As all fans of Keith Emerson know, he died in March of this year in Santa Monica. I had photographed him in '90 or '91 for the same magazine and they used this old black and white image for the cover of their issue dedicated to Keith and those he worked with.
Mind you this was shot on 35mm T-Max100 film with a Nikon and either a 24mm 2.8 or a 35mm f/2 lens and this is less than half the frame. It was a horizontal frame with a vertical stripe taken out. It's a little grainy but holds up remarkably well with the drum scan. I was surprised. Unfortunately the cover is the only thing that remotely acceptable as the layout on the inside where there's another one of my images among many others, is simply horrible. It's actually so bad that it interferes with the basic task of reading the text. I guess this is what you get these days.
Keith Emerson photographed in Hollywood for Keyboard Magazine
I suppose I should know that but to be honest, with bands like ELP, I never paid much attention to the lyrics, at least not in the way I do from all the songwriters from Texas and Lo-Cal. I did pay attention to Keith's virtuoso musicianship and those subsonic shake the house down bass notes that you could only hear on a pair of Koss headphones back in the day at the end of Lucky Man.
Here's a clip of Keith playing with Gary Farr and the T-Bones in 1966. Gary's brother, Rikki, started Isle of Wight in '70, put ELP on the bill and made them world famous.
