Lost ELP Boys

Random: Two-thirds of the tunes on The Lost Boys soundtrack permeated pop radio in the middle 1980's. "Good Times" by INXS has the most energy, "Lost in the Shadows" by Lou Gramm, "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" by Roger Daltry, and "Cry Little Sister" by Gerard McMann got the most radio play. Echo and the Bunnymen's version of The Doors' "People Are Strange" has always been my favorite track on this disc. The main thing that stands out is that even with all the ridiculous reverb, studio effects, and artificial sounding snares, pop music in the 80's was not all that compressed so it still conveys much more vitality than current pop fare.

Selected: Emerson Lake and Palmer have never set well with me. While I love early 70's progressive music and particlarly love tunes that require some effort on the part of the listener, ELP sounds... wrong to me. I have not been able to put it into words. Perhaps it is arrogance, perhaps lack of cohesion among the players, perhaps it just a general lack of passion and an aritficial sound. Most ELP strikes me as musical practice exercises rather than passionate music. The best context for my attitued is that Emerson is a great keyboard technician, Lake is a good singer and competent bass player, and Palmer is a good drummer, but they are all weak composers. In playing so much existing music, they sound a but like a DJ that is just dropping samples of other tunes together to make a performance that never sounds cohesive and organic. Having said those things, I would say this disc possesses the least of the bad qualities of ELP; it sounds more sincere, but a bit sloppy. In "Take A Pebble" one can already hear odd "samples" of tunes clashing together in strange ways. However, "Lucky Man" is one of the great all time rock tunes and may be representative of "even a blind squirrel finds a nut occassionaly." Having never felt connected to ELP, I have not learned much about their history and was shocked to learn that they were a huge selling band. Popularity has been said to be proportional to predictability and their inclusion of so much familiar classical-type music may have given them a head start with the public.