Our series Dusting ‘Em Off looks at how classic albums found an enduring place in pop culture. Today, we spend some time with Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Trilogy.
At times, Emerson, Lake & Palmer were downright maniacal. It’s evident in their most celebrated material; the absurd 10/8 time signature in “Tarkus,” the proto-heavy metal detour in “Trilogy,” the utterly dense, occasionally incomprehensible patterns of their 29-minute suite, “Karn Evil 9.” But occasionally, ELP found a sweet spot of simplicity, where a single chord can ring out like a beacon from another universe, and a plain-spoken phrase from Greg Lake is enough to level the listener completely.
The supergroup’s respective origins and strengths — Keith Emerson of The Nice on keyboards, King Crimson’s Greg Lake on bass, guitars, and vocals, and Atomic Rooster’s Carl Palmer on drums — made for an uncanny presentation of musicianship. While Palmer and Lake’s previous projects helped lay the foundation of the relatively new genre “progressive rock,” Emerson’s work with The Nice featured dizzying arrangements of classical and jazz-influenced piano. Together, they would push past rock music’s preexisting boundaries, and set a new standard of musicianship and conceptual ambition.
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Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s third studio album, Trilogy, represents the trio at the height of their powers. Released in 1972, it would become their most commercially successful album across the globe, and cemented the band as one of the most experimental and ambitious groups in rock. As its title suggests, Trilogy is divided in threes: The first three songs, “The Endless Enigma (Pt. 1),” “Fugue,” and “The Endless Enigma (Pt. 2)” begin the adventure in a cosmic fashion. “From the Beginning,” “Sheriff,” and “Hoedown” bring us more or less back down to Earth, and then the concluding title track, followed by “Living Sin” and “Abaddon’s Bolero” take us to another universe once again.
Picking up where they left off in 1971 with the similarly ambitious Tarkus, the trio sought to meld the expansive possibilities of classical-influenced jazz-rock odysseys with a slightly more accessible and courageous sound. As such, it was a grueling album to record. Greg Lake, who produced each of the trio’s albums before Trilogy, resumed his role behind the boards — due to the “accurate” nature of the album’s arrangements, structures, and extensive overdubs, Lake has professed in retrospect that Trilogy was both his favorite Emerson, Lake & Palmer album and one of the hardest to craft.
Even from the first song, it’s clear to see what Lake meant when he described the album as “accurate.” “The Endless Enigma,” complete with parts one and two and “Fugue” dividing them, is a whirlwind journey that ebbs and flows through various song structures, tempos, feelings, and synth voicings. It’s so meticulously crafted that each Keith Emerson curve ball sounds both completely improvised and intensely labored. Lake’s vocals and the song’s central melody don’t even appear until the two-and-a-half minute mark — by that point, you’re already bewildered from Emerson’s mysterious sci-fi-esque opening synths, a barrage of bongos from Palmer, Emerson briefly playing a Eurasian zurna, and then a maniacal shuffle groove guided by Lake’s throttling bass and Emerson’s colorful, free-wheeling organ solo.
But as they settle into “The Endless Enigma”‘s core melody, they shift from experimental absurdity to soaring majesty — Lake immediately narrates a rather fraught scene and sings of dejection and disconnect. When he reaches the end of the second verse and cries, “I’m tired of hypocrite freaks/ With tongues in their cheeks/ Turning their eyes as they speak/ They make me sick and tired,” the natural rasp in his voice pops, and all of a sudden, the band’s sonic urgency is matched with Lake’s emotional confessions.
The dividing “Fugue” then gives way to the suite’s concluding section, which features cheerful trumpet synths and feels like the resolution of a great journey. Lake once again mirrors the fanfare of the trio’s instrumentation, landing on the escalating, jubilant realization, “Now that it’s done/ I’ve begun to see the reason why I’m here.” “The Endless Enigma,” like their other multi-part epics, seems to rely on sweeping, all-encompassing themes of good and evil, life and death, fate and coincidence — all the while, they find ways to make these themes appear in micro, multi-layered structures and arrangements, demonstrating the grey area between these storied concepts.
After such a remarkably complex opening, the band was smart to give listeners a bit of a reprieve. “From the Beginning,” an acoustic number penned by Lake and one of the band’s signature songs, can actually feel more enigmatic than its three-part predecessor. Lake mostly oscillates between two minor guitar chords, but in his winding verse arpeggios, yearning guitar solo, and buoyant, crystal-clear bassline, Lake creates an entire world for his band to inhabit. The song’s arrangement, lyrics, and particularly Emerson’s cosmic synth solo at the end, add more layers to the mystical air of Trilogy.
In “From the Beginning,” Lake sings again of absolutism. He wonders about whether he “might have changed,” he ponders regrets and things he “shouldn’t have said,” but each time, he surrenders to acceptance. “But there it is,” “Whatever is done is done,” “It doesn’t matter at all,” he sings, eventually landing on what he sees as inevitability of time and fate: “You were meant to be here from the beginning.” This kind of consuming, almost spiritual assessment of our existence is a quality that looms over all of ELP’s best work.
Notably, on an album with so many overdubs — and considering the vocal-forward trends in both rock and pop during the ’70s — there are hardly any harmonies or detailed arrangements on Lake’s vocals. ELP wanted listeners to feel like the band was operating with a full orchestra, but then there’s Greg Lake singing all alone like he’s the only one in the room. It ends up working in the band’s favor because Lake often arrives at these songs with sharp decisiveness; on “Trilogy,” he outlines the end of a relationship with wisdom and assurance, ending the song with a rather strange melody as he escalates, “You’ll love again I don’t know when/ But if you do I know that you’ll be happy in the end.” He’s not so much mourning the end of the partnership as he is fiercely intent on exploring new worlds.
That air of joyous discovery is present even in the band’s more traditional offerings. The heartland rocker “Sheriff” is arguably Carl Palmer’s most electrifying performance behind the kit, matching Emerson’s frenetic chord shifts with appropriately dynamic fills in each phrase. His compositional elegance as a drummer is everywhere on Trilogy, especially given the frequent overdubs of auxiliary percussion; but when you subtract all of that and look at the parts Palmer was laying down on the drum set for songs like “Sheriff,” a sense of joy and wonder rings out with each groove (Bonus points for Palmer’s jaw-dropping fill during “The Endless Enigma (Pt. 1)” where he fills the empty space between refrains with three sets of quick-fire triplets on the bass drum and ends it with the abrupt sound of a choked crash).
And then there’s “Hoedown,” which is an adaptation of Aaron Copland’s ballet piece of the same name and a longtime live staple for Emerson, Lake & Palmer. At such a blistering pace, a lot is demanded from all three musicians — but it’s Emerson who pulls out all the stops on this country romp, soloing not just on his usual organ, but on three different synths throughout. “Hoedown” is a deeply silly, absolutely haywire rendition from the trio, and it showed that even with the intense, all-encompassing experiments like Trilogy and Tarkus, they never took themselves too seriously.
Trilogy concludes with the synth-forward march, “Abaddon’s Bolero” when the journey is complete, the mission accomplished, and cosmic enlightenment achieved. Yet, the journey was only just beginning for the trio — only months after Trilogy‘s release in 1972, the band would start their own label, Manticore Records, and begin working on new material for the band’s fourth album, Brain Salad Surgery. But Trilogy‘s international success demonstrated that ELP’s magic touch was no longer just a secret for British rock fans — it was a novel quality that deserved to be celebrated around the world.
Though they continued with more expansive albums as a trio over the next two decades, Emerson, Lake & Palmer would never quite reach the heights they had on Trilogy. In a 2012 interview with Vintage Rock, Lake agreed: “It couldn’t be anyone else. It truly is a definitive album. It is the very best of ELP in a way. It’s got flashes of all the best things of what we were.” His first claim — that it couldn’t be anyone else who made this album — seems to hit the nail on the head. Today, seven years after Emerson’s death by suicide and Lake’s fatal battle with cancer in 2016, Trilogy is the reminder of their unmistakeable brilliance.
As all great supergroups do, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer made each other better. They challenged each other, they made each other laugh, they pushed each other to expansive, psychedelic sonic limits. But when they sync up, like in the majestic outro of “From the Beginning,” the maniacal 5/4 groove in the center of “Trilogy,” or the gritty, furious chorus of “Living Sin,” they appear as one tremendous vehicle of music.
