Keith Emerson
On November 2, 1944, legendary keyboardist, pianist, and composer Keith Emerson was born!
(Photo: Mari Kawaguchi)
He's the man who brought keyboards from the backstage to the front stage, became the Hendrix of the Hammond organ with wild, theatrical shows, made history by becoming the first artist to tour with the massive Moog modular synthesizer, and led the band The Nice and the super trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Here are 40 fascinating facts about the virtuoso magician who redefined the boundaries of progressive rock.
1. Emerson was born Keith Noel Emerson in the town of Todmorden in Yorkshire, England, where his family was evacuated from southern England during the bombings of World War II.
2. Shortly after the end of the war, his family moved to the coastal town of Worthing in Sussex, where he grew up as an only child to supportive parents, and his father Noel, who was an amateur musician and trumpet player in the British Army Band, immediately recognized his son's perfect pitch.
3. At the age of four, he began improvising melodies from earshot on the family piano, and at the age of eight he was sent to rigorous classical piano lessons with local teachers who instilled in him a rare technical discipline and taught him the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, Frédéric Chopin, and Claude Debussy.
4. Despite his classical training, his first great love as a boy was jazz and boogie-woogie music, and he was deeply influenced by American pianists such as Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Fats Waller, Floyd Cramer, and Jerry Lee Lewis, whom he copied note for note from listening to records.
5. The young Emerson was drawn to modern classical works with complex and aggressive rhythms, primarily the works of twentieth-century composers Alberto Ginastera of Argentina, Béla Bartók of Hungary, Sergei Prokofiev of Russia, and Aaron Copland of America.
6. He developed his first stage acrobatics on the keyboards after watching British cabaret pianist Winifred Atwell and American Hammond player Don Shinn, who taught him how to tilt and shake the heavy Hammond organ while playing to produce dramatic explosions from the instrument's internal reverb springs.
(Photo: Jorgen Angel)
7. At the age of fifteen, he purchased his first Hammond organ, an L-100, on installments after working as a clerk at the local Lloyds bank to finance the purchase, but was fired from his job at the bank because he used to practice piano fingerings on his desk instead of attending to customers.
8. In the mid-1960s, he moved to London and joined the rhythm and blues band "The T-Bones" led by singer Gary Farr, a band that also served as the backing band for American blues legends such as T-Bone Walker and Little Walter on their European tours.
9. During a tour of France with "The T-Bones" in 1966, a violent fight broke out between the band members and locals in a nightclub, and when Emerson saw that the guards were ignoring the commotion, he decided to play the "Gladiator March" on the organ at a dizzying pace, a move that surprisingly calmed the spirits and stopped the beatings.
10. On that same tour in France, his bandmate, future German saxophonist for "Roxy Music" Andy Mackay, gave him an original Hitler Youth dagger from World War II, and Emerson discovered that he could stick the knife between the keys of the Hammond to hold sustained notes while he played with the other hand or turned the organ on stage.
11. After a brief stint in the soul and jazz band "The V.I.P.'s", Emerson was invited in May 1967 by the legendary manager of "The Rolling Stones", Andrew Loog Oldham, to form a new backing band for American soul singer P.P. Arnold.
12. Emerson agreed to the offer on the condition that the band could open each show with its own independent instrumental set, and thus the band "The Nice" was born, along with bassist and singer Lee Jackson, drummer Brian Davison, and guitarist David O'List.
13. Within a few months, the theatrical performances of "The Nice", in which Emerson whipped the organ with a whip, stabbed it with knives and slammed it to the stage floor, completely overshadowed Arnold's performance and made the band one of the hottest sensations at the Marquee Club in London.
14. At the end of 1967, "The Nice" joined a joint tour of Britain with Jimi Hendrix, the band "Pink Floyd" and the band "The Move", a tour during which a courageous friendship was formed between Emerson and Hendrix, who used to play stormy jams together backstage.
15. In 1968, the band released their groundbreaking debut album "The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack" and immediately followed it with the immortal single "America", a stormy symphonic rock arrangement of a passage from Leonard Bernstein's musical Suburbia Story that incorporated quotes from Antonín Dvořák's Ninth Symphony.
16. In June 1968, Emerson caused a huge international scandal during a charity concert at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall in London when, while playing "America", he set fire to a painting of the United States flag on stage in protest against the Vietnam War and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, an act that led to the band being permanently banned from the Royal Hall.
17. Composer Leonard Bernstein was so outraged by the association between his music and flag burning that he attempted to legally ban the song from being released in the United States, while modern classical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen actually praised the band enthusiastically, while renowned classical conductor Leonard Slatkin later acknowledged that Emerson's arrangements of Karel Husa's Third Symphony and works by Jan Sibelius and Johann Sebastian Bach on the albums "Ars Longa Vita Brevis" and "Five Bridges" attracted an entire generation of young people to concert halls.
18. The greatest technological turning point in his life occurred in 1969, when Emerson visited a record store in London and first heard the album "Switched-On Bach" by composer Wendy Carlos, an album in which Bach's works were played on a mysterious new electronic device called a Moog synthesizer.
19. Emerson contacted American inventor Dr. Robert Moog and borrowed an experimental Moog modular synthesizer, which in those days looked like a huge, cumbersome telephone switchboard that weighed hundreds of pounds and tended to go out of control with any slight change in the temperature of the room.
20. In February 1970, while performing with "The Nice" at the Royal Festival Hall in London, Emerson became the first musician in history to play the Moog modular synthesizer live on stage, an event that Bob Moog himself defined as the moment when the synthesizer transformed from an academic research laboratory into a living, breathing instrument of the rock world.
21. In December 1969, when The Nice were performing at the Fillmore West in San Francisco with King Crimson, Emerson met in the dressing room with then-King Crimson lead singer and bassist Greg Lake, and the two revealed that they were both frustrated with the direction of their bands and wanted to form a new, ambitious band.
22. After a frantic search for a virtuoso drummer to complete the trio, during which they considered adding Mitch Mitchell from Jimi Hendrix's band, they invited twenty-year-old drummer Carl Palmer from the band "Atomic Rooster" to audition, and the immediate connection gave birth to the supergroup "Emerson, Lake & Palmer" in April 1970.
23. In those months, persistent reports were published in the world music media that Jimi Hendrix was about to join the trio to form a super quartet under the name "HELP", an acronym for Hendrix, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, a scenario that began as a joke at a press conference but was finally cut short with Hendrix's tragic death in September 1970, just a month after the band's dizzying debut at the Isle of Wight Festival in front of six hundred thousand spectators, in which the band members fired real pyrotechnic cannons from both sides of the stage at the climax of the piece "Pictures at an Exhibition".
24. In November 1970, the masterful debut album "Emerson, Lake & Palmer" was released, in which Emerson demonstrated his genius in the aggressive work "The Barbarian", which was based on Béla Bartók's Allegro Barbaro, in the classic ballad "Take a Pebble", and in the dramatic epic "Knife-Edge".
25. The most famous synthesizer solo in rock history, which closes Greg Lake's acoustic song "Lucky Man" on the debut album, was recorded by Emerson in one completely improvised take at the end of a long day of recording, and because he thought it was just a preliminary sketch, he didn't even bother to record another take.
26. In 1971, the band released the monumental concept album "Tarkus", in which Emerson composed a twenty-minute suite in dizzying asymmetrical time signatures of five-eighths and ten-eighths that depicted a mythological battle between an armored armadillo in the shape of a tank and the manticore monster. The album reached number one on the British charts, despite Lake initially threatening to leave the band due to the extreme complexity of the piece.
27. That same year, the band recorded the live album "Pictures at an Exhibition" at Newcastle Town Hall, a wild, electric rock arrangement of the work of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, which became one of the best-selling records of the 1970s and proved that classical music could fill huge stadiums.
28. On his fourth album, "Trilogy" from 1972, Emerson demonstrated almost superhuman technical abilities in playing the instrumental fugue "The Endless Enigma", the complex theme song, and the energetic and dizzying cover version of Aaron Copland's work "Hoedown".
29. In 1973, the trio founded the independent record label Manticore Records, which operated out of an abandoned cinema in the Fulham neighborhood of London and signed leading prog artists from England and Italy, including bands such as "Premiata Forneria Marconi" and "Banco del Mutuo Soccorso" alongside poet and composer Pete Sinfield.
30. For their fifth album, "Brain Salad Surgery," released in late 1973, Emerson traveled specifically to Switzerland to the home of elderly Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera to play him his electronic arrangement of the fourth movement from his Piano Concerto No. 1. The excited Ginastera determined that Emerson captured the spirit of the piece better than any classical pianist ever and gave him official permission to record the piece "Toccata".
31. The highlight of "Brain Salad Surgery," wrapped in the mesmerizing biomechanical painting of Swiss artist H.R. Giger, was the thirty-minute apocalyptic suite "Karn Evil 9", in which Emerson used a programmed Moog synthesizer to create the voice of the tyrannical computer that rules humanity alongside the immortal opening line of the first episode, Part Two.
32. During the massive 1974 world tour, which culminated at the California Jam festival in front of two hundred and fifty thousand spectators, Emerson performed one of the craziest stage stunts in rock history when he was strapped to a Steinway grand piano that was lifted ten meters into the air and spun in three hundred and sixty degree loops while continuing to play in the air.
33. In 1975, Emerson was seriously injured in his fingers when a grand piano rigged with pyrotechnics exploded prematurely during a rehearsal for the filming of British presenter Michael Parkinson's television show, but despite the bloody injury and burns, he refused to cancel the broadcast and went up to play with bandaged hands.
34. In 1977, Emerson led the band on the double album "Works Volume 1", in which he fulfilled his great dream and composed a full concerto for piano and symphony orchestra in three movements accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, alongside the captivating stadium arrangement of "Fanfare for the Common Man" which was recorded in the snowy Olympic Stadium in Montreal and became the band's biggest chart hit in the UK.
35. With complete faith in his symphonic vision, Emerson convinced his bandmates to embark on an unprecedented North American tour in 1977 with a full symphony orchestra and choir, bringing together seventy musicians and dozens of truckloads of equipment, a grandiose adventure that cost the band a personal financial loss of about three million dollars and nearly bankrupted them.
36. With the outbreak of the punk rock revolution and the band's first breakup in the late 1970s, Emerson found a brilliant creative outlet in the world of cinema and composed masterful and chilling soundtracks that combine rock, synthesizers and classical music, most notably the 1981 thriller "Nighthawks" starring Sylvester Stallone and the cult horror film "Inferno" by Italian director Dario Argento from 1980.
37. In 1985, he re-formed the band with Greg Lake and the super drummer Cozy Powell, who replaced Palmer, who was at the time committed to the band "Asia", and the trio called "Emerson, Lake & Powell" released a successful album that entered the American charts with the dramatic work "Touch and Go", after which Emerson formed the band "3" in 1988 with Carl Palmer and American musician Robert Berry.
38. In the early 1990s, the original trio "Emerson, Lake & Palmer" reunited to record the 1992 album "Black Moon" and embarked on a successful world tour that included a memorable performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the same hall from which Emerson had been banned twenty-four years earlier. However, in 1993, he began to suffer from severe pain and loss of sensation in his right hand, resulting from nerve damage to the muscle and tendons, and required complex surgery that left him unable to play for more than a year.
39. In the last decades of his life, Emerson was diagnosed with focal dystonia, a brutal neurological disorder that caused two fingers on his right hand to contract involuntarily while playing, but despite the severe physical limitation, he refused to give up, continued to perform with guitarist Marc Bonilla's band, released the symphonic album "Three Fates Project" in 2012, and in July 2010 led the historic and final reunion show of "Emerson, Lake & Palmer" at the High Voltage Festival in London to mark the fortieth anniversary of the formation of the band.
40. On March 11, 2016, he took his own life at his home in Santa Monica, California, at the age of seventy-one, deeply concerned that his mind and body would not allow him to meet the expectations of his fans on a planned tour of Japan, just nine months before the passing of his bandmate Greg Lake, but the immense legacy he left behind continues to resonate in every rock and metal keyboard player in the world, with his original Moog modular synthesizer and scarred Hammond organ now on display as historical treasures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Whether he was soaring through the air with a spinning grand piano, stabbing knives between blazing Hammond keys, or transforming classical masterpieces into massive stadium anthems, Keith Emerson will forever remain the greatest, boldest, and most virtuoso keyboard architect in the history of rock music.
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