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Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Works
(Atlantic, 1977)
Or rather, to be more specific, Fanfare For The Common Man, the über-pop-hit of Neo-Classical Rock. If one song sums up the pomp and arrogance of the whole genre, it’s this hi-tech marmalising of Aaron Copland’s wistful encomium. And yet, there is something about that buggerda-buggerda bottomline (admit it, when you hear Copland’s version, you’re secretly listening, nay hoping, for it to kick in) and hell, Carl Palmer’s having a ball on those timps. Copland’s original piece – a svelte 3-minute thing, riding on gloriously burnished French horns – premiered in 1943 and was conceived as a tribute to the sacrifices ordinary Americans had made in aid of the war effort; in the reddened butcher’s mitts of ELP it becomes a mile-high hologram of an elephant having a wank (in a… good way?) and from 3 and a half minutes in it morphs into a an increasingly strident Keith Emerson keyboard solo which goes on roughly forever. In October 1977’s Contemporary Keyboard magazine, Copland defended ELP – “a gifted group” – and said there was “something that attracted [him]” to their version, but even he found the solo “puzzling”. I’m still not sure that’s quite the word. DE
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