Flying pianos.
Fifty years ago you could go to an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer concert and see Keith Emerson playing his flying grand piano. And if you watch through to the end you’ll see the wall of totally analog technology that he used to synthesize music.
Yes, there were no computer chips, just miles of tiny wires, and endless capacitors, resistors, and knobs and switches.
And, of course, patch cords.
This week Facebook popped up an ad for a concert by Billy Bragg at the Commodore Ballroom. I adore Billy, and I adore the Commodore, but wow, seventy-seven dollars just feels awful expensive to me.
I know, some of that is just getting old. I think my first concert ticket for Big Brother and the Holding Company, was eight or nine dollars.
Looking at that half-century old video though, I find myself thinking that fifty years (give or take) of computers, and Internet, and software, and smart-phones, hasn’t really improved my quality of life.
It’s made it more frantic, for sure, and has buried me alive under emails, tweets, skeets, and medicocre YouTube videos. And of course ads, oh god, the endless ads.
Now, I will acknowledge that actually maintaining Kieth’s gear was surely an endless nightmare, and someone, somewhere was spending every waking hour with a soldering iron in their hand. And I’ll agree that the flying piano would fail every health and safety rule that we have today.
Still, it was a time when an artist could wake up, look at the sunrise, and say “What if I had a flying piano? How cool would that be?”
Somehow I’m sure that today there would be multiple committee meetings, and sponsor meetings, and insurance company meetings, and inspections before he played one note.
But hey, it’s also the 50th anniversary of Cheap Thrills!
