photo courtesy of Glass Onyon PR

Album Review of Emerson, Lake & Powell: Complete Collection (Cherry Red Records)

Last year, Cherry Red Records released a 3-CD box set of Emerson, Lake & Powell‘s music. 3 CDs? How is that possible when the band only released one studio album and one live album? Well, the self-titled album is disc one, featuring three bonus tracks – two B-sides and a “single edit” of “The Score.” The second CD contains The Sprocket Sessions, a live rehearsals collection heretofore only available as a bootleg, a 12-song album that features six of the songs from the debut album. The third album is the live album, Live in Concert.

image courtesy of Glass Onyon PR

I know many of you will already know this, but I’ll include it for newbies to ELP. Of course, Emerson, Lake & Powell isn’t the classic line-up of ELP. That was Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, and Carl Palmer – Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The original ELP quietly broke up in 1979. In 1984, while Palmer was now a member of successful supergroup Asia, Emerson and Lake were auditioning drummers to hit the road again. They enjoyed performing with ex-Whitesnake drummer Cozy Powell. The band insists the “P” in Powell’s last name was just a coincidence, but nevertheless, it ushered in a one-studio-album version of ELP with Powell in place of Palmer.

I don’t think I ever owned any of ELP’s albums, though I was familiar with at least a couple of the songs, particularly “Touch and Go,” which received some airplay on MTV and moderate radio play; it actually hit number 60 on the Billboard Hot 100. And the Emerson, Lake & Powell version of ELP is the one that coincided with my music fandom, so this is my ELP.

My personal favorite track from the studio album, Emerson, Lake & Powell, remains “Touch and Go.” It soars with that big, open, we’re-performing-in-a-big-empty-warehouse echo that was present in many of the seventies and eighties progressive rock songs that crossed over to mainstream rock fans. It just feels expansive but also rockin’. A close second, for me, is album-opener “The Score,” which, like “Touch and Go,” features Emerson’s big, open organ-sounding keyboard sound. The original version of “The Score” clocks in at 9:10, so it makes sense there’s a “single edit.” The single edit still runs 6:11, though, so it’s still not exactly conducive to mainstream radio. (“Touch and Go,” meanwhile, clocks in at an airplay-friendly 3:39.) The whole disc is strong – it’s Emerson, Lake & Powell, after all, and these guys are legends for good reason – so your favorites may differ. Maybe you’ll like something mellower like “Step Aside,” a song that saunters along coolly and on which the keyboardwork is like a piano. The added tracks are cool, too. Notably, there’s a nifty instrumental version of “The Loco-Motion” that gets the full ELP treatment.

photo courtesy of Glass Onyon PR

Discs two and three in the box set – The Sprocket Sessions and Live in Concert – will probably be of the greatest interest to hardcore ELP fans. That is, if you don’t own the discs already. You’ll find five of the eight songs from the studio album on The Sprocket Sessions, with three of them – “Touch and Go,” “The Score,” and “Mars, the Bringer of War” – also appearing on Live in Concert.

The rest of discs two and three are primarily Emerson, Lake and Palmer songs. “Knife Edge,” “Lucky Man,” and “Pirates” are on both discs. Well, sort of. “Lucky Man” on The Sprocket Sessions is just a 48-second instrumental snippet. But “Pirates” runs 13-plus minutes on both discs, so you’re not getting shortchanged there. The Live in Concert disc closes with a medley of “Karn Evil 9 (1st Impression),” “America,” and “Rondo” that’s kicked off with the memorable ELP line “Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends.” If you’re a rock fan from that era, even if you had no idea what song (or band) it came from, you’ll still definitely remember that line. At least, that’s true for me. And yes, “America” is a musical nod to West Side Story. And thus ends the three-disc collection, quite a haul for an exceptional band of legendary musicians whose studio output was but a single album.