Middle-aged white guys like me, I guess.

Several times in the past week I have found myself ruminating on Keith Emerson’s suicide.

It’s easy enough just to shrug and move on when an aging has-been rock star offs himself. The news cycle is so full of tragedy and madness that Emerson’s death could hardly be expected to register as more than a blip for anyone who was not a member of his shrinking fanbase.

Nevertheless, I find the thought of this once quite famous 71 year old shooting himself while alone in his home — apparently plagued by fears about his deteriorating ability to play — terribly sad and haunting. And learning that he had struggled with substance abuse — while no surprise for a 1970s era rock star — made this lonely, despairing death seem all the sadder. It set me pondering the vicissitudes of fame and taste, and the human cost of celebrity culture, and all that stuff …

And while I hadn’t actually sat down and played an ELP record in 20 years, I guess I have to admit — and it is a confession, given the degree to which ELP have been condemned by the critics — I have to admit that I am feeling all this because I was indeed once a fan of ELP.

When I was fifteen, like all my friends I wanted to be a rock star when I grew up. But I didn’t have the nerve to sing, my parents would never tolerate the drums, and everyone already seemed to play guitar.

So I became a nerdy keyboard player.

But keyboards seemed to be the one role you could have in a band that wasn’t automatically cool. I mean, when slapping became a thing, suddenly even bass players were cooler than keyboard players.

And looking back in pop history for a keys player that commanded the kind of admiration that the other rock gods inspired — well, there weren’t many. I now regard Jerry Lee Lewis as pretty damned awesome, but at the time, in the 1980s, it was too much like ancient history. Ray Manzarek of The Doors would get some props. But everyone knew who the sexy one in that band really was. (It didn’t help that Manzarek always struck me as a self-mythologizing bullshitter of epic proportions whenever he gave an interview.) And there were amazing jazz players, of course. But jazz was by comparison a niche interest, commanding none of the attention of rock and pop among my high school cohort.

And then there was Keith Emerson. A crazy showman with bags of talent — the “Jimi Hendrix of the keys”! Most people I knew did not give a crap about ELP in the early 80s, either, of course. But at some point I had caught a TV re-broadcast of a gig from the early 70s and was impressed. Wowed, even.

So this week I went back and had a look at some of that old footage. Here’s one of the moments I vividly remember from that old TV show — two minutes of inspired silliness.

Today, the antics with the daggers and the other forms of Hammond abuse strike me a bit differently. I took it all dead seriously when I was fifteen, in a way I just can’t now. But it still strikes me as a fascinating piece of rock theatre, falling somewhere between Spinal Tap (the scene where Nigel Tuffnell plays his guitar with a violin comes to mind) and Townshend smashing his SG, or Hendrix sacrificing his Strat at Monterey. It’s ridiculous — utterly — watching Emerson drag that massive bit of furniture around. But part of me still finds it awesome. Maybe it’s even slightly camp, in Sontag’s sense of the term — two contradictory things at once, both sublime and ridiculous!

Lost in all the theatrics, though, is the fact that this was a musician of great skill, able to play jazz and classical stylings with real fluidity — admired by such giants such as Oscar Peterson, and with a left hand technique that matches any concert pianist.

Just check out the first few minutes of this clip for an example of how dexterous and delightful his playing could be.

So … talent and showmanship … and yet, is the verdict ever since punk really true? Do ELP deserve their bad rep for rock excess, pretention and pointlessness? Were they really, frankly, just a bit shit?

It seems true that a lot of the material has aged badly.

But, but … at it’s best, I find there is still something in ELP for me. Something about the alchemy involved when those three individuals manage collectively to overcome their musical egotism just long enough to make an extraordinary thing. Something that does not sound quite like anything else. Something capable — if I let it — of inducing in me an experience close to rapture.

Witness: my single favorite ELP track:

The link is to the whole album — but just let the first track play. It’s called “The Barbarian” (I know, I know) and it’s an instrumental mini-epic, in three sections, all of which I find absurdly delightful. There’s the lumbering bass and Hammond of the first sequence, which closes out with a really cool little “call and response” part between the keyboards on one side and drums and bass on the other; then there’s the delicate jazzical Chopin-lite mid-section, with some lovely right hand flourishes from Emerson, and breathlessly rapid brushwork from Palmer; and then a third section that recapitulates the opening before taking off on the mad-as-fuck frenzy of the final 40 seconds.

I’d never heard anything like this when I first encountered it. I still can’t think of any thing else in the pop world that it resembles.

Critics are unkind. Hipsters are dismissive. And the crime of tastelessness was certainly one that ELP committed again and again.

But I think that sometimes they were actually pretty bloody good.