantly taken aback by just how good it was.And its become a bit of an aural obsession in recent weeks, barely a day goes by without my playing it.

Lyrically, Tarkus might be not something you'd want to pay too much attention to, lest you find yourself assaulted by its pseudo-philosophy and the mythic nobility of its leaden sentiments. Musically, however, it still demonstrates huge ambition. An original and often funk-jazz inflected fusion with both classical and hard rock musical tropes. It possesses a really compulsive drive and undoubted feeling for magnificence and grandeur. Interspersed with quieter simple interludes of almost hymn like melody, beautifully rendered by Greg Lake's steady and well modulated vocals.

Progressive Rock will always be remembered as the natural home for the electronic organ, a home it has never found since. And it was  Keith Emerson, this handsome man in his mid thirties, often bare chested, testosterone fueled, striking the pose of a rock god, who made it sexy. His versatility on the keyboard, often on multiples of keyboards, dwarfed beneath the vast cliff wall of wires and jack plugs of a seventies synthesiser, was always unquestionably the real star of the show. And he was undoubtedly a technically astounding player, with daring adventurousness, but one who could also pack a substantial emotional punch. 

Now Emerson Lake and Palmer did become musically inflated to the point of obese excess, and certainly their importance was over rated, even by themselves, at the time. But I'd say Tarkus is still well worth twenty minutes of anyone's evening listening.