EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER - KING BISCUIT FLOWER HOUR [AKA: LIVE]

This album is mostly useless, featuring tracks that appeared already on their famous live Welcome Back My Friends. But I can't recommend strongly enough the version of Pirates featured here. The trio plays it without orchestra, and the epic gets much better this way. Greg Lake has (actually, I mean he had) one of the most powerful and beautiful voices I've heard, and this epic song showcases it like few others (I can think of In the Court of the Crimson King, I Talk to the Wind, Tarkus, Trilogy... ok, not so few, but you know what I mean).

The rest is pale by comparison: C'est la vie is a beautiful ballad, Palmer is brilliant in Maple Leaf Rag and in his short drum solo (it ends when you start getting tired... a good quality, lacking on most drum solos), but the live rendition of Pirates is what really matters.