Pictures of an Exhibitionist: From the Nice to Emerson Lake and Palmer - The True Story of the Man Who Changed the Sound of Rock - Hardcover

Emerson, Keith

3.78

69 ratings by Goodreads

9781904034797: Pictures of an Exhibitionist: From the Nice to Emerson Lake and Palmer - The True Story of the Man Who Changed the Sound of Rock

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1904034799 ISBN 13: 9781904034797

Publisher: John Blake, 2003

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Keyboard legend Keith Emerson is one of the most important figures to emerge from the thriving rock scene of the sixties and seventies. Fusing rock n’ roll with classical, jazz, and world music, he has set a standard by which others are judged. With Greg Lake and Carl Palmer, he formed the hugely successful Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who, between 1970 and 1977, released six platinum albums. Now in this insightful and irreverent memoir, Emerson tells uproarious tales of life on the road, tales of the high lifestyle that goes with being a rock star, and of course, tales of the outrageous, barrier-shattering music he produced.

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About the Author:

As well as being one of rock music's great exponents and the founder of supergroup Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Keith Emerson is now a Hollywood film composer. His first piano concerto has been received to great critical acclaim. He divides his time between England and the USA.

From Publishers Weekly:

One expects a rock n’ roll memoir to be full of sound and fury, signifying nothing if not the inflamed passions, tortured egos, precipitous climb and calamitous descent of its subjects. Emerson, composer and keyboardist for the Nice and, later, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, gives readers all this: from flag-burnings to overeager groupies, from musical mishaps to drunken, drug-addled excesses, as well as a host of backstage celebrity interactions. (Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Rod Stewart and a wonderfully catty portrait of Leonard Bernstein as a supercilious old perv are just a few that dot the book’s landscape.) Wildly theatrical onstage, Emerson played Norman Bates to his organs and keyboards, hacking away at them with knives and swords, often leaving them ruined and smoldering in his wake. The problem is that, as narrator to his own life, Emerson seems too, well, nice to rev the engine needed to drive such a book properly. He pulls back when he should barrel full-speed, and his writing lacks the killer incisiveness of his keyboard play. Slow to start, often clumsily overwritten and self-serving, Emerson’s memoir shows little sense of the narrative arc of the author’s life, and so the book trudges on in a litany of events, happenings and episodes that ultimately don’t add up to more than a series of pictures at an exhibition. Emerson seems too self-absorbed to be an acute observer of others, neither does he appear reflective enough to cast light on the shadows of his own life. Fans of Emerson’s bands will relish the scenester details anyway, but others may find themselves wishing he could write with the same brilliant abandon that he applied to his music.
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