Emerson, Lake & Palmer performed on this day in 1973 at the Hallenstadion in Zurich, Switzerland.
ELP’s Get Me A Ladder Tour was now in full swing across Europe. The band provided nightly entertainment to large crowds across Europe as they performed numbers from all of their albums released to date. Switzerland was the fourth unique country they visited after Germany, Belgium and France.
From the debut album, “Take a Pebble” was featured, during which Keith Emerson took a piano solo and Greg Lake played a pair of acoustic pieces. One of these was “Lucky Man”, also from the debut album. From Tarkus, the title track was performed, along with “Jeremy Bender”; this was paired with “The Sheriff” from Trilogy to create a comic section of the performance. Trilogy was the best-represented on the setlist despite its general difficulty to perform, with “Hoedown” and “Abaddon’s Bolero” joining “The Sheriff”. The setlist was finished by an abbreviated “Pictures at An Exhibition”.
Also included were pieces from the still-to-be-recorded Brain Salad Surgery also made it onto the stage, including “Still…You Turn Me On” featuring slightly different lyrics in the first portion and a completely different second section.
Apparently onstage was Keith Emerson’s
This concert has been recorded in full and is in circulation online.
Perhaps more excitingly, there are portions of the concert that exist on video as well. I made an exciting discovery as I was writing this post, namely that the audio on the video clip and on at least one version of the bootleg match almost exactly. I listened to them in sync–or as closely as possible to being “in sync”–to verify this. Perhaps this means the bootleg was pulled from film footage, so a complete film could exist. Alternatively, the film was synched with found sound, and my little theory is toast.
The concert took place at the Zurich Hallenstadion, which was first opened in 1939. It was renovated between 2004 and 2005, and seats 15,000 people.
While primarily used as a sports venue, it has obviously also been used as a concert venue, holding these concerts, among others. The Hallenstadion is still in use today; its website can be found here.
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Post Sources
- https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/emerson-lake-and-palmer/1973/hallenstadion-zurich-switzerland-4bd2878a.html
- http://www.covers-at-an-exhibition.de/elp/1973/zurich/lselp1973zur.html
Venue Sources