Well, I read through this thread and it appears I'm kinda the new boo-boo. I promise not to go bananas tho.
OK, "promise" is too strong a word. Let's just say I have reasonable confidence.
One thing I am taking away from this thread is that it's nearly entirely looking at this music as a completed body of work, I'd appear to be the only one that watched EL&P's catalog evolve in real time.
My first exposure as a 6th or 7th grader (or mebbe the summer in between) was when "Lucky Man" was released as a single. It sounded like a lot of 1970 top 40 singles, until Emerson's synth in the outro. That seemed so incongruous to the main ballad that I was hella intrigued. Then, Christmas of '71 saw this:
as their second single. I thought this was kinda silly so I again never followed up. The next single followed in '73, "Still...You Turn Me On" was way too much like "Lucky Man" for me and I still didn't bite. It was in '74 that I finally went in to their catalog, their California Jam performance was televised (taped, not live) primetime on ABC (there was only broadcast TV in those days, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and whatever independent local stations were in your city, Fox came along in the '80's). I was just impressed as hell by that performance, and ended up getting all the albums available at that time, the eponymous 1st, Tarkus, Pictures On An Exhibition, Trilogy, Brain Salad Surgery, and the three record Live album. I was floored by all of them, even PoaE (I lost interest in that one to a considerable degree when I discovered the Mussorgsky/Ravel work). None of them were perfect, least of all my favorite, Tarkus. But the best of all those albums (except PoaE, which does have some good moments) were transcendent.
Speaking of Tarkus, I consider that a one side-one track album. Side two was totally tacked on to avoid putting out an album with a blank side two and/or breaking the title track in half. There's no earthly reason to turn that record over, and once I arrived at that conclusion after the first play (of side two) I never did again. I consider all the songs after the title track to be completely irrelevant to the album to such a degree that reading through this thread just now was the first time I'd even thought of them for decades.
When Works was released in '77 was when the anti-ELP diatribe from the Punk movement really got rolling, and to a large degree rightly so. I like their rendition of Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" but most of Works is way too full of itself and an easy and apt target for the DIY movement.
Love Beach = Dreck. Nothing else to say about that POS. No redeeming quality at all, it's been said it's good for a laugh but I find little humor in this once great band taking such a colossal public crap on itself.
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