Carl Palmer has been talking to Rolling Stone about his long career – about Emerson Lake and Palmer, Asia and the prog era as a whole.
Palmer is the last survivor of ELP – Keith Emerson committed suicide in March 2016 and Greg Lake died of pancreatic cancer at the end of that year. But the drummer is still playing and honouring his bandmates – he’s been playing as Carl Palmer's ELP Legacy since 2021.
During a long interview, he lets slip one interesting nugget – that he wasn’t the first choice of drummer in ELP. “The first drummer was Mitch Mitchell. I was quite surprised that they didn’t take him. I ended up being called up. And the second time I played with the guys, I thought, ‘Wow, this is magical.’”
ELP’s second ever gig was at the Isle Of Wight festival in 1970 and it set them up for a decade when they became one of the core groups of the prog movement. But after touring 1973’s Brain Salad Surgery they took two years off before regrouping for the Works albums. When they returned everything had changed.
“I think a lot of people got knocked off their perch,” Palmer says of the punk era. “We were a little bit affected by it, and it sort of hurt a bit towards the end of it.”
“We took it very personally, and we shouldn’t have done,” he says. “We should have just stuck at it, but we didn’t. You have to understand that ELP, as a group, they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Instant success, instant karma out there, instant new art form, instant everything.
"So anything that came in our way, we weren’t like a normal group that’s ready to take a knock. We couldn’t fight back.”
Instead, they recorded 1978’s Love Beach, which saw them torn to pieces by critics, not least for the laughable sleeve which sees the tanned trio pose - on a beach - in open-neck shirts like they’re about to head off down the disco. Palmer describes the album as “a complete disaster… we were absolutely shattered.”
“So, we said, 'Let’s do it in the Bahamas.' That was the first mistake. You can’t write a prog album when you’ve got fishermen bringing in conch and salmon and sand and sun.
"You can only write a prog album if you’re stuck in the traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge. You know what I mean? That’s where that shit comes from.”
“Making that album wasn’t a career move. And then the album sleeve, we looked like the Bee Gees on the front. How can you call an album Love Beach that’s a prog album?”
Don’t expect to hear much from it when Palmer hits the road in April. The tour, entitled Welcome Back My Friends – An Evening with Emerson, Lake and Palmer, starts in Las Vegas on April 8 and winds up in Hidalgo, Texas on May 1. For the full list of tour dates and tickets, click here.
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