This review marks the March 2023 Atlantic Records release of a remastered version of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s original 1977 recording of Now I Wanna Sniff Some Prog: A Tribute to the Ramones. It includes interviews with Greg Lake, the late Keith Emerson, and the late Joey Ramone, and includes never-before seen photos taken at the March 1977 recording sessions at Pathé-Marconi EMI Studios, Paris. Also included is a brief essay on the genesis of the LP written by ELP Fan Club President, the late Lester Bangs.
In January 1977 Keith Emerson of progressive rock group Emerson, Lake & Palmer told rock critic Greil Marcus, “People are always after me to make snide remarks about the Ramones, as if we’re in opposing camps or something. Which is pure, unadulterated codswallop. I have enormous respect for the band, which may surprise some. And the reason I respect them is that, if you look beyond their short blasts of sheer sonic speed, what you’ll hear is a continuation of the neo-classical music tradition. What most hear when they listen to “Cretin Hop” is what has become known as “punk rock.” What I hear are musically sophisticated echoes of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. The reason very few people hear them is they’re gormless gits.”
Progressive rock’s equivalent of the Axis Powers put their money where their mouth is with 1977’s Now I Wanna Sniff Some Prog: A Tribute to the Ramones. The double album includes progrock adaptations of four songs culled from the Ramones 1976 eponymous debut and its 1977 follow-up Leave Home. After its release Joey Ramone told Bangs, “ELP get us. We would have loved to add a full orchestra and the Vienna Boys Choir to “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” but there’s no way we could have squeezed them into CBGB.”
This critic has no musical training whatsoever and couldn’t identify 4/4 time in a police line-up, so bear with me as I discuss the songs that appear on Now I Wanna Sniff Some Prog, which received a Proggie Award in 1978 from Progressive Rock Monthly, which is published thrice annually and edited by Quentin Watt-Muzzlewit, noted Doctor of Progology at London’s Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospital and keyboardist of the short-lived English progressive rock group Sistine Uncle.
Of “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” Emerson told music critic Richard Meltzer, “The Ramones’ version is fantastic, but I think we can all agree it would be even more fantastic if it was seventeen-minutes long.” ELP managed the feat by ingeniously slowing the song’s tempo to a crawl and opening with simple block chords–E, A, E, A, D, A–before adding an oratorio, an eight-minute symphonic exploration of the song’s main motif and a four-minute Carl Palmer gong solo.
Emerson then takes over on Moog synthesizer, playing a long improvisatory solo that he liberally peppers with brief phrases from the works of Bach, Mozart, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Handel, Stravinsky, and Sammy Johns, whose prog classic “Chevy Van” has been called “Brahms in a four-wheeled babe banger.” “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” ends in a swelling crescendo and lots of terrified shrieking by the Vienna Boy’s Choir. Emerson’s sole musical advice to them was, “Make believe it’s April 1945, and the Russkies are very, very horny.”
On the eighteen-minute “Judy Is a Brat” the band keeps things simple by converting the song’s motif by changing its 4/4 time to 5/4 time using only scale tones 1, b3, and b7, then by changing the last two eighth-notes to quarter-notes. It was a bold, even revolutionary move. What then follows over the course of its four movements are a mind-boggling series of rapidly changing time signatures and tempo changes, moving from Molto vivace to Andante moderato to Andante maestoso to Asti spumante. A pimply teen picking up an electric guitar for the first time could master it in 10 minutes, if his last name happens to be Mozart.
With the side three-length “Blitzkrieg Bop,” ELP faced a different problem. Said Lake to NME’s Charles Shaar Murray following the LP’s release, “The original was of such labyrinthine complexity that we had to find a way to structure it so that your average musical slack-jaw could make sense of it. So we broke it down into its ten constituent parts. Part 1, “The Blitzkrieg,” is a lightning organ instrumental. Part 2, “The Big Bopper,” is an even faster adaptation of the original theme that recapitulates the entire history of rock and is generally credited with inventing hardcore.
Part 3 is the impressionistic mini-suite “The Kristol Palace.” Part 4, “The kids Are Losing Their Minds,” segues from a Hammond organ solo by Keith to a barbaric Palmer drum interlude, and so on. Johnny Ramone approached me afterwards to tell me the Ramones owed [ELP] a debt of gratitude for making the song’s byzantine structure comprehensible to, in his words, ‘our fan base of complete dolts.’ He also told me that not long after the album’s release he ran into Television guitarist Tom Verlaine outside [Joey’s] apartment in the East Village and said, ‘Now I get it.’”
On side four album closer, the twenty-two minute “Pinhead,” Emerson freely acknowledged that he borrowed liberally from Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Goldberg Variations. “I was listening to it almost nonstop at the time,” he told The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, “because it was stuck in the 8-track player in my Aston Martin V8 Vantage. And it suddenly struck me that Bach’s masterpiece was the ideal way to capture the barbaric quality of the Ramones’ original.
An aria, thirty adaptations, it was primal simplicity itself. As every school child who isn’t standing in a corner with a pointy cap on knows, every third variation in the series is a canon, following an ascending pattern. The trick was to find a way to incorporate Greg and Carl, because they were still pissed after I showed up at the sessions for Works Volume 1 with a piano concerto, leaving them with nothing to do but mull over their intellectual incapacity to produce solo albums.
Anyway, Greg’s vocals just weren’t cutting it—as punk as he is—so we hit upon the idea of approaching the vocals the way Jacqui McShee does on Pentangle’s proto-punk classic “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme.” And it worked. As does Carl’s extended tubular bells solo. I used a two-manual harpsichord, and played the song with one hand on each manual, which is the way Bach intended. Later Joey [Ramone] would tell me ‘We would have used a harpsichord, but they don’t sell them at Manny’s Music.’”
It’s safe to say that ELP’s Now I Wanna Sniff Some Prog: A Tribute to the Ramones remains a seminal punk document, one that inspired the Clash to release 1978’s Mahler Calling. I can think of only one dissenting voice and that came from Lou Reed, who called the album “Dogshit on the platform boots of Jayne County compared to my 1975 tribute to the New York Dolls, Metal Machine Music.”
Emerson, Lake & Palmer might have increased their punk cred even more with their 1980 quadruple LP tribute to the Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Prog, Here Come Emerson, Lake & Palmer; unfortunately the album was shelved by Atlantic Records and has yet to see the light of day, although bootlegs are rumored to be in circulation. The straight line between progressive rock and punk was obvious to everyone. But it took the creative vision of Emerson, Lake & Palmer to dot the “i”’s ” in both “punk” and “prog.” You should own this album. You should play it all the time. You should wish it exists.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
