MUSIC REVIEW : ELP Satisfies at Engaging Reunion Gig

A week ago, the prospects for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer turning in a memorable concert Wednesday night at San Diego State University’s Open Air Theatre did not seem good, even to a longtime fan.

Once the most popular, successful, and classically oriented of the progressive-rock bands of the early- to mid-1970s, keyboardist Keith Emerson, guitarist-bassist-vocalist Greg Lake and drummer Carl Palmer are nearly 20 years beyond their best work. Now snugly into their 40s, ELP returned to San Diego representing a long-dormant genre still pilloried by many critics for its alleged pretensions and excesses.

Perhaps most ominous of all, the British trio’s just-released “Black Moon”--its first album of new music in 14 years--is, inexplicably, the sort of turgid, plodding blob of a thing that a band might issue only to satisfy contractual obligations.

The first few minutes of ELP’s two-hour show lived down to expectations. Emerging after a recorded orchestral fanfare that made one wonder if the university was beginning its commencement exercises early, the band played a truncated version of the “First Impression” movement of the extended piece “Karn Evil 9.” This long-traditional opening for an ELP show, with its giddy synthesizer sequence and carnival barker appeal (“Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. . . .”), seemed at once a nostalgic nod and a ploy to revive old allegiances.

With prop-fog billowing onto the stage, a jury of 2,900 heard the first evidence, and it seemed damning: Vocalist Lake couldn’t hit the high notes; timekeeper Palmer lost his place and momentarily pushed the trio out of sync, and Emerson’s keyboard work seemed stiff-fingered and rote.

Then, the band segued into the title piece from the 1971 album, “Tarkus.” It was as if the music’s aerobic, pummeling, multiple-metered rhythms were a musical lineament; ELP’s gears gradually began to mesh, and one had an inkling that the show might turn out well, after all.

In the middle of the lengthy piece, however, Emerson abandoned his mad-scientist’s lair of keyboards and doodads and jumped into the audience holding a relic from the band’s ‘70s shows. The “instrument”--basically, a stick-like gizmo equipped with a voltage controller--emits theramin-like whoops when stroked in a rather suggestive manner. For a climax, Emerson used to trigger an explosive device that shot gunpowder from the “business” end.

Such bad-theater folderol, and not any lofty airs about conservatory virtuosity or compositional sophistication, was ELP’s Achilles heel even during its heyday. Whether because he felt a need to patronize rock audiences with cape-and-dagger showmanship, or because he just couldn’t help hamming it up, Emerson debased the band’s honest efforts with dumb tricks. On at least one occasion, he dearly paid for it.

Before a show on the trio’s 1973 “Brain Salad Surgery” tour, a newly hired roadie put too much gunpowder in the stick. It exploded in Emerson’s hands, tearing off a thumbnail and leaving him to bleed all over his keyboards for the concert’s duration. When the magic moment came Wednesday night, the stick spit only very tame sparks. One hoped that wouldn’t prove symbolic of the concert itself.

Two cuts from the new album put a drag on the show’s momentum. With its lumbering rhythms, “Black Moon” might better have been titled “Variations on ‘We Will Rock You.’ ” After performing the songs “Paper Blood” and the title track, which only proved the older material’s superiority, Lake and Palmer left the stage.

Emerson provided something of a buoy with “Close to Home,” his solo-piano contribution to the new opus. The man is an extraordinary player, and this interlude was welcome and rewarding. Emerson’s baby grand piano was equipped with a MIDI controller, which enabled him to call on electronically sampled “orchestral” accompaniment without lifting his fingers from the keys.

“Close to Home” is a characteristically Emersonian mixture of jazz, classical, and 20th-Century piano styles. Uncharacteristically, Emerson constructed it around a melody from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto without crediting the composer. He was more gracious with his second piano piece, the piquant “Creole Dance.” Emerson allowed that the largely extemporaneous effort was based on music by the contemporary Argentinean composer, Alberto Ginastera. It also included a healthy quote from “Something’s Coming,” from “West Side Story.”

Lake’s solo segment followed, and was enhanced by the evening’s first effective use of the backdrop scrim. While Lake sang faithful and well-received renditions of the band’s acoustic-guitar ballads, “From the Beginning” and “Still. . .You Turn Me On,” a multihued sunset appeared beyond a giant Doric colonnade. Emerson and Palmer returned to supply support on the 1970 hit, “Lucky Man,” to which Emerson added a nice keyboard-generated “string-section” wash.

Next, the trio played Emerson’s arrangement of Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” (the music heard on the perfume commercial where women keep opening shutters and yelling, “Egoiste!”). The piece had more guts in performance than it does on the new album, but its inflexible melody and tightly contained harmonic structure make it an odd, arbitrary choice for interpretation, and a questionable selection for live performance. By this point in the concert, the judges’ ringside score cards were giving even points to both ELP’s idolaters and detractors. The next segment, however, would bring a knockout.

“Pirates,” the massive programmatic piece composed by Emerson, Lake, and lyricist Pete Sinfield, and originally conceived as a soundtrack for Frederick Forsyth’s “The Dogs of War,” was a gang buster. ELP’s charged reading brought to life the work’s dramatic thematic shifts and epic sweep. The band’s 1977 recording of the opus (“Works, Volume 1”) featured Paris’s Orchestre de l’Opera, but Emerson utilized the newest music technology to replicate the meat of the original score.

“Pirates” seemed to stimulate the audience, as well, priming it for a performance of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” that led directly to a splashy drum and percussion solo by Palmer. For an encore, ELP played its arrangement of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and Emerson’s hyperactive interpretation of “America,” from “West Side Story,” which he first recorded with his pre-ELP band, the Nice.

It was during this otherwise entertaining section that Emerson reverted to bad form. He and a stage hand spun the keyboard riser around to expose a battered C-3 organ and Marshall amplifier against a fake brick wall. Emerson then revisited his most embarrassing trick from the old days, by standing atop the organ and jabbing knives between its keys while rocking back and forth, bronco-style. At one point, he moved to the back of the instrument and pulled it down on top of him. From a supine position he proceeded to play a passage from Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in d minor”, upside-down.

It was a silly way to end a show, but not silly enough to ruin what had turned out to be an engaging and generous showcase of the band’s strengths.