Carl Palmer talks ELP legacy and that time he drummed with Fleetwood Mac

Photo courtesy of Chipster P.R.

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By George Varga | [email protected] | The San Diego Union-Tribune

UPDATED: August 24, 2017 at 2:12 PM PDT

As the drummer in Emerson, Lake & Palmer, progressive-rock’s biggest-selling band ever, Carl Palmer helped make history by fusing classical music and rock.

Formed in 1970, the groundbreaking trio — also known as ELP — sold more than 40 million albums worldwide and scored such U.S. radio favorites as “Lucky Man,” “In the Beginning” and “Still … You Turn Me On.”

They filled sprawling venues, including the San Diego Sports Arena and Balboa Stadium, and set a standard for virtuosity, ambition and musical pomp and bombast. Their legacy will be saluted anew with the Sept. 29 release of the 16-CD “Fanfare: Emerson, Lake & Palmer, 1970-1997” box set.

Now, seven years after the final reunion show by ELP, Palmer is again making history, albeit in a bittersweet way. As the band’s sole surviving member, he is keeping its music alive with Carl Palmer’s ELP Legacy, which plays here Monday at the Balboa Theater with fellow English prog-rock pioneers Yes.

The concert is part of the ongoing Yestival tour, which also features Todd Rundgren (who is not playing at the Balboa and instead has a Sept. 1 solo date here at the Music Box).

It will be Palmer’s first San Diego appearance since ELP singer-bassist Greg Lake died from cancer in December at the age of 68. ELP keyboardist and synthesizer Keith Emerson died in May of last year from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was 71.

But instead of replicating ELP’s keyboards, bass and drums with vocals format, Palmer is leading a vocal-less guitar, bass and drums lineup, which he formed in 2001 as The Carl Palmer Band.

“I never wanted to copy ELP, because it made no sense,” he said, speaking from a recent Yestival tour stop in Pennsylvania.

“So I decided to take a new route to show people the versatility of ELP’s original material. Keith and Greg took their hats off to what I did with my band and loved every minute of it. This is another way of bringing the music to another generation, and giving it to them, so that it’s theirs.”

ELP formed in 1970, after Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell first auditioned for the spot filled by Palmer — and after Emerson’s plans to launch a band with Hendrix went astray.

To hear Palmer tell it, he and Emerson hit it off immediately, at least musically speaking, after leaving their respective previous bands — Atomic Rooster and The Nice — to team up with former King Crimson front man Lake.

“Coming from a family of classical musicians, one of the greatest things for me about ELP was to play classical adaptations in a rock genre,” the veteran drummer said. “For me, it was absolutely perfect that — when I looked at the classical and jazz albums Keith had — he had everything I had in my collection. So there was an incredibly synergy from the start.

“And we wanted to write our own music. We all knew what we wanted to do; it was just a case of getting it done and it was a magical moment. We weren’t the best of friends; we didn’t go on holidays together. We basically were all about the music. When we went in our rehearsal room, we’d play for 6 hours a day, and we did that for years. When we walked out of the rehearsal room, we said ‘goodbye.’ It wasn’t: ‘Let’s go down to the pub.”

Differences of opinion between the three musicians were a frequent occurrence. But that was a good thing, according to Palmer, who contends that bands whose never argue with each other tend to make dull, complacent music.

“Nobody sat on the fence in ELP,” he stressed. “If somebody didn’t like something, it would be discussed immediately. That’s how you want it to be, with everyone putting in their time and opinion. We never argued over women or expenses, only about music. And we could argue about music, and did, for about 4 years, really, and il loved every minute of it. It was probably the greatest time of my life.”

Despite their frequent arguments — or, perhaps, because of them — ELP ultimately fostered an all-for-one sense of cooperation out of even its most heated disagreements.

The key?

No two could out-vote the lone dissenter in their ranks.

“Everybody would have to agree,” Palmer said. “And if we couldn’t agree, it wouldn’t happen. If there was a musical problem between Keith and Greg, I’d solve it. There would be tension, always (between them). One guy wrote beautiful folk songs with three chords, and the other guy wrote huge classical pieces.

“So I’d have to be the referee with a cap on to judge it for what was worth, and tell them the way it was going to be. And it worked, because they respected me. We always made it work.”

Until, that is, they didn’t.

ELP disbanded in 1979, as progressive-rock lost both its commercial prominence and cachet of hipness following the rise of punk, disco and New Wave. Palmer, though, cites just one reason.

“Radio, radio, radio!” he said.

“In the 1970s, until a certain point, American radio was wide (open). You could have anything played, at any time on the radio, whereas in Europe it was more difficult. In America, our entire (version of Mussorgysky’s) ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ was played on radio, the full 23 minutes, by Scott Muni in New York. That was the difference. Times have changed and America has moved on.”

ELP regrouped in 1991 and played its final reunion show in 1998 at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay in San Diego. They did not perform again until mounting a U.S. tour in 2010.

ELP’s final show was in July of that year at London’s High Voltage festival. Palmer cites his band mates’ health problems — most notably the degenerative disease in Emerson’s hands — as the key factor that spelled the end of ELP.

“What happened in 2010 is that we didn’t reach the musical standard where we had left off 12 years before, even after five solid weeks of rehearsal,” he lamented.

“I knew there was something wrong. There were physical things wrong with Keith and problems with Greg, and I understood that. But, at the end of the day, you have to be of the standard the public expects and you cannot fool them. So that’s why it ended.”

Palmer, 67, was only 16 when he became the drummer in Chris Farlowe and The Thunderbirds, a London band featuring several other future English rock legends. In 1968, he ed The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, best known for its almost unhinged hit, “Fire.”

Brown would perform the song in concert wearing a flaming metal helmet that sometimes burned out of control. Was Palmer ever singed?

“It was never a problem,” he replied. “Arthur did get burned. He had several helmets and if the glue put on wasn’t dry enough, it would splash off into the petrol. He did get seared on the side of his face, but I was well out of his way.

“The only thing that happened to me, because I had two strobe lights in front and in back of me on stage, my peripheral vision got very bad and the muscles under my eyes got incredibly weak. So I have bags under my eyes, which I shouldn’t have. That’s the only damage I got.”

It was while he was a member of Brown’s Crazy World band in 1968 that Palmer played a single performance with what was then the most successful blues-rock band in England, albeit for only a single show.

“When I was 17, I was in Fleetwood Mac for one night with Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer,” Palmer recalled. “John McVie called and said Mick Fleetwood was ill, and asked if I’d sub.

“It was easy for me to play blues, once you got the pocket sorted out. I probably played too much for them; Peter said it sounded a bit like Cream, because I filled things out a lot on drums.”

And if McVie called now to ask him to sub for Fleetwood?

“It depends, really,” Palmer said.

“Fleetwood Mac is not the type of music I like to play. It’s not my idea of playing drums, because you’re playing solely for the song, and I like to play for the music, not just for a song. Fleetwood Mac doesn’t have enough music for me, but I say that with the greatest respect. I wish I could write songs like that!”