Benny the Bouncer by Emerson, Lake & Palmer

      At their formation before their first rehearsal or recording session Emerson, Lake, and Palmer were already billed as a super-group.  Carl Palmer was known as a highly skilled and well respected technical drummer with perhaps the quickest hands in the history of rock and roll.

Keith Emerson

Greg Lake

       Keith Emerson was and still is considered one of the most accomplished and savvy keyboard players in the entire history of music.  The classical influences that became compelling in ELP's music can be heard in it's infancy in The Nice's song America written by Leonard Bernstein for the Broadway play West Side Story. In what would become something of a formula for ELP, Emerson took the core of the song and combined it with other more traditional classical music influences added in a dash of his own bombastic and darkly emotional performance style to create what many consider the first genuine Progressive Rock song in the brand new and wildly successful early 1970's Prog-Rock genre.

One of the most complex drum sets
in rock history. Note the gongs, and the
railroad engine bell hanging overhead

       The third member of ELP Greg Lake was possibly the most well know of the trio before ELP's formation.  He had been the lead singer and bassist of the band King Crimson.  They had received quite a bit of radio airplay for their song 21st Century Schizoid Man.  Perhaps even more importantly the band had appeared in the April 9, 1969 Rolling Stones free concert in Hyde Park which is best known for being turned into an impromptu memorial for Brian Jones who had recently passed away.

Palmer, Lake, Emerson is seated

       ELP's early work showed the strength of the bands musicianship and put them squarely in the sites of the hippie generation who were always looking for anything new that would enhance a good chemically induced altered state of mind.  Their self titled first album featured lots of organ and synthesizers, great drumming, vocals, bass, and guitar.  Greg Lake produced the album and throughout the bands tenure he had an eye on singles chart success to help drive the band to reach wider audiences.  This would eventually prove to be a frustrating subject for the band in later years but for now the guys just seemed to be having fun doing something completely original.
       Their second album was the highly ambitious Tarkus.  Side one of which was the title track and it clocked in at nearly 21 minutes.  The song showed off the incredible talents of each member of the band as well as featuring Emerson playing a Moog synthesizer piece at the end called Aquatarkus which never fails to mesmerize me.  The album became ELP's second gold record in a row and reached #1 in the UK.

The true power of ELP could be best felt when they played live

       Next ELP released their take on Modest Musorgsky's classical piece called Pictures At An Exhibition.  At first the record label did not want to release it.  They had no confidence that the teenage record buying public would have any interest in a purely classical recording, even one that had been updated and modernized by three of the greatest rock and roll musicians on the planet.  The label initially agreed to release it as a classical album but at the insistence of the band they finally agreed to full release and promotion.  The band was right the album went gold and sailed up to #3 in the UK and reached #10 in the US.  Which was eight places higher than their highly regarded first album and only one position behind Tarkus.
       While the album might have confused the executives at the record label kids like me understood immediately that ELP was onto something that nobody else was even coming close to matching.  Their next album was called Trilogy and featured the single From The Beginning.  Also for the first time ELP seemed to reach out directly to their American audience by including the songs The Sheriff and their take of the Aaron Copeland's Hoedown.  Again the album sailed up the charts in both the US and the UK going on to become ELP's 4th gold record in a row.

Keith Emerson and his futuristic Moog Synthesizer

       The band was, by now, firmly living up to it's super-group billing and had established themselves as one of the reigning masters of the "concept album".  Flush with success the band was now ready to begin work on it's most ambitious project yet the album eventually called Brain Salad Surgery. Right from the beginning the band captures the listener with a musical version of the William Blake poem Jerusalem, followed by their eerily violent and wildly psychedelic version of Toccata based on the classical piece by Alberto Ginastera.   Then came the quieter acoustic Greg Lake ballad called Still You Turn Me On.
       After Benny the Bouncer the remainder of the album is filled up with an incredible piece of music and masterful storytelling with the 3 movements of Karn Evil 9.  I really don't want to get into an explanation of Karn Evil 9 because it is perhaps the most ambitious rock and roll music ever put on vinyl and the equal of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here , or the Beatles Sergeant Pepper for complexity, range of emotion, and musicianship.  It really requires a post of it's own and perhaps in the future I will give it the full write up it deserves.  But the last song on Brain Salad Surgery before the bold and impressive Karn Evil 9 is Benny The Bouncer.

I imagined Keith Emerson playing Benny the Bouncer amidst
a bloody bar fight and flying beer bottles

       I've seen ELP play live on four occasions  and have never heard them perform the song and I've only ever heard the song played once on the radio.  Unless you are a fan of the band and own the Brain Salad Surgery album there is a good chance you've never heard it before today.  The song stands alone in the ELP repertoire as both a  straightforward hard rocking song feauring good humor and fearless keybard work by Keith Emerson.  It's the story of a bar fight between Benny the Bouncer and his nemesis Savage Sid.  The song hurtles along at a breakneck pace with Greg Lake fiercely growling the vocals and Carl Palmer adding a fiery yet strangly understated drum brush stick accompaniment. But the not so secret weapon driving the song is the barrel house keyboard play creating the exact tone of a bar fight.  You can almost picture Emerson in a rowdy turn of the century NYC Bowery bar wearing a striped shirt and derby.  With beer bottles crashing around him , he just keeps pounding away on the keys of his upright piano providing the soundtrack of a dangerous underground speakeasy.  I've never understood the bands reluctance to play the song live or why it's never received the airplay it clearly deserved.  Please do yourself a favor and take a minute to rock out to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's saloon shaking Benny the Bouncer