Love Beach...I suppose.

Those are not  the songs I prefer on  Hot Seat. Interestingly (maybe) Long Black Coat was meant to be part of a larger epic piece. Producer said no.  Theis album  is  not ELPs fault. It was the record company to blame. Same as Love Beach in  that respect.

If you mean the Memoirs of  an  Officer lyrics it is hardly Sinfields fault. he had to write  them on demand section  at a time and  immediately  asthe song was recorded. He didn't do a terible job under the circs.

far as I remeber side 1 is Lake lyrics co wrote with  Sinfield

It is  very  possible.

I know you are joking  but the reality was they never wanted to be there and couldn't wait to leave. Leaving Emerson to sort out the album production and mixing.

 Yeah, righty-oh, Mr Lake..................just sit on your throne and watch the lobsters in your bathroom..........

I've never heard Hot Seat, so no vote.

 

Now my work is done, look at the percentages:

 

WEll the whole band hate the  cover and Emerson lobbied Atlantic to change the album title.

Taste Of My Love is a real stinker but the rest isn't that bad and would have stood up as an ok 'pop prog' album with a decent production like Genesis had with Duke.

Although Palmer is very good its actually Lake that impresses me most which accounts for why he got slaughtered by ELP fans for supposedly dragging the band in a commercial direction ( to suit his own agenda goes the faulty argument).

Palmer later stated that it was only worth using as a coaster. Emerson is perhaps more the issue as his keyboard work is totally uninteresting even on the Memoirs suite. The March is especially half hearted. Its best explained by his own admission that he was very deflated after the collapse of the Works orchestral tour and felt the band had run its course ( it had). However that 'nasty' Mr Ahmet Ertegun made them carry on as they didn't have wills of their own (apparently)

in a serious pop direction in his career after the 70's.   

And there is a similar sound to Love Beach as to Duke.  I guess we all have more time for the first 5 ELP albums, but LB is still enjoyable.

The next poll should be Love Beach or Tormato.............

 +1

Iván

If it was for the original material, i would had gone with Love Beach for CANARIO, wjhich is brillisannt, if it would had been released in Trilogy or BSS, would be considered a top 10 by many people who doesn't know it exists.

But that version of Pictures is brilliant.

Iván 

There is a good version of The Sage and Great Gates Of Kiev but its let down badly by a truncated version of the Baba Yaga section which is easily my favourite thing about Pictures.

Yers I know, I got Return of the Manticore after ITHS.

But still that piece pays the album, and with a small investment, I paid 100 bucks in Lima for the box set and like 6 bucks in Santiago de Chile for ITHS

The title track is saved by some very nifty drumming imo. Side One has some highlights especially the girlie backing vocals on The Gambler and more nifty drumming on Canario. For You is an excellent song that deservedly found its way onto the Return of The Manticore box set.

I like Memoirs parts 1 and 2 but part 3 just meanders before the sudden melodramatic 'the telegram...'.Part 4 is just plain lazy. Just had to be a ' March'

'For You' is excellent.  Canario is excellent.  I've been acquainted with this album since 1988 and apart from the cover, I've never thought ill of this album - I was disappointed there was no Hammond, though.

Lack of Hammond is a real downer. Emerson wanted to try and create an orchestral feel with the keyboards (mainly the Yamaha GX1 as you mention) which he managed really well on Memoirs Part 1 but otherwise it sounds too 'thin' elsewhere for my taste. It was meant to be a radio friendly album so I guess the idea was to avoid too much of a big sound. However as I mentioned before Genesis created a radio friendly album in Duke that still felt like a 'big production to my ears.

Regarding Palmer that would have been the last album that he played with a single bass drum ( or maybe he did with PM? - not sure). With Asia he adopted 2 bass drums and deliberately changed his style of playing. Love Beach is virtually his last hurrah as a top drummer sadly.

 

Great One      

I used to have a .sig that read:

"Every day a little sadder, a little madder, someone get me a ladder" - and who says Greg Lake writes awful lyrics???

Its shows a sense of humour at least that they embarked on the 'Someone Get Me A Ladder' tour following Brain Salad Surgery's release.

Lake has written some excellent lyrics. Trilogy (the album and track) from that perspective stands up well. BSS was more 'out there' and Still You Turn Me One is fine if taken in the context of the whole album 

By 'top drummer' I mean the very highest echelons. Palmer won loads of drumming awards in the seventies. In the eighties he turned himself into a proficient but  ordinary AOR drummer imo.

Not ordinary imo

that was as fast a response as a Carl Palmer drum roll (circa 1973)

I've never heard that before...did they actually refer to it as the "Someone get me a ladder tour"?  I could see Keith or Carl saying that (they're both very funny guys) but Greg just seems a bit too serious to go along with it.  Although, there is a funny story about the original King Crimson.  When Fripp (who had the popular Mitch Mitchell, Eric Clapton, late 60's white guy afro) told the other members of Crimso he was going to sit on a stool to play, Greg Lake said something like, "you can't do that, you'll look like a giant mushroom".

I love ELP and Yes but am much more likely to listen to Love Beach than Tormato. Aside from its inherent comedy value Love Beach is also more dynamic and energetic. It's hard to believe Tormato was released just a year after the brilliant Going for the One. The drumming sounds like damp cardboard boxes, Wakeman was experimenting with a range of ghastly keyboard sounds and Howe had lost his guitar mojo. The only tracks that work for me are the ballady ones Onward and Madrigal

Love Beach was also the last album where Palmer's drumming had a "wow" factor, and his work with Asia definitely lacks his earlier dynamism. I think he continued to be a very good drummer but the true magic was gone. Anyway, here's a reminder of what made CP (and ELP) so awesome.

Great youtube clip with ELP at the height of their magic.  This is what frustrated me so much about Asia.  My fave bassist (Wetton) with my 2nd fave drummer (CP), Steve Howe, and Geoff Downes and they threw all that prog mojo away to do radio friendly rubbish like "Heat of the Moment".  Oh well, I guess even prog superstars gotta eat!

There was a "Get Me A ladder Tour" which was an European  tour before the release of BSS and then a "Brain Salad Surgery Tour" from  which the live album was taken.

Ya, I think I read it one of his online journal postings...I would've loved to have been there to see RF's reaction 

Carl Palmer is still a good drummer if you listen to any of Asia's live albums. In the studio is something else where the drummer has maybe one fourth or one fifth of the say as to what goes down on the album. Also, my feelings about Love Beach is that it is less than half of a decent album. Tormato however is maybe a bit flawed and a little under produced, but I still prefer it to GFTO which is a bit over produced. Any of the live versions of Awaken are vastly superior to the studio version. I don't agree that Howe has lost his guitar mojo on Tormato as I really like the guitar parts. I think the faults more lie with Wakeman's keyboard parts and I question whether Wakeman was really interested in the project (having left the band again when the album was completed). I think its more the band that has lost its mojo for producing top notch studio albums after Relayer.

most of that 3 album is dreadfull AOR/POP excepting Desda La Vida , a good track but nowhere near as good as classic ELP and the playing sounding laboured to my ears (but I like the lyrics and atmosphere of it)

Asia's debut album did have some proggy stuff before they decided to go full AOR on Alpha although Wildest Dreams is the only track with the supposed 'wow factor' drumming wise that I can hear. Sole Survivor is also a good track and Palmer is very solid but thats all. What else?

For me White hit his peak on Tormato and Drama. 

anyway that clip of Palmer is amazing. The version of Pictures that ELP were playing around that time (1973-4) was amazing especially the Baba Yaga section as per that clip. Palmer loses his drumsticks at one point but hardly breaks stride.  I remember him being interviewed a few years later and saying that he used to come out of ELP gigs totally knackered. That's exactly how it should be

richardh wrote: most of that 3 album is dreadfull AOR/POP excepting Desda La Vida , a good track but nowhere near as good as classic ELP and the playing sounding laboured to my ears (but I like the lyrics and atmosphere of it)

 

Not only is it dreadful AOR "pap" ("Yeahhh, I'm talkin' bout you / I'm talkin' bout me"), Keith's sounds were the dullest ever, the epitome of drab '80s digital electronics (as referenced in that other thread).

 

(...much to the same effect when Geddy used the most dreadful "popcorny" digital patch in lieu of the dense synth strings on "Distant Early Warning" when they played it during the Roll The Bones tour...)

We will never agree Richard, ever. I happen to regard Three's album very highly. 

Palmer's manager suggested the collaboration.

No but he was a multi instrumentalist with solo albums. He was in a band called Hush too.

What? In a poll specifically about it? I wonder why...

The fact that it is the poll in the first place!

Hmmm. Not sure I'm with you. Do you mean this one poll? Are you including all past polls? (if there are any)

If anything this poll is revealing how much people like it.

 

Exactly why I started the poll.  Why no avalanche of ITHS jokes?

Ya, it was catchy, but also embarrassing at the same time.  I think they should have gone incognito and disguised themselves for the music videos  

a fair summation would be it has some good moments but shows a band in decline

its gets a bad rap because:

a) the cover

b) it was a 'contractural obligation album'

c) the band themselves didn't like it

that's plenty of reasons why it has such a bad reputation but for me its an 'ELP album'. I can recognise it as ELP and if they hadn't made it we would always wonder 'what if?'.

No but he was a multi instrumentalist with solo albums. He was in a band called Hush too.

I have always thought of Berry as Trevor Rabin or Billy Sherwood: a younger guy who had been exposed to classic prog and liked it but gave up following its true values and just hoped that they could use its foundations and fanbase to create a new, mainstream oriented success story, they teamed up with the broken dinosaurs to achieve their goal in an easier way, shortcutting half of the process (possibly a respectable vision but they failed, not achieving neither mainstream success not recognition by the prog fans).

At any rate we can not blame them, they were a product of their time, Asia or GTR tried the same without being pulled by a young guy.