No. 700 – Pictures at an Exhibition

Performer: Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Songwriters: Modest Mussorgsky, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, Carl Palmer

Original Release: Pictures at an Exhibition

Year: 1971

Definitive Version: Anything live

When it came time to finally see ELP, Scott and I rendezvoused—I was coming from Flint; Scott was coming from Columbus—and proceeded to the Nautica, smack dab in the middle of The Flats. The entrance was surrounded by bars that already seemed to be full to spillover.

The crowd was a mix of people who were me and Scott’s age and then older, longtime ELP fans, and you couldn’t really tell where the concert-goers began and the pub crawlers ended. I almost got the sense that the Nautica was an open venue, where people could come and go as they pleased. It wasn’t, but it was difficult to see the difference. I wore my black suit jacket. It seemed I should dress up a bit for ELP.

Our seats were in the first section, stage right on the ground. We’d be about 150 feet from Greg Lake if the band had its usual setup. The Nautica was quite a difference from their previous tour some 15 years earlier, when their excess simultaneously defined and buried progressive rock. ELP went from selling out 60,000 stadiums to not quite selling out Nautica, which held maybe 4,000. I had a vision of Ian Faith saying the band had become more selective with its venues, not—repeat NOT—less successful.

Not that I cared. I had been wanting to see ELP for a long time and figured I never would, but their reunion after Carl Palmer’s stint with Asia wrapped up for the time being made it possible. Scott and I wondered: How many of their 15-minute songs would they play? Heck, if they had a mind to it, they could do 90 minutes and play only four songs.

The warm-up act was Bonham, which was Jason’s band. They were OK, and they only indulged in Jason’s dad’s old band’s catalog at the end, breaking out Rock and Roll.

Finally it was time for ELP. The crowd cheered when the roadies pulled the tarp off Palmer’s drum kit and then off Keith Emerson’s rig, which was almost as big as Palmer’s thanks to his continued audacity to tour with a full-size Moog synthesizer. And when the band hit the stage to the strains of the Welcome Back My Friends … segment of Karn Evil 9, we were in heaven.

They started off with a lot of shorter songs and stuff from their new album Black Moon, which Scott and I bought at the end of Scott’s school year at Ball State to be a little prepared for the new material. But the thing that stuck out the most about the show was that because the Nautica is on the Cuyahoga River, you could see boats sailing past as they came in off the lake.

Well, maybe it was just one boat. Scott and I noticed the same mast passing by behind the stage, obviously circling to hear more free music. We must have noticed that boat go by a dozen times if it went past twice. A few minutes would go by … yep, there it is again.

ELP finished its set with this song, complete with a 5-minute drum solo. I wasn’t that familiar with Pictures, but when they got to the Great Gates of Kiev part of the song, it seemed oddly familiar. Scott, do you recognize this? Yeah, but I don’t know where.

The encore predictably was Fanfare for the Common Man, which segued into Rondo, Emerson’s homage to Brubeck, when the real fun began. Emerson pulled out the old Hammond B3 and went to work on it, wrestling it all over the stage, prying keys open with knives, getting feedback galore before pulling it over on top of himself and playing Bach upside-down and cross-handed. Ridiculous!

Afterward, The Flats still was going full-tilt. I had wanted to get a room near town so we could hang out and explore a bit, but Scott just wanted to head home to Columbus. It was a decision he said later that he regretted.

It was a great show, and I then recommitted to ELP. I bought The Atlantic Years, a now out-of-print retrospective that has this song on it, and I played Pictures at an Exhibition, among other things, over and over.

And that’s when it hit me. I called Scott. Do you recognize this now? No. So then I enunciated a la Vince McMahon: “The King! In alllll his glory!” Yes, the WWF used Great Gates of Kiev as the ring-entrance music for Harley Race for a while.

That made it high-brow and low-brow all at once. I think ELP would’ve gotten a chuckle out of that.