Two Albums By The Nice and Pictures at an Exhibition, part 6

Sooo… look. Did I come to a better understanding of what Keith Emerson was all about? Eeehhhh… maybe. I guess I’d say that the most perfect encapsulation of what Keith Emerson’s approach to music is in my opinion quite well represented by the final track on Pictures at an Exhibition, a boogie retelling of bits of the Nutcracker Suite called “Nutrocker,” which was devised by Kim Fowley. It’s what I’ve always thought he was about, to be honest.

It’s that fusion of rock n classical that Emerson seems to have been after. He really never dives all that deeply into either rock or classical music, although it’s clear that he sees that his bread is better buttered in rock n roll grease, and so he puts everything under that umbrella. Across these three records we see snippets of just about every section of the record store — jazz, show tunes, blues, rock, classical, even a little dusting of country music, and across all of it, the unifying element is Emerson’s fingers and the feeling he had that some of what he could do with his fingers on a keyboard was dangerous or even subversive (meh).

What he did with The Nice sometimes transcended that need to push the boundaries of outré attention grabbing. I especially felt that on Elegy which showed a band that might have had some technical limitations, but had all of the ability to think and feel and attempt to make something beautiful. With ELP, it was all about the flash-bang.

So, ELP could be bigger, louder, more exciting, but somehow I think they were slighter on an artistic level.

This is a minority opinion, I’m aware of that. I’m also entirely capable of changing my mind, given a better argument about what’s happening in the grooves of the records or on stage in the video above. The guy who thought he’d made an “instrumental protest song” is clearly operating on the same assumptions in that “I’m stabbing my organ!” bit. I just don’t know what it’s about beyond the prurience of it. Maybe he had a bad piano teacher?

I’m a Yes fan. I will be upfront about thinking that Yes had terrible lyrics, but they had great lyricism. They made some of the most beautiful music I can think of within the rock context. ELP could play anything (they did, they played every style of music, sometimes within the bounds of a single track) but all they ever made me feel was admiration for their musicianship, and a bit of cynicism-tinged excitement over all of the flashiness.

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