Review: In Clearwater, Carl Palmer loops his late bandmates into innovative prog-rock celebration

The future is always now, but holograms are plain scary. And one of progressive rock’s most prolific drummers strongly concurs.

As someone who was born too late to catch countless music legends live—in or out of their respective prime—I get the urge for wanting to bring back the dead. I mean, who wouldn’t want to see David Bowie sauntering around a stage as Ziggy Stardust for two-and-a-half hours? And I dare you to refuse an offer of seeing Jimi Hendrix play guitar with his teeth live one more time.

Carl Palmer loves the idea and has decided to bring back his fallen bandmates using a more faithful approach than a cheesy hologram. In a recent interview with Creative Loafing Tampa, Palmer—the last surviving member of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer—explained how he found an obscure DVD of the band playing at London’s Royal Albert Hall in the early ‘90s, with everything recorded separately (both audibly and visually). This gave Palmer the perfect loophole out of using holograms and presented him a new opportunity to drum live, with archival footage of Keith Emerson and Greg Lake playing in sync behind him.

Other artist camps have tested the waters with this method in recent years. Elvis Presley and his isolated vocals appeared on screens above a full orchestra during the flipside of the 2010s, and Johnny Cash’s vocals have been fronting a full band led by Debbie Horton, the only woman to have ever played lead guitar for the Man In Black.

Keeping up with archive vocals is one thing. Sound engineers can pause them to make room for some instrumental improv. But following pre-recorded keyboards, bass, and vocals in a live setting? That can be a challenge.

But still, it turned the crowd on.

Following a brief video dedication to the fallen Emerson and Lake—and a compilation of television clips mentioning the band—Palmer, 73, hopped behind his massive, double-gong-finished drumkit at Ruth Eckerd Hall last Friday night, and launched into “Karn Evil 9: First Impression, Part 2,” with nothing but himself and his late bandmates providing instrumentation and vocals for the first two verses.

When the first instrumental segment began after Lake’s second chorus ended, he and Emerson faded offscreen, and Palmer’s current band took over the rest of the opening track. Youthful vocalist Paul Bielatowicz’s virtuosic guitarring and whimsical bassman Simon Fitzpatrick were given extensive time to shine on both the latter portion of “Karn Evil 9,” and again on “Hoedown,” which was a bit skimpy on the keyboard parts, and also excluded the “Turkey In The Straw” bit near the end. But you try playing multiple keyboard bits by Keith Emerson on a fucking six-string.

Fitzpatrick would pull out his black, 10-string Chapman Stick for an instrumental version of Lake’s “Take A Pebble,” and Palmer took on an incredibly rare vocal part on “Benny The Bouncer,” off of “one of [his] favorite albums,” 1973’s Brain Salad Surgery. Lake would never sing the track—centered around a tough-guy bouncer who was murdered by an even tougher guy—and this always weirded Carl out. “He just always steered away from it,” he recalled, just to inform the less-than-sold-out room that he was going to sing it himself, just like on the original recording. “Strap yourselves in, kids,” he commanded.

Soon, the live band would perform “Tarkus”—the 20-minute epic that shares a name with ELP’s sophomore album—in its entirety, with vocals by Bielatowicz, and a well-deserved standing ovation was to follow.

By this point, the room of people in which I was one of the only ones with naturally brown hair was all-grins and loaded with nostalgic stadium show memories, but it wasn’t until Palmer’s nine-minute drum solo (yes, I counted) three-quarters of the way through “Carmina Burana” that jaws began to drop.

Palmer—a septuagenarian who is less than a year past undergoing heart surgery— made sure that every nook and cranny of his kit—from the cowbell to the drumsticks themselves—got pounded at some point. Let’s just say that even if he wasn’t the last man standing in the prog-rock super trio, the standing ovation he would have received would still be just as deafening.

That’s not to say Palmer was the only one who got an all-eyes-on-me moment, though. He played bongos on “From The Beginning,” only featuring Lake on guitar and vocals, intended as a salute to the late King Crimson singer. And following a conversation with Emerson’s son Aaron centered around how his dad always did a piano solo at ELP gigs, footage of the late Korg legend playing Alberto Ginastera’s “Creole Dance” rolled while everyone exited the stage.

While there shouldn’t be a problem taking Palmer’s word for this show being “the real thing” and not a tribute show, the only thing that could have made it more authentic was taking higher advantage of having three screens to mess around with.

Most of the archived footage (which included a plethora of profile angles of Emerson and Lake respectively) rolled on both screens in unison, as opposed to having Emerson on one screen the whole time, and Lake on the other. Excluding a handful of wide angles seeing both of the guys together, the only time we actually saw Emerson, Lake, and Palmer onstage together was during “Lucky Man,” performed just before the epic medley finale that opened and closed with “Fanfare For The Common Man.”

However, during said medley (which also included “America” and “Blue Rondo à la Turk”), the footage that rolled seemingly required both side screens, just as a reminder of the madman Emerson was when it came to performing live. As Palmer continued going to town on his kit, all eyes shifted towards the late keyboardist riding, standing on, and getting crushed by one of his organs, before leaving it for dead.

Try doing that with a hologram.

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