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Author F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, "There are no second acts in America lives," and then promptly drank himself to death. Drummer Carl Palmer is English and believes in a more forgiving philosophy.
He's on his fourth act in a career that first saw him playing drums with Arthur Brown and then auditioning for the former keyboardist from the Nice, Keith Emerson, and King Crimson founder Greg Lake for their new super group. He passed the audition and Emerson, Lake & Palmer was born. The sound that followed was of the minds blown around the world as this power trio produced complex explorations of pomp rock.
That career-defining moment wasn't the end. In the '80s Palmer got behind the kit drum for MTV staple Asia, and today he's leading his own band, simply called Carl Palmer Band. He's about to embark on a North American tour this spring and summer. For further information log onto his website, CarlPalmer.com.
Movies influenced Palmer's musical development, such as seeing Drum Crazy: The Gene Krupa Story as a child, and now he's releasing his own DVD. The working title is Carl Palmer Band Live in Europe, taken from the MTV Prog Rock Festival in Romania. It's due out this summer. "A lot of people have said how fantastic it is, but they always do to your face," Palmer says. "I'm really quite proud of it. The sound could be better; it can always be better. But nevertheless it shows you what you can do instrumentally with great musicians and great music, and not end up sounding like some cabaret band."
Is this really your first solo North American tour?
Yes. I've not been there since '98. That's the last date I played with ELP--September the 2nd, I remember, in San Diego. I've been there since to play some drum clinics. But, yeah, this will be the first time.
How is this tour going to be different than touring with ELP? I mean, do you still get nutty groupies trying to get backstage?
Whoever wants to come backstage, if they're respectable they can come back. Number one, it's smaller venues, a lot smaller. Number two, I'm obviously not as well known as the whole band, ELP. Number three, it's an instrumental band, so it's a bit more intellectual music. We are playing classical adaptations all night long on various pieces. I would say it's completely different. For one, it's all guitar, no keyboards at all. We had to change many of the arrangements. There are pieces which ELP didn't play. It's radical, that's for sure.
You played in The Crazy World of Arthur Brown; so how crazy was that world?
Fairly strange, yes; the album and the single ["Fire"] were number one at the same time. It was a strange time. It was '68. It was my first time in America. Yes, it was a learning curve; I think you guys call it that.
What did you learn?
I learned about publishing, a certain amount of management. I learned what you could and couldn't do. I learned an awful lot about your country, touring and working there and making that work. I was eighteen. It was exciting and I was quite happy to do it. It was just a great, great time. There's nothing else I can say about it, really. It was a period of time where I didn't know exactly how far my career was going to go. I know that I could always play, that I could always make a living. Of course I didn't understand anything about America, so it was just great to go there, see it all, and realize what we have in Europe is completely different, just as valid, but different, you know?
Since then I've been back with ELP. I've been back with Asia. I've been back again with ELP, and now I'm coming back with the Carl Palmer Band. I like the place.
For you the go-go '80s were spent laying down the rhythm for chart-toppers Asia. That was a pretty decadent decade. Was it equally as debauched for the band?
I think you're kind of a scandal writer, obviously. I wasn't really debauched. The band wasn't together for very long. If you were around during that time you'd know that Asia didn't play America at all. We played maybe for six or seven weeks [live] for the whole of our career. We didn't play to more than eight thousand people.
The first album sold about four and a half million, the second one sold about a million, and the third one sold about less than half that. Then the band broke up due to internal conflicts and personal reasons.
It was a corporate rock band. It was the age of corporate rock, where the intro had to be twenty seconds long because that's all a deejay in America could talk. They wanted the third line in every chorus to rhyme. That's what you had to do to get on in America at the time because all your radio stations had been bought out by corporations.
That was a major problem. Before that you guys were quite arty, but you lost it a bit there, and that disturbed us, but that's the way it goes.
After being the butt of bad jokes, progressive rock has experienced a resurgence of late, thanks to hipster re-issues and young bands picking up the torch you left burning in the '70s. Are you enjoying this resurgence?
Yes. It's not resurgence, really, because the stuff doesn't get played on the radio. The fact that these guys are playing it is that they're really desperate and they'd love to have the opportunity to have been in the fun that I was in when that was happening.
Unfortunately you can't play complex prog rock or, what I'm playing, classical adaptation--now, my band sounds like a metal rock band, but it plays instrumentals--there's no way that you can do that today and expect to make a living at it. It's really difficult if you're a young band. I just happen to sell enough CDs to make it worthwhile.
There's no resurgence; prog rock will never come back. It's finished, it's gone, it's over. But there will always be a certain amount of people who will want to see it. I've just tried to tune into a market that wants to see and hear great musicianship, playing great tunes that are basically instrumental and dealing with it on a serious musicianship side rather than having lots of esoteric lyrics. I just try to make it a little more adult, a little more specialized and see if I can grow a market in America as I have in Europe.
Europeans love it if you play something by Bach or Bartok or Copland or Stravinsky. People are tired of that instrumental music that sounds like elevator jazz. Certain people of the age demographics--say, between thirty to fifty--would love to go to a concert, but don't want the razzamatazz, you know, the singer at the front of the stage holding his codpiece. They don't want that, but they want to rock out, and it's hard to rock out when someone's playing the clarinet, the saxophone, because it's cool jazz--the word says everything.
This is metal prog rock, instrumental fashion, with a certain amount of cultural value to it. That's basically what I'm all about. It could be just what's needed in America.
images of Carl Palmer all courtesy of Carl Palmer website
He's on his fourth act in a career that first saw him playing drums with Arthur Brown and then auditioning for the former keyboardist from the Nice, Keith Emerson, and King Crimson founder Greg Lake for their new super group. He passed the audition and Emerson, Lake & Palmer was born. The sound that followed was of the minds blown around the world as this power trio produced complex explorations of pomp rock.
That career-defining moment wasn't the end. In the '80s Palmer got behind the kit drum for MTV staple Asia, and today he's leading his own band, simply called Carl Palmer Band. He's about to embark on a North American tour this spring and summer. For further information log onto his website, CarlPalmer.com.
Movies influenced Palmer's musical development, such as seeing Drum Crazy: The Gene Krupa Story as a child, and now he's releasing his own DVD. The working title is Carl Palmer Band Live in Europe, taken from the MTV Prog Rock Festival in Romania. It's due out this summer. "A lot of people have said how fantastic it is, but they always do to your face," Palmer says. "I'm really quite proud of it. The sound could be better; it can always be better. But nevertheless it shows you what you can do instrumentally with great musicians and great music, and not end up sounding like some cabaret band."
Is this really your first solo North American tour?
Yes. I've not been there since '98. That's the last date I played with ELP--September the 2nd, I remember, in San Diego. I've been there since to play some drum clinics. But, yeah, this will be the first time.
How is this tour going to be different than touring with ELP? I mean, do you still get nutty groupies trying to get backstage?
Whoever wants to come backstage, if they're respectable they can come back. Number one, it's smaller venues, a lot smaller. Number two, I'm obviously not as well known as the whole band, ELP. Number three, it's an instrumental band, so it's a bit more intellectual music. We are playing classical adaptations all night long on various pieces. I would say it's completely different. For one, it's all guitar, no keyboards at all. We had to change many of the arrangements. There are pieces which ELP didn't play. It's radical, that's for sure.
You played in The Crazy World of Arthur Brown; so how crazy was that world?
Fairly strange, yes; the album and the single ["Fire"] were number one at the same time. It was a strange time. It was '68. It was my first time in America. Yes, it was a learning curve; I think you guys call it that.
What did you learn?
I learned about publishing, a certain amount of management. I learned what you could and couldn't do. I learned an awful lot about your country, touring and working there and making that work. I was eighteen. It was exciting and I was quite happy to do it. It was just a great, great time. There's nothing else I can say about it, really. It was a period of time where I didn't know exactly how far my career was going to go. I know that I could always play, that I could always make a living. Of course I didn't understand anything about America, so it was just great to go there, see it all, and realize what we have in Europe is completely different, just as valid, but different, you know?
Since then I've been back with ELP. I've been back with Asia. I've been back again with ELP, and now I'm coming back with the Carl Palmer Band. I like the place.
For you the go-go '80s were spent laying down the rhythm for chart-toppers Asia. That was a pretty decadent decade. Was it equally as debauched for the band?
I think you're kind of a scandal writer, obviously. I wasn't really debauched. The band wasn't together for very long. If you were around during that time you'd know that Asia didn't play America at all. We played maybe for six or seven weeks [live] for the whole of our career. We didn't play to more than eight thousand people.
The first album sold about four and a half million, the second one sold about a million, and the third one sold about less than half that. Then the band broke up due to internal conflicts and personal reasons.
It was a corporate rock band. It was the age of corporate rock, where the intro had to be twenty seconds long because that's all a deejay in America could talk. They wanted the third line in every chorus to rhyme. That's what you had to do to get on in America at the time because all your radio stations had been bought out by corporations.
That was a major problem. Before that you guys were quite arty, but you lost it a bit there, and that disturbed us, but that's the way it goes.
After being the butt of bad jokes, progressive rock has experienced a resurgence of late, thanks to hipster re-issues and young bands picking up the torch you left burning in the '70s. Are you enjoying this resurgence?
Yes. It's not resurgence, really, because the stuff doesn't get played on the radio. The fact that these guys are playing it is that they're really desperate and they'd love to have the opportunity to have been in the fun that I was in when that was happening.
Unfortunately you can't play complex prog rock or, what I'm playing, classical adaptation--now, my band sounds like a metal rock band, but it plays instrumentals--there's no way that you can do that today and expect to make a living at it. It's really difficult if you're a young band. I just happen to sell enough CDs to make it worthwhile.
There's no resurgence; prog rock will never come back. It's finished, it's gone, it's over. But there will always be a certain amount of people who will want to see it. I've just tried to tune into a market that wants to see and hear great musicianship, playing great tunes that are basically instrumental and dealing with it on a serious musicianship side rather than having lots of esoteric lyrics. I just try to make it a little more adult, a little more specialized and see if I can grow a market in America as I have in Europe.
Europeans love it if you play something by Bach or Bartok or Copland or Stravinsky. People are tired of that instrumental music that sounds like elevator jazz. Certain people of the age demographics--say, between thirty to fifty--would love to go to a concert, but don't want the razzamatazz, you know, the singer at the front of the stage holding his codpiece. They don't want that, but they want to rock out, and it's hard to rock out when someone's playing the clarinet, the saxophone, because it's cool jazz--the word says everything.
This is metal prog rock, instrumental fashion, with a certain amount of cultural value to it. That's basically what I'm all about. It could be just what's needed in America.
images of Carl Palmer all courtesy of Carl Palmer website
