Time to post something on this blog again, despite the fact it has never quite caught on. I am thinking about Keith Emerson today, and of those who have been posting tributes, memorials, and condolences, including the likes of Peter Gabriel and Dave Stewart (Egg, Hatfield, National Health, Bruford, Stewart/Gaskin), both of whom spoke most wistfully and adoringly of Emerson's work with The Nice, although they were also appreciative of his work with Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
The Nice were before my awakening to what was then current and cool. I think I was probably more into Snoopy and the Red Baron than progressive rock when The Nice were covering Bernstein. I was only introduced to ELP through my brother, his friend William and William's brother John, with which little foursome I went to my first concert. It was ELP's Works (I) tour. Soon after I went to see Genesis (...And Then There Were Three, plus Daryl Stuermer and Chester Thompson) and Jethro Tull (Heavy Horses), Rush (Farewell to Kings, or so I think). Needless to say, I was hooked on the big shows, the most ostentatious bands, especially those with the craziest time signatures. It was the 1978 concert season. What a thrill. Anyone who thinks the 1970s produced no good music was listening to the wrong stuff.
So it was interesting to read this week, before the latest details emerged, of the gigantic impression Keith Emerson made on these two guys (Gabriel and Stewart) whose reputations have appeared gigantic to me. Such comparisons are, by nature, relative. Duh. But it is the scale of the multiple comparisons I find striking. Well aware that Emerson had in many ways completely reinvented keyboard for rock, I had not known, however, that Jimi Hendrix (who clearly did the same for the guitar) was close to joining The Nice at one point. One can now see how, in ancient days, mere suggestions and brushings of elbows among the great ones could spawn whole new quantum stages for legend and imagination. (Little known fact: at one point Elton John—who borrowed his name from Elton Dean for the stage—
was considered for joining King Crimson, but thank goodness for all concerned that never happened.)
Meanwhile, Dave Stewart writes so humbly and admiringly of Emerson that, if one were not aware of his own massive and inspiring oeuvre, one would think he really is as minuscule as the mouse, or the ant, currently running across this very different keyboard.
I think I mentioned in a previous post that in my "year of study abroad" (1992-93), I dropped by a little house east of London one day to deliver an unsolicited tape to what I thought might be Stewart's address. The chap inside was not he, but was very pleasant nevertheless and did not seem to mind the interruption; he was kind enough to take the tape and promised to pass it on. We agreed that, if one wanted an opinion on the merits of a record with lots of keyboards, Dave was "the man" — his words, to which I nodded deeply and reverently.
Not long thereafter I received a postcard (which I have buried somewhere, but not lost). It featured Barbara Gaskin's artwork, I think, and a cordial, supportive message from Dave, with his signature half-note surrounded by a corona of dashes, which I took (perhaps too optimistically as regards the quality of the record) to be saying, "Nothing to be ashamed of here," but also suggesting: (1) I needed a bigger variety of sounds in my palette (i.e., more expensive gear), and (2) I might want to rethink the obvious, upfront religious agenda signaled never so subtly by uttering The Apostles' Creed unaccompanied, unadorned, and naked as a jay bird, on Track One.
Needless to say, I never quite managed to cobble together enough gear (or enough talent) to have a proper musical career, but I am indebted to Dave Stewart, not least for his courtesy in responding, but also for an article in Keyboard magazine in which he suggested a compositional crowbar to get you unstuck when you need to resolve a section or a solo and move on: a cascading arpeggio thingy that I did indeed use to complete the middle section of "Oran Mor" and move on to the closing cacophony. As I recall, other than "Imago Dei," which did not come along until Glasgow in 1993 under the mixing boardwork of Andy Thornton, this was the last section of A Soundtrack for the Close of the Age that finally fell into place before going into Jack Black's Jump Studio (no relation to the School of Rock guy, sorry).
O nostalgia. Walter Brueggemann has recently written his warnings against it, to which I can add nothing, except, as I wrote to a friend recently who is aching for the past and for loved ones since passed away: "I too long for former days, but then I am reminded, as Kierkegaard said, 'we live forward,' so then I ask God to take all my nostalgia and remake it and reserve it for the future, when we shall never again run out of time with one another." That — the fellowship of the saints — is a large part, but just a part, of the promise of the resurrection to eternal life.
I am glad I at least had the chance to recite the Creed for one of my progressive rock heroes, who (it turns out) is a mortal human after all, who himself regards Emerson as a giant, and next to whom I am in turn, by comparison, a mere musical microbe, unworthy of any comparison at all.
Meanwhile, the whole "family" of British prog rockers, folk-rock and jazz-rock fusion types, from the Canterbury tea-totalers to the Skye-dwelling frontman often mistaken for a guy named Jethro, et al., are much on my mind these days and much in my prayers. I hope they will, one by one, reach out to those of their ilk, such as Rick Wakeman or Steve Hackett or any of the handful of their graduating class, who appear to have heard and believed the good news of Jesus Christ. I also hope, before they start up a medicinal regimen of prescriptions that include suicidal side-effects, they will first spend some time reading and praying the psalms and maybe even discover The Secret of Salix Babylonicus, the purpose for which we are given tear ducts, and the gracious promises of the One who invented tears and even "records" them, along with inventing the entire musical and aural dimension, and, yes, the whole of creation itself. If the great high Triune God who set the table for music itself is himself knowable, then I would say to one and all of my musical heroes, this God is well worth knowing.
