No. 158 – Tank

Performer: Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Songwriters: Keith Emerson, Carl Palmer

Original Release: Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Year: 1971

Definitive Version: Works Live, 1993.

Waiting until the Nineties to buy my first CD player and move my music into the digital-production era had money-saving benefits. By the time I was ready to start buying albums on CD, many of my favorites were re-released with additional material included, so I didn’t have to buy them twice.

Although this had been true of studio albums, such as So, from the beginning, what began to happen in the Nineties was the re-release of classic live albums that were longer. The first one I remember was Four Way Street by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in 1992. (I bought my first CD player in 1990.) It was nice to have the four extra songs, but it was a bit of a disappointment that the electric disc hadn’t been enhanced similarly.

One album that wasn’t a disappointment in this regard was Works Live. After I pledged undying allegiance to ELP in the early Eighties, I wanted more stuff to listen to, but after you buy Welcome Back My Friends …, there’s really only so much more that you don’t already have.

I passed on ELP’s final album, In Concert, because it was only a single album. How can ELP possibly release a live album that’s only one record? Works Live is a double disc, and as soon as I discovered it among Scott’s CDs in the summer of 1993, I bought it for myself. I was particularly pleased to have this version of Tank in my collection.

At about the same time, the Sports staff made a momentous discovery of its own at the White Horse in Flint—the tap had been switched from Labatt’s to Labatt Ice. I don’t know which summer discovery pleased me more at the time—the arrival of Works Live or the arrival of Labatt Ice.

Being close to Canada, I had been able to explore pre-craft Canadian beer. In the United States, you got Molson, Molson Golden, Labatt’s, Moosehead, and that was about it. In Canada, however, there was a full slate of Molson and Labatt offerings—many of them highly potent—like Molson Brador. It soon came to pass that any trip to Canada required a stop at the duty-free shop at the border to bring over some of those unavailable beers for home consumption.

I looked it up, and Labatt Ice made its debut in Canada in spring 1993, but I would swear that it had been out at least a year before that. When it finally arrived in the United States—at the White Horse—I already knew well of it from trips to Great White North, so I was pretty excited by the tap switch. Memory being what it is, however, I might have known it more from reputation than actual sampling.

Either way, it was as good as I recalled (or heard). Labatt Ice instantly became my favorite beer of all time as well as the beer of choice by everyone in Sports the rest of the time I was in Flint.

Of course, by the time I moved to Columbus, the U.S. breweries had jumped on the ice-beer bandwagon, and what had been a legitimately good product became the latest beer fad to be watered down and ruined by overexposure. It was kind of like what happened to alternative rock at the time, with Hootie and the Blowjobs playing the role of Bud Ice.

Now if you see ice beer at all, it’s lumped in with the Thunderbirds and Mad Dog 20/20s of the cooler. Sad.