Times change, however. Few have understood this more than legendary drummer Carl Palmer, the “P” in ELP. Where ELP once rolled with massive multi-wheelers hauling extensive lighting rigs and hefty musical equipment, the drummer’s own trio, The Carl Palmer Band, featuring guitarist Paul Bielatowicz and bassist Simon Fitzpatrick, operates with a technical crew of three from a Sprinter van and trailer.
Undeniably, prog rock’s heyday has dissipated like stadium smoke clouds, and Palmer has hinted that the ELP chapter of his life is over. However, the spirit of those days survives. Palmer, whose playing is as aggressive and precise as ever, brings arena-rock drama to small and mid-sized theaters across the U.S. and U.K. via video projection — something his former band rarely featured in their lavish productions.
“The pyrotechnics used by ELP were meant to enhance the music, just like the films being used on this tour,” says Palmer, 61. “You can’t use pyrotechnics at every venue, but you can use film. It seems to work in this environment.”
The guitar-based instrumental prog rock that Palmer’s trio performs onstage every night — material largely written and recorded by the keyboard-driven ELP — is given more depth and new meaning with the addition of historical footage, classic films and even computer-generated graphics being beamed onto a projection screen positioned behind the band.
“Carl is doing things with projections ELP hadn’t,” notes Tony Ortiz, ELP archivist, who supplied stills for the tour’s video content. “ELP never used video, just photographic images.”
Scrappy Crew
A key component of how and why Palmer and his band have the mobility to tour on both sides of the Atlantic is due, in part, to each member of the crew tapping his own creative resources in order to present a visually rich multi-media experience.
“When I do the lights I’m pretty much playing drums along with Carl,” says lighting designer Jon Lalopa, who explains the band doesn’t tour with its own programmable lighting console. “Every time Carl hits a drum, I have to be able to follow it. That gets complicated when a song is in 5/4 time for five or six measures and then reverts back to 4/4. But I’ve learned to do this in a relatively short period of time.”
“We’re set up to be a quickly-running ship,” says projectionist Josh Gailor, who first began working with Palmer in 2008, handling merchandise for supergroup Asia. “When we have to use someone else’s equipment, like a sophisticated projector, it just slows us down.”
Not surprisingly, Gailor says he prefers using his own idiosyncratic setup. “I have a dual-output Pioneer DVD player, something you’d have in your home entertainment center, and a 19-inch 9300 series Pioneer flat screen TV/computer monitor,” says Gailor. “I’ll run a component output to the projector, which takes a VGA feed, and then I’ll run an HDMI or regular RCA output to the cuing monitor, which operates via RCA, HDMI, and VGA.”
In addition, Gailor employs a ViewSonic PJD6381 short throw projector to cast 2,500 lumens onto a five-by-six-foot Da-Lite Fast-Fold screen with retractable frame. Depending on the dimensions of a venue’s stage, the ViewSonic projector is situated four to six feet behind Palmer’s hanging Paiste gongs; the screen is ordinarily positioned five to six feet from the projector. Both the projector and projection screen are perched atop Palmer’s tarpaulin-covered gig cases.
Because Gailor is Palmer’s only side stage tech, he needs line of sight relative to the screen and what’s transpiring onstage. In order to control the projector from his side station, Gailor uses a reasonably priced X10 Pro PowerMID infrared repeater system composed of pyramid-shaped receiver and transmitter units (PEX02 and PEX03), approximately 6 inches in height. When Gailor points a universal remote controller at the infrared PowerMid transmitter, located in his rig, the transmitter unit converts the IR message to a radio signal and communicates this message to a receiver unit. The receiver then converts the radio signal back to an infrared message and relays it to the projector’s IR receptor just inches away.
Synchronized Content
A blank-out function on the ViewSonic helps ensure smooth transitions between songs. “Because I’m using a DVD player to cue up the video, blanking out the projector eliminates the possibility that the disc menu will appear on the projection screen,” Gailor says. “But the procedure to sync the music and video is a bit involved: I have to blank out the screen, go back to the top menu, find the chapter I need, play it, pause it, and then, when the song starts, hit play again, make sure there’s no ‘play’ or ‘pause’ symbol at the bottom corner of the screen, and unblank the screen. Before this infrared system was in place, I would run up and down the length of the side stage trying to find the spot where the remote would catch the projector’s IR sensor and blank out. I don’t have to worry about that now.”
After rifling through his extensive collection of public-domain films, manager Bruce Pilato of Pilato Entertainment Marketing & Media used Apple Final Cut Pro software to sync the tour’s video content with live, recorded versions of the songs the band performs every night (most of which appear on Palmer’s solo releases, Working Live, volumes 1-3).
If Pilato admits that the “projection aspect of the show is not an exact science,” the synchronicity of the video imagery and musical interaction onstage is impressive. For instance, during “Hoe-Down,” the Aaron Copland composition that marries European art music and cowboy motifs, we see John Wayne aim his rifle and shoot as Palmer smashes the head of his snare drum. Similarly, a horse and rider slam into the ground as the trio plays, in unison, the final resounding beats of the song. Later, during “Tarkus,” computer-generated images of strange man-like beasts bounce to the rhythmically jagged beats of this epic song.
“Bruce handed me a DVD with his reel on it,” says projectionist Gailor. “We made slight changes to the video, but the quality and volume of the images, and how well they are in sync with the music, is all Bruce.”
A Visual Safety Net
Allowing for nightly mutations in the set, the video content disc Pilato handed Gailor features a “CP” logo default graphic. “That’s a built-in safety net,” Gailor says. “Carl thinks a blank screen, even for a few minutes, is distracting. If a song is changed slightly, it will end earlier or later than usual. The CP logo flashes at the end of a chapter and remains for 60 seconds.”
Images shown during the set’s centerpiece, a 25-minute instrumental interpretation of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” a musical composition Palmer was introduced to when he was just seven years old, and one he famously recorded with ELP, reflect the triumphant and violent musical upheavals heard throughout the composition.
As guitarist Bielatowicz squeezes out majestic, volume-controlled notes of the intro, titled “Promenade,” stoic faces of Emperor Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, and the royal family pass before our eyes. This and other pre-Russian Revolution footage, including the hypnotic glare of soothsayer “monk” Rasputin, provide an eerie backdrop for the menacing music being played onstage. Next, the twisting musical lines of “The Hut of Baba Yaga” and “The Curse of Baba Yaga” spiral out of control as we witness the turbulent rise of Communism and the fall of the Russian monarchy with a subtle wave of Stalin’s hand and the carnage of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent movie classic/political propaganda film, The Battleship Potemkin.
As we move into the modern era, the worn facial expressions of ordinary Russian folk match the music’s inherent patina and darkness. During the piece’s grand finale, “The Great Gates of Kiev,” former U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr. and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev appear in a photo-op/political discussion. Later, two former enemy soldiers shake hands across the top of the Berlin Wall.
By presenting a virtual tour of major Russian and Russia-influenced historical turning points of the last 100 years, Palmer has ushered Mussorgsky’s musical “scenes” into the video age. “We are an instrumental band, so the audience is not looking at a lead singer onstage,” Palmer says. “If you can project video onto a screen, and it adds to the music, I think it’s beneficial. The way I see it, the film, the historical footage, is not gratuity, it’s relevance.”
With dedicated help, no-nonsense technology and video enhancement, Palmer has devised an economical way to conjure the grandness of a full-blown arena-rock concert on a budget. “It’s a day-to-day existence when you’re on tour,” says Palmer. “You can’t have all of this equipment only to find out that you really don’t need it. It’ll be stuck in the truck outside. Doing that didn’t make good business sense years ago, and it doesn’t now.”
