The age of excess. A glimpse of Emerson, Lake & Palmer in their pomp from Bob Harris’s autobiography:
We’d followed them from Montreal, where they played the Olympic stadium, the setting for their striking “Fanfare for the Common Man” video, with them knee-deep in snow. They’d filled the place with 80,000 people and 129 on-stage musicians, including a full concert orchestra. It was massively expensive lumbering the equipment and personnel around America, a project for which they’d commissioned three chrome-plated juggernauts, issuing instructions that they always had to travel in the order of the letters painted on the roof. First was “P”, then “L”, then “E”, a very important point, because with “P” leading, the convoy correctly read E L P when viewed from the sky.