Tell me about ELP.
I hear that track as complete chaos. Which, if you were sending it to them....they understood and I did not.
Rush. Nice.
The last one is obvious. But we gotta kinda gingerly prod them to the nice comfortable jacket.
Not so much the ELP song, but the title (Tank). Lots of ELP stuff isn’t always listenable. Numerous times I’ll try to be focusing on something (car repairs, data, etc.) and “Tank” or similar songs of theirs will come on the player and I have to turn it off. “TURN that crap off now!!”
(Better for driving - or just kicking back and listening.)
Heh. Maybe that’s why it is a suitable tribute to the left wing. “Turn that crap off now!”
I did a search on the back-sotry for “Tank”:
“Your drums’ lead role certainly showed itself early on—especially during “Tank” from the debut album.”
Carl Palmer (drummer): “Tank” was the very first piece that I actually wrote with Keith. I had a couple of musical ideas, which I played to him. And I had this rhythm and said that we could have these starts and stops. And I asked him, “What do you think?”
We kind of just kicked it around for a couple of hours that day, and the next day, we got it down and just played it. I think it probably happened the second take.
It was one of those kind of very natural pieces that just sort of fell under our hands, and we decided, “Oh, we’ll put a drum solo in that.”
A lot of those things were quite organic and they developed very quickly, which is always the best way. If we have to sit around for days and days, it’s usually because something is wrong with it. But “Tank” was extremely spontaneous, and I like it a lot. I’m very, very happy with it, and I continued to play it live with my own band. It goes down incredibly well. People still remember it.
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On one of the reviews of an ELP concert, somebody wrote that they were all pomp and no circumstance. Greg Lake acknowledged that to some degree. Said something like “Some times we wrote of things that needed to be said. Sometimes it was to create something beautiful. And sometimes it was just pure showmanship.”