WHAT YEAR IS IT ANYWAY?

Confessions of a music geek: I'm a longtime fan of 70s progressive rock. It started with Rush. They were my gateway band. It moved along to Pink Floyd, Genesis and Yes, who at the time were the most musically insane band I had ever heard. Ten and twenty minutes of spiraling guitar parts, thunderous bass lines, bizarre percussion rhythms intertwining with lightning-fast keyboards that sounded impossible to reproduce with human hands; It had to have been sped up on tape, I used to tell myself.

Then, my better half turned me on to Emerson, Lake And Palmer, arguably the Mothership of over the top excess and pretentiousness in the Prog pantheon. I was not that familiar with their music outside of the radio hits like Lucky man and From The Beginning. From those songs alone, I never thought they were as outrageous as I was led to believe.

Boy, was I wrong.

Every ounce of crazy and pomposity I used to embrace with Yes and Rush, ELP had it in spades. This music was off the charts on the wacky-meter. I had never heard the kind of noises that Keith Emerson got out of his synthesizer before. I was floored by this tension in the musical interplay between these three guys who seemed determined to outdo each other for the sake of musical superiority, subtlety be damned.

Well, I got slightly re-energize my fascination with ELP last night when Emerson and Lake did "An Intimate Evening With.." at The Las Vegas Hilton showroom, in the same room where Elvis and Liberace once celebrated their excesses. Remarkably, in 2010, there is still an enthusiastic crowd for this lost aspect of rock history. To be fair, the audience was probably happy to be outside at all. I sensed that most of these people hadn't seen a live rock show since the Carter Administration.

In lieu of a fill-in drummer for absentee Carl Palmer (on the road with ASIA, whom I have also forgotten are still together), drum machine tracks were provided but should have been dumped altogether as they sometimes gave it a lounge feel it didn't need. But when Greg and Keith rolled out such gargantuan warships as "Tarkus" and "Rondo", that atmosphere of excess was back in full glory and I could not have been happier. The spectacle of hearing these insane keyboard parts at surprisingly high volumes in what is probably the most revered showroom in Vegas with about 500 out-of-place tourists who just wanted a comp show after dinner was even crazier than the music itself.

I am glad I got that little time travel out of my system. Of course, it should work out that my prog-rock nerd needs to be watered again this summer when Rush hit the road.