Emerson Lake & Palmer - Love Beach

I've been listening to albums that, regardless of how they turned out, the bands very much wanted to make. Let's go the opposite direction and listen to an album that was made under 100% duress by everyone involved.

Emerson, Lake, & Palmer couldn't quit or do anything else until they made one more album. They had basically defected from England because England's tax burden on musicians was ludicrous. I make no judgement on that, but it's a pretty common sentiment and it's the basic explanation for why a lot of them retired to the US or non-British controlled island nations.

They had always had internal bickering and went through periods of hating each other, but this really was the end. Emerson gave Lake side a to write whatever songs he wanted to write, and used side b for a large 4-part work of his own. Their lyricist didn't really have time to collaborate with them (and they weren't talking to each other anyway), Emerson wasn't actually in charge of anything but everyone else just refused to participate beyond recording their parts and leaving, so he kept taking lots of drugs and just assembled it all as best he could even though he didn't like any of it (especially the lyrics Sinfield wrote for his Memoirs of an Officer and a Gentleman).

I don't hear any of that though. Sure, side a is random songs, but it sounds like EL&P. The songs aren't bad, they're just a step back from the massive fantasy concepts everybody expected from them. A WWII love story isn't exactly normal fare for them, but the piece itself certainly doesn't sound like hack work.

The most fascinating story about the album is Emerson's market research. He "set up a booth at O'Hare International Airport." I'm trying to imagine walking through the airport on your way to catch your next flight and being asked to listen to an EL&P album and fill out an actual questionnaire. Robert Stack walks in, punches a Hare Krishna, puts on a pair of headphones and responds "the title doesn't make any sense, change it" before continuing along to deal with Ted Striker's PTSD.

Love Beach is exactly like Airplane or Police Academy or Bad News Bears. You take all the crap you have on hand and you just go through the motions and it turns out perfectly fine. They made their last album, they kept more of their own money, Lake got a chance to write commercial songs like he always wanted to, contractual obligations fulfilled. You can't ask for more than that, and you certainly can't be disappointed with an album that none of them wanted to make in the first place. I find the whole situation hilarious, because the magic of this band isn't WHAT they made, it's THAT they made it. It doesn't seem to matter how any one of them felt about it, these three musical madmen playing together just worked.

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