A Carl Palmer drum solo was part of the Emerson, Lake & Palmer show from the band’s first album onwards, and it is on record in more forms than most fans realise: a studio solo inside a song, a percussion movement built on electronic drums, a five-minute feature on the band’s biggest-selling live album, and a concerto that waited fifteen years to be released. This guide goes through the essential recordings one by one – where each is, when it was made and how it came about – so that you know exactly what to listen to.

Before the solos: how Palmer learned

Palmer came from a musical family and took lessons with James Blades, the best-known classical percussionist in Britain in the twentieth century, alongside the jazz and big-band drummers he admired as a boy. Before Emerson, Lake & Palmer he had already played in The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Atomic Rooster. That mix of orchestral training and jazz is the background to the recordings below.

“Tank” — Emerson, Lake & Palmer (1970)

The first recorded Palmer solo is on the trio’s debut, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, recorded at Advision Studios in London in the summer of 1970. “Tank” was written by Palmer with Keith Emerson; it starts as a keyboard, bass and drums piece and gives way to a full drum solo. Modern Drummer, in its series on the greats of the instrument, calls it Palmer’s “solo vehicle”, and Bruce Eder, reviewing the album for AllMusic, writes that it made Palmer “the idol of many thousands of would-be drummers”. Later remixed editions of the album add a separate, untitled studio drum solo, similar to but not the same as a section of “Tank”. One version to avoid if the solo is what you want: the remake of “Tank” on Palmer’s side of Works Volume 1 (1977), recorded with an orchestra, leaves the drum solo out.

“Toccata” — Brain Salad Surgery (1973)

“Toccata”, on Brain Salad Surgery (released 7 December 1973), is the band’s arrangement of the fourth movement of Alberto Ginastera’s first Piano Concerto, and inside it is a movement for percussion alone, arranged by Palmer. What makes it unusual is how it was played: Palmer used custom-built electronic drums linked to a synthesizer, one of the earliest such set-ups in rock. “Everyone thought it was Emerson on a keyboard”, he has said of the sounds, which in fact came from drums made for him in London. The percussion company Remo, in its profile of Palmer, goes as far as calling it the first electric drum solo. It is the most technically unusual of his studio features.

“Karn Evil 9” — Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends (1974)

The live solo most fans know is on the triple album Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends – Ladies and Gentlemen, released in August 1974 and recorded on 10 February 1974 at the Anaheim Convention Center in California, on the tour for Brain Salad Surgery. Most of the Brain Salad Surgery material appears close to its studio form, with one big exception: a five-minute Palmer drum solo inserted as the climax of “Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression”. It is also the place to hear the band at its commercial peak: the album reached number 4 in the United States, the highest chart position ELP ever had there, and number 6 in Britain.

“Concerto for Percussion” — Do Ya Wanna Play, Carl? (1991)

The most ambitious piece of all took the longest to come out. Palmer recorded a “Concerto for Percussion” in the 1970s, and it stayed unreleased until his two-disc anthology Do Ya Wanna Play, Carl? in 1991, fifteen years after it was recorded. The same anthology gathers his recordings with ELP, Atomic Rooster and Asia, rare tracks from his other groups and a live track with the Buddy Rich Orchestra, the band of the drummer he had idolised as a boy. For anyone who wants Palmer the composer for percussion rather than Palmer the soloist inside a rock song, this is the record.

Where to start

If you want one studio solo, start with “Tank” on the debut: it is where the idea began, and it is short. If you want the showman, go to the Karn Evil 9 solo on Welcome Back My Friends. If you want the most unusual of them, put on “Toccata”. And if you want the whole picture, the Do Ya Wanna Play, Carl? anthology covers the ground from his early bands to the concerto. After ELP he went on to play with Asia in the 1980s, but the solos above are the core of his recorded work as a soloist.

Go deeper

For the band itself, start with the Emerson, Lake & Palmer band guide, the best Emerson, Lake & Palmer albums, the best ELP songs and where to start with ELP; if you want Brain Salad Surgery on record, my guide to which edition to buy covers the options. For the other great drum features in the genre, see the best prog rock drum solos of all time, my guide to Neil Peart’s drum solos and the countdown of the best prog drummers of all time, or browse the prog musicians hub. The full story of British progressive rock, ELP included, is told in Beyond the Thames, the second book in my Beyond the Sound series.

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