Performer: Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Songwriters: Greg Lake, Peter Sinfield
Original Release: Works, Volume 1
Year: 1977
Definitive Version: Works Live, 1993
Even though I lived an
hour-and-a-half from Detroit for nearly 5 years and dated several women from
the area, Mordecai Three-Finger Brown could count on his right hand the number
of times I actually had been in central downtown Detroit before the Tigers
moved after the 1999 season.
Melanie and I went downtown
briefly to Greek Town in 1988; I saw a Red Wings game in 1991 and the third and
final time until my first game at the new Tigers ballpark in 2003 was to see
ELP in February 1993 at the Fox Theater.
After the show in Cleveland
the year before, I went through a major ELP renaissance. Don’t get me wrong:
When I switched over to CDs in 1990, Welcome Back My Friends … and Trilogy were
among my first picks, so it wasn’t as though I weren’t listening to their music
any more, but after summer 1992, they went into very heavy rotation.
It didn’t hurt that they
were releasing a lot of stuff at the time. I bought Black Moon, The Atlantic
Years, Live at the Royal Albert Hall and Works Live—all new releases—in a
little more than a year.
Right after the release of
Albert Hall, which, of course, was essentially identical to the show Scott and
I saw in Cleveland, ELP went on a second tour. This time, though, they were
flying solo with no warmup act. This meant more ELP, which was fine with me.
Scott and I couldn’t meet up this time, so I flew solo—only the second time I
had taken in a concert by myself (Midnight Oil in 1990 being the other).
Nowadays, of course, The Fox
Theater is across an open promenade from Comerica Park, but in 1993, it was
pretty much an oasis at the fringes of Greek Town, and it was questionable as
to where I would park. The area itself didn’t bother me though. Between four
years of Tiger games and working in Flint, I wasn’t intimidated any more by
dark, empty buildings. I’m pretty sure I parked on the street fairly close to
the theater.
I had decent seats on the
floor, and the Fox Theater, of course, is an old-school performance hall,
similar to Ohio Theatre in Columbus, and as I walked in, I overheard one
black-T-shirt rocker say to his buddy, “I just want to see if these guys still
can wail.”
You don’t normally associate
wailing with ELP. But they can, of course. I might have mentioned this, but to
me the only difference between ELP and Tool is the instrumentation: Emerson
plays keyboards; Adam Jones plays electric guitar. Otherwise, they both play a
lot of dense, very long songs very quickly.
The show was good. ELP added
this song to the set list as well as Hoedown, among a few other things, and
they did in fact wail during appropriate times, but the same spark wasn’t there
like it had been in Cleveland the year before. Maybe my excitement of seeing them
the first time after being a fan for nearly 20 years added to the appreciation,
I don’t know. Scott felt the same way about the show he saw at, appropriately
enough, Ohio Theatre.
Eventually my ELP run came
to an end a year later after a very poor album—in The Hot Seat—and another
breakup soon thereafter. I don’t listen as much to ELP as I used to, but my
appreciation hasn’t waned one iota. Sometimes you just want to listen to
something new. That’s life.
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