Thirty years ago, noted progressive rock multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Robert Berry was introduced to two legends from the genre – Keith Emerson and Carl Palmer, two thirds of Emerson Lake and Palmer.
The pair were looking to collaborate together once again, after Palmer had recently departed Asia, and Berry was an experienced musician, producer and sessions player who had built a reputation for his professionalism and compositional excellence. The result was a new band called 3. Their debut album, …To The Power of Three, drew great praise in some quarters but also some critical commentary and even though a single made the U.S. top 10, the band dissolved after it appeared that the label was losing interest in promoting the project.
So, there was unfinished business, at least in Berry’s mind. He went on to a number of creatively and commercially satisfying projects, including the band Alliance with current Boston guitarist Gary Pihl, and a recurring gig as a member of 1980s pop hitmaker Greg Kihn’s band. But the notion of revisiting 3 in some form or another never left him, and it also seemed like it never really left Emerson’s mind either. In 2016, the two began talking about a new album, then ideas began to be exchanged. Berry said that Keith actually had the idea of calling the project simply ‘1’ and was fired up creatively like he had not seen for some time.
Parts of songs were written, concepts decided upon, and preliminary recordings made. But, shockingly, even in the midst of the excitement and vitality of this new project, Emerson took his own life on March 11, 2016 at the age of 71.
Berry said after a number of months of mourning and not being sure if he was up to the challenge of completing the record, especially from an emotional point of view, he decided that it needed to be done, not only to fulfil and add one more excellent example of compositional excellence to Emerson’s already vaunted legacy, but also to bring to fruition his own dream of creating a sequel to the first 3 album. Eventually it happened, and the result Is 3.2: The Rules Have Changed, which will be released on Frontiers Music on Aug. 10.
“As a fan of Keith Emerson, as well as his friend, I thought that after 3, none of the ELP stuff or the Keith Emerson Band stuff was up to what I knew he was capable of. It’s like he wasn’t being challenged, or they didn’t understand what he could do. I know everybody thinks they know, but maybe you have to be a keyboard player to really understand. And I was determined to get the best out of him for this new project. I wanted it to be as good, or better than the first 3 album,” said Berry.
“And I had a lot of ideas that we talked about on the phone about how to do that and what my requirements were to fulfill the contract and he told me about his. But honestly, I didn’t complete it because I thought it was going to be released. I thought I had a great start on it and Keith had a lot to do with that. I decided to finish the songs. Every year I write and record an album, whether people have heard of it or not, for myself. And some of them you will probably never hear of. I have this crazy album where it’s like Cheap Trick meets polka. It’s really crazy, but I did it because I wanted to do it. It’s fun for me.
“So, with this album, I had no idea if someone was going to release it, but I was going to finish it. It took me a year to do I and I didn’t really think of it as a tribute to Keith Emerson. I thought of it as a partnership that I wanted to complete. And I know it comes off as a tribute album because of what the lyrics say and that’s just my feelings coming out.”
On another level, Berry said he thinks the album is needed because it re-establishes a part of a genre that perhaps is being overlooked by the music industry but that which is still held in great esteem by music lovers.
“Whether I did it with Keith or on my own as I ended up doing, I really thought it was an album that in the progressive market was needed. Bands like Asia had become more pop and there was progressive metal but there was nothing really musical, with good lyrics and meanings like there was in the 1970s and early 1980s. And I wanted the album completed even if no one ever heard of it. When it was done, I thought I had really done what I set out to do. I believe I have done what Keith wanted to do. I am not saying that he wouldn’t have done more than I ever could do, because he would have. He would have taken it way over the top from where it is,” he said, adding that he reached out to officials with Frontiers Records to see if they were still interested as they were interested back when Emerson was still alive. And after hearing the songs, they were enthusiastic about releasing it.
Berry said he knew that Emerson was having a bit of difficulty with the tendons in his hands, which was having a somewhat limiting effect on his ability to play, especially in a live situation. What he did not fathom was the depths of despair that not only the physical issues but also the criticisms he was receiving from some circles was taking on his psyche.
“The tendon problem everybody knew about and there were some very harsh criticisms of Keith because of that. I knew about that, like everybody. But he was completely capable of playing, that was obvious. And everything I had seen and heard from him was positive: he sounded great. He was upbeat and happy. When we were talking about this project he was excited. I got him a really good advance from the record company and he was really pleased about that,” he said.
“And he was in a very creative place. One of the things that he and I shared together, along with Carl too, was that the three of us always had ideas. There was no writers block. So, there was no indication that there was any problem at all.”
The impact of the Emerson’s suicide hit Berry on a number of levels – firstly as a good friend and collaborator, but also a deep cognizance of what his loss meant to the music world.
“I heard about his passing from Eleanor Emerson who I like to say is Keith’s wife, but was actually his ex-wife. He was one of the most famous of musicians’ musicians. With that phone call I lost a great friend, my most famous and talented friend, the person I had a top 10 record with and that hadn’t happened in his career or mine since. And it made me think of our friendship and I realized that the most important things were not the recordings and our work together but the silly phone calls I would get over the years, a dumb joke or a silly story from Keith Emerson,” Berry explained.
“He was such a real, sweet, honest average guy in personality. But he was a way beyond average, genius kind of guy in terms of his artistic capabilities. He was one of a kind. And it was hard for me to even think of this project. For six months I didn’t want to do this album. I am not a guy who gets depressed, but I was down and disappointed and of course very sad that I had lost Keith, like so many were. As a matter of fact, about two weeks after we lost him I wrote a song called Our Bond, where I expressed myself and what I was seeing people posting on social media. People were missing the human being as much as the musical genius.
“I wrote the song that had a bunch of quotes from all these people, who I called the Emerson Army, this group of people who bonded together over the loss of Keith. That’s all I could do at the time, until I got this idea of getting back to revisiting the 3 album. I realized there was too much good stuff here. I had already started writing parts to the songs, the melody and the things to link them all together. What I didn’t realize was the lyrics that were coming out of me were so poignant to the time and what happened in Keith’s life and my life and I look at them now and I realize, wow I guess I was really pouring out my feelings for him.’
The song Our Bond made it onto the album, and even the titles of a number of the other songs are indicative of this emotional tenor of the album and how it truly is a tribute to Keith Emerson the human being as well as Keith Emerson the musician and songwriting legend: Powerful Man, Somebody’s Watching and Your Mark on the World.
One hitch to the project was that people who represented Emerson’s estate would not allow any of the original playing that Emerson had done in anticipation of what would become the 3.2 release to be released. This meant that Berry, no slouch at the keyboard himself, had to replicate and extrapolate Emerson’s playing as meticulously and faithfully as possible to make it sound as though Emerson truly was playing on the album.
“There was a group of six nameless, faceless people who got to decide that I could only do the album if I didn’t use Keith’s playing. I could use the writing, but they said no, they want to remember him as a composer not as a player. And I remember saying that this is the Jimi Hendrix of the keyboard, what do you mean you don’t want to remember him as a player? He is the one guy who performed like that on the keyboard and made us keyboard players want to play the instrument. But I had to agree to it,” Berry said with barely disguised incredulity.
“So, when I was playing the stuff and having to redo some of Keith’s parts it was a real melancholic experience for me. It made me sad to have to do that, but it was also a challenge. I wanted to make sure that if I played you Keith’s section of the intro to the first track One by One and I played you my redoing of that same section, you wouldn’t hear any difference in tone quality, in articulation, in tempo speed, instruments – nothing.
“If they’re going to make me redo his parts then I am going to make it sound like Keith – that was my goal. And coming at it from a technical standpoint, I achieved that goal. I would never say I was as good as Keith, but I am a keyboard player and I am capable. And I worked my butt off to make sure that there was not an ounce of difference. And for the other sections where I had nothing directly from Keith, I would ask myself what would Keith do here? I had spent so much time with him on the first 3 album back in 1988 and throughout the years doing different things and I had a good sense of him, and then of course there was the three months we were talking back and forth about this record. I was confident I could figure out what he would want.”
One of the most difficult aspects of trying to reproduce what Emerson would want and expect to include in a particular song would be trying to replicate a trademark Keith Emerson solo.
“It was the oddest experience for me. It was something I was technically capable of doing, but I had not planned on. I had a lot of Keith’s ideas and even his original performances on some of the intros and some of the links and different parts of song structures; he designed those, and we were going to design the full song structures soon, but the solos were going to be done later, towards the end of the process,” Berry explained.
“And I would whip off this solo that was so unknown to me. I would have to go back and fix a couple of notes here or there and punch them in, but I would listen back and go, ‘where did that come from.’ And to me it was Emerson plus something special. It felt like Keith, but it was something that was borrowed from the past and performed in the present like we had talked about, where we updated it a little bit.”
Back in the day, there were a number of naysayers who did not appreciate the 3 project because they felt it was a knock-off of Emerson Lake and Palmer, minus Greg Lake, but many others did see it for what it was, a unique and musically effervescent project that brought together three amazingly talented progressive rock musicians and songwriters. It just so happened two of them were named Emerson and Palmer.
Berry braced himself for similar criticism – and possibly even more vociferous negativity because of the nature of how 3.2 The Rules Have Changed came together and was completed.
“I was actually set for lots of criticism like the first 3 album got. But I have got an amazing amount of love for the music and for the sound. People were saying they really loved hearing this kind of synth-based album with these kind of Keith Emerson songs. They said they thought this kind of music had been lost forever. It’s been so well received by reviewers and interviewers. And even from when they could only hear a couple of songs before the album’s release, I was getting a lot of love from the general public. It’s been incredible.”
The positive response has also brought a lot of booking agents to Berry’s door asking him to tour not only the 3 and 3.2 material, but songs from the entirety of his catalogue.
For more information on Berry, 3.2 and his other varied musical endeavours, visit www.robertberry.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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