Greg Lake – Lucky ManLucky Man was featured on Emerson Lake & Palmer’s eponymous debut album in 1970. This is how that came to pass, in words taken from his autobiography, entitled Lucky Man (of course), which is well worth a read. He wrote it in the short time between his cancer diagnosis and his death.
“Very shortly after I began playing the guitar at the age of twelve, I wrote the song Lucky Man. I only knew four chords at the time – D, G, A minor and E minor – and I used all of them to compose the song. I don’t really know what caused me to think of the title ‘Lucky Man’ – maybe it was that I was feeling lucky about having my very own guitar or perhaps it was just that moment in a young person’s life when you know the time has come to emerge from the chrysalis of childhood and begin a new life as a free-thinking adult.
“At first, I had no plans to bring ‘Lucky Man’ to the group. We already had a fairly simple song on the album, ‘Take a Pebble’, which I wrote very early on with Keith before Carl had joined the band, and we built it up with a piano solo for Keith and a guitar solo for me. The other tracks on the album were more complicated, though, including ‘The Barbarian’ inspired by Béla Bartók’s ‘Allegro Barbaro’, and ‘Knife-Edge’, which merged elements of Janacek’s Sinfonietta and Bach’s ‘French Suite in D Minor’ – those pieces showed how we were trying to draw on European classical influences to create a radical new sound. ‘The Three Fates’ and ‘Tank’ showed off the musical virtuosity of Keith and Carl respectively, with ‘The Three Fates’ involving us lugging all the recording equipment to both the Royal Festival Hall and a church in Finchley to capture Keith’s organ solos.
‘Lucky Man’, however, didn’t seem to break new ground and was very simple in its approach. This isn’t how Keith remembers it, but that day remains very clear in my mind. As the recording sessions were about to draw to a close, we counted how much of the album’s running time we had left. We discovered to our dismay that we were over three minutes short. (During the glorious days of vinyl, the prescribed time for a record was twenty-one minutes per side.)
Eddy Offord’s voice came over the talkback.
‘We need one last song,’ he said.
Carl asked if anyone had any ideas. We looked at each other blankly and there was a pregnant silence until I reluctantly came forward.
‘Well, if there’s nothing else, I do have this little folk song that I wrote when I was a kid,’ I said.
The awkwardness in the studio returned until Keith said: ‘Okay, why don’t you play it and let’s take a listen?’
I put down my bass, picked up my Gibson J200 and sang the song. For a couple of minutes, Keith tried to improvise along on the Hammond organ but he ran out of ideas. He suggested that I just record it on my own. I was a bit surprised. It was such a straightforward song, after all, so it allowed plenty of room for him to come up with something. What was the problem? I could see he wasn’t keen, though, so I agreed to carry on without him. Keith left to go to the pub down the road from the studio.
I took my J200 into the isolated vocal booth and got ready to record the song. Suddenly the padded door opened and Carl poked his head around.
‘Do you want me to play along on drums?’ he asked.
I gave him the thumbs up and a few minutes later we had recorded the first take. We went back into the control room to take a listen. It didn’t sound great. We started analysing what was wrong but Eddy suggested that I record the bass track before we got overly critical. So I did, and then I added the backing vocals and the electric guitar solo as well.
I was never tempted to revise the lyrics. Over time, people would interpret the song in various ways. Some people associated it with the last years of the Vietnam War and a soldier getting shot, others with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It seemed to evoke the tumultuous era we had been living through. But that was never my intention. The lyrics were simply a medieval fantasy I had written as a child.
When Keith returned from the pub and we played him the track, he was shocked to hear how this modest folk song had been transformed into such a rich and powerful track.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘perhaps it would be good if I played on it, after all.’
We all laughed. I was happy that he was enthusiastic about playing on the song but the problem now was I had just covered the solo part of the song on electric guitar. The only space left for him was the long fade-out at the end of the song. We started to think about what sound would be best to use.
‘How about trying out the Moog synthesiser?’ said Keith.
We had seen this new piece of equipment being delivered earlier in the day. Bob Moog had sent it and it looked more like a telephone switchboard than a musical instrument.
‘What does it sound like?’ I asked.
‘I don’t really know. I’ve never used it in a studio.’
So we agreed to give it a go anyway.
Keith went back into the studio and started to experiment with the sounds.
Eddy and I sat in the control room listening as Keith slowly brought this machine to life. We started to hear this fascinating swooping sound, a portamento whereby the pitch slides from one note to another, and we suggested to Keith that we should run the track alongside it. When experimenting in a recording studio, it is always worth capturing the first performance just case something extraordinary happens. So many magic moments have been lost in studios over the years because that first pass wasn’t recorded. Fortunately, this was not the case here and, as the run-through started, we punched the track into record. As the track came to an end, I turned to Eddy and said: ‘Is it just me or did that sound really good?’
Eddy smiled. ‘Let’s listen back,’ he said.
Over the studio talkback I told Keith to come in and take a listen. He insisted that he was only just getting started and that he was sure he could do a better take. However, the track we had used to record him on was the last one available. To do a second take would mean scrubbing the one he had just recorded. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Keith would later say he was devastated about this but we managed to talk him round and he agreed to take a listen.
As soon as he heard it in context, there was no question about it. We all knew then that it was special. Keith would say that I was always better than him at choosing which of his solo takes to use – he was too close to the music and always thought he could do a better take, but later he would agree that it was impossible to imagine a better solo for a particular track than the one I had chosen.
Of course, the Moog has now become one of the most famous synthesisers of all time, but this was the pop breakthrough for the instrument. As Kurt Loder of MTV would later say: ‘“Lucky Man” demonstrated for delighted keyboard players everywhere that it was at last possible for them to blow amp-shredding lead guitarists right off the stage, if they so chose.’
So that was it. ‘Lucky Man’ was finished and ELP’s first album was complete.
It seems quite strange that time and different perspectives have almost given this song whole new meanings, particularly about the Vietnam War, quite separate from the one I had originally intended. In the course of my career, I have learned that people have their own impression of what a song means to them, and that’s a very good thing: they have their own way of feeling that song, and that’s why it’s important to them. There is no point banging on about how the song was meant to mean something else. Making music is like giving a gift – it belongs to other people to make of it what they will as soon as it leaves your hands.”
Gregory Stuart Lake (10 Nov 1947 – 7 Dec 2016)
https://youtu.be/RxzS_ZzYgsc
