ELP Appreciation thread !!!!

By the late Seventies critics really turned on you guys. You became the embodiment of rock excess. Did that perception bother you? 
I think there is truth in the fact that the group was pretentious. You don't make an omelet without cracking eggs. We wanted to try and move things forward and do something new and break boundaries. It was important for us to be original. Certainly the early albums . . . I'm talking now especially about Tarkus, Trilogy and Brain Salad Surgery. Those records were really great and innovative. There were members of the press that didn't love us, but the public loved us.

I'm very proud of ELP, but it wasn't the journalists that brought down ELP. I think it was ELP themselves. It started to fragment when they made Works Volume 1. It was a good album, but it wasn't ELP. It was Keith Emerson, Greg Lake and Carl Palmer with an orchestra. Well, with three separate orchestras. [Laughs]

The album went platinum, and I can say with all the humility that I can muster that there were some great tracks on the record. But it wasn't a record that reflected the chemistry of ELP. It reflected the individuals apart from each other.  There are some tracks, like "Pirates," for example, which stand up on their own. Leonard Bernstein liked that song a lot. But the truth of it was that Works Volume 1 was the beginning of the end. After that, ELP never made another really innovative record.