My Top 1000 Songs #815: From The Beginning

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

My high school journey through prog history, kicked off by a love of Genesis and King Crimson, hit a brick wall when I started diving into Emerson, Lake & Palmer. 'Cuz hoo-boy, there's a lot of dreck in there! But there are a handful of ELP nuggets I enjoy, usually (albeit not exclusively) those that focus more on Greg Lake's vocals & guitars then Keith Emerson's bombastic keyboards. Case in point: the gorgeous acoustic ballad "From The Beginning," off 1972's Trilogy. It's essentially a Lake solo cut, with some relatively modest moog-y keyboard soloing from Emerson at the end, and feels more like mellow, laid-back yacht rock than prog. (There are some suggestions out there that Lake had originally written it for King Crimson but Fripp rejected it; dunno if that's correct, but I would've loved to have heard it played by that early KC line-up.)

I have some personal sentimentality for the track, as it was something I learned to play on guitar way back and still like to noodle on it now and then. But it's also one of those classic rock chestnuts that, if it shows up on the radio, I'm gonna stick around for a bit. Something about the jazzy, built-in-nostalgia vibe has always captured my imagination.

Live:

Lake solo, 2005: