HOFFSTACK PLAYLIST #16 - Emerson, Lake & Palmer, "Hoedown (Live)"

The part where the guy goes "yeah!" is great.

Synthesizers, by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash

Emerson, Lake & Palmer represents the precise border between classic rock and prog. Classic rock is a realm that welcomes all, and prog is a fetid swamp of boiling sulfur, home only to mutated trolls. Naturally, it is a place where I feel quite comfortable.

ELP wasn’t just a group with a few hits. They were absolutely massive, selling out football arenas. Much of their 1977 tour featured a 70-piece orchestra. (Like the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound,” the band eventually accepted that such a production untenable for too long.)

On stage, they trod dangerously into Spinal Tap territory, with Emerson hurling knives to slay his own keyboard like a picador, and he would also play upside-down. (I witnessed this in person a solid 20-25 years after their heyday.) Their albums, which centered Keith Emerson’s organs and synthesizers, were so many steps ahead that they looped back around eventually to feature a straight-up acoustic piano concerto. (Leonard Bernstein famously shrugged it away as dreck.)

The band’s repertoire featured a few radio-friendly tunes (“Lucky Man,” “Still… You Turn Me On,” and “From The Beginning”) and some bonafide epic prog originals like the “Karn Evil 9” suite. Then there were the weird covers, mostly from the Western classical canon, like “Pictures at an Exhibition,” “Fanfare for the Common Man,” and, a personal favorite, “Theme from ‘Peter Gunn.’”

The most deranged was their version of Aaron Copeland’s “Hoedown,” an interlude from the composer’s 1942 score to a ballet called Rodeo. ELP’s version was zippy and playful enough on their official release, but it became absolutely unhinged in a 1973 recording from Italy.

In this video you will see Keith Emerson wearing what looks like some kind of medieval breastplate and he charges through the melody at breakneck speed. (A well-placed wine bottle is up on the top of the keyboard.)

Greg Lake (bass) and Carl Palmer (drums) are in lockstep with one another, charging through like absolute madmen. The fury teeters on the edge of dissonance a few times, but comes together at the end. A poorly-mixed “yeah!” blurted out at the 2:28 mark is an ejaculation of pure rhythmic joy, before a tidal wave of geeked-out synthesizer noize. It’s glorious.

Please click through on the video below to hear this for yourself. You won’t be disappointed.

In other news, I am happy to welcome a handful of new subscribers (free and paid) who have joined the HOFFSTACK ranks thanks to a recent visit on the podcast Blank Check with Griffin and David. (During my appearance I frequently made the case for people to join this li’l club, and the door swung open as soon as the new episode “dropped.”)

As a semi-regular Blank Check guest (this was my sixth visit), people occasionally ask me “what’s it like being on Blank Check?” So I figure this is a good opportunity to look behind the curtain of the most successful movie podcast hosted by two people who seem to tolerate me.

I don’t remember the first time I met David Sims. One day I woke up and he was part of my life, and that doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon. I don’t remember the first time I met Griffin Newman, either, but it had to have been before the press screening of the motion picture Draft Day, because when Griffin came on the screen I said to myself “hey, I met this guy, and look at him go! He knows all his lines and everything!”

I could’ve sworn I wrote a review of Draft Day, but Google can’t seem to find it. It’s possible I wrote it for a website that no longer exists. As a result of this search, however, I did find a review I wrote of McFarland, USA, a movie that I apparently thought had “the best of all intentions.” Glowing!

A pixelated image of the Blu-ray cover of McFarland USA

I do, however, remember meeting Ben Hosley for the first time, because that was when I made my Blank Check debut some time shortly before October 1, 2017. Being a) an esteemed film critic, and b) hilarious, I am frequently asked to appear on podcasts. I figured this was just another favor for some fine fellas, but was soon thunderstruck to see these two yucksters actually had a professional-seeming producer and halfway decent microphones. I think there was even a fridge full of Polar brand flavored seltzer, a cache from which I filled up my backpack when no one was looking.

The first time I realized that people throughout the land actually spent what limited free time life allotted them by listening to Blank Check was in a blazing hot overflow parking lot in Camden, New Jersey.

I was there one summer day to see the improvisational rock group Phish. Camden, New Jersey is basically an Escape From New York-esque hellhole except for a tiny section on the waterfront facing Philadelphia. There’s a hospital, an aquarium, and a “shed”-style concert venue whose name changes regularly. It is currently called The Freedom Mortgage Pavilion, which just rolls off the tongue, but was previously known as The BB&T Pavillion, which either sounds like a sandwich order or a sex act, The Susquehanna Bank Pavillion, which certainly delighted all the Abbott & Costello fans who came to see Rusted Root or Dave Matthews, and the Tweeter Center, which just sounds fake.

Anyway, being within view of the Philadelphia skyline, I said to myself, “self: this day you have a two-part mission: first, to enjoy the face-melting jams of Phish, second, to consume as many of the regional delicacies as you can find.” This meant, of course, a cheesesteak, and also a soft pretzel with mustard.

Some good-looking pretzels but NOT Philly-style. Photo by Mark Zanzig on Unsplash

Here’s the thing about New York City: it conquers Philadelphia in every conceivable metric, except in prayer-shaped baked dough. The Big Apple doesn’t know from a pretzel. Sure, you may see vendors lining all the tourist districts that sell pretzels, but they aren’t really pretzels. They are cold, dry bread casings flavored with cancer. They are awful. I know this because I keep eating them. I eat them (and pay! As much as $8 in Central Park!) because as a righteous person I maintain a level of optimism in life. Otherwise, why get out of bed? I buy the pretzels and eat the pretzels thinking one day, maybe, they will be good. They never are.

But in Philadelphia, where the R&B records come with string accompaniments and the sports mascots are visions of an LSD-laced psychosis, the pretzels are soft and chewy and salty and also one pretzel is actually like three pretzels smushed together like a car crash. I don’t really understand it, but I’m not complaining. You then take a bottle of mustard and give it a nice zetz around the entire top. Spicy brown mustard is preferred, but yellow mustard is okay, too.

The overflow parking lot, which was an enormous rectangle of unmarked gravel, included a guy off to the side selling pretzels. I went over to him, made an order, and some dude behind me said “hey, I know that voice, you are Jordan Hoffman, frequent guest of Blank Check with Griffin and David!” I have been recognized in public now-and-again (usually at film events) but this was the first time a spun wook (you can look at up) knew me just from the sound of saying “yeah, I’ll take a pretzel, please.”

So what’s it like to appear on the show? I dunno, you go and talk about a movie. Griffin’s a really funny guy, Ben is super nice, and it’s great when David gets annoyed at things. I’m always impressed at the stuff they can remember.

Stay tuned for more developments on HOFFSTACK. I need to tell you about my thoracic muscle strain, which has not been fun!