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Memories of an officer and a gentleman is great

I recently spotted a minty copy of this in the shrink-wrap for $.99 I decided to pass and opted for a package of cheese/peanut butter crackers. Thank you for validating my decision!

I was such a fan of ELP in the seventies! When I first played this I literally cried, I’m not even kidding. 😢

Always absolutely love hearing you talk about music :) These guys sound a little looney lol! Thanks for a fantastic video :) xo Ambie

Due to my brother and our mutual friend (Kevin) playing Brain Salad Surgery incessantly it took me forty years before I could even go back & appreciate that record. Love Beach never got the same sort of love (praise Azmodus)! Trust me, there is nothing like hearing a former lapsed Christian singing, "Why did he lose six million Jews" over & over again to make you embrace the catharsis that punk rock provided!

I was just given a largish (about 450) collection of classic rock albums. I have been randomly picking various albums out and popping them on the turntable. Amazingly, after thinking about Love Beach for decades (mainly because of that horrific cover), there was a copy in this treasure trove and I finally listened to it about an hour before I spotted this video. Yes, the instrumental bits are definitely the highlight. Surprised to find out that Sinfield wrote the lyrics because some - if not most - of them are awful. High school level stuff. I shall quickly pick another aural curiosity this collection to see if you have some otherworldly connection to the musty boxes in my basement.

I get it a cursory spin once every 2-3 years. They were dressing like Miami Vice 6 years before the show first aired. Nice work, but now you've made me go and listen to it again....

Ha, I loved this video. Your video has so much more personality than Love Beach. The little quips you added had me laughing. Very cool to see the 45s.

Superb stuff here! Thank you so much for this video. It is so rare to step into a really fair analysis of Love Beach, usually it's all about the cover and how punk supposedly kicked prog's ass. So I am happy to watch your truly fair and in-depth analysis of the album. The way you put it, one can clearly get something that to me is very important: it's a decadent album, but considering ELP's glory days and their level of musicianship. After all, it's not every band that can come up with half of the good stuff that one certainly finds in Love Beach. I always get the feeling most of the time there's a double standard, while ELP is usually judged with biblical severity, many other bands are just treated like kids. Not the case here, your review shows anyone this is a problematic record , but coming from a good band. Well, anyway, I am surprised to learn there is that allusion to America in Canario! Somehow that escaped me for all those years. Thanks to reviews like yours, I hope more people can finally give a fair chance to this album, which is definitely a weird and irregular work, bad until Canario (to me until For You, I already like that one), but I still choose it over In The Hot Seat or even Black Moon anytime. Personally, I love the rare chance to hear Emerson playing a Fender Rhodes piano (Letter's from the Front) and I admire the fact that he not only quoted Chopin's Op. 10 No. 1 Etude at the beginning of "Love at first sight" but also used the uncommon arpeggio figuration Chopin came up with (on Op. 10/1) during the last section of that track. Sorry for the long text! Thanks again for the fantastic analysis!

Nailed it. You exactly landed my views in this video. It was easy for me to appreciate some elements of Memoirs as a huge fan of Pirates with all it's orchestrations and theatrical vibes. Its no match for the grandios brilliance of piratebor the edgy lunacy of Karn Evil 9 but it is a good listen the piano drips romance in it even if Greg's voice does not.

Wonder what (how) they were thinking when they made that album...

Really enjoyed your review on this album. I used to see this album a lot in clearance bins but don't see it much anymore. I have to say that I would love to hear Side 2 of the record. Its kinda of sad to hear the group fell apart. I am a fan of the band. One of my favorite songs is "Take a Pebble". Classic ELP. Have a good week.... Edward

Ahhh, that cover: 'Emerson, Lake and Gibb' as a local record shop owner describd it back then. Visual evidence that it was well-past time to throw in the (beach) towel...

Ha! Hooo hum!! You did the best you could! It is cheese mo neese😏......I’m more interested in the albums on your shelves😉😁...🤭 hi ya Michael👋🏻☮️

Lmao, it’s just a plain dirty song, omg. Taste of my love. Ah the 70s, it’s all about hairy chest. Greg Lake, fat boy. I’m dying laughing on this. Nothing better then starting a video by saying it’s an album that many people call a stinker. You had me at that. Your humor really shined on this Michael. That is an album that is popular in most $1 bins. I have generally shied away from any album that is filled with hairy chests. Interesting though your thoughts about instrumentation and how that helped the album vs just the pop ditties. Well done and super enjoyable, two thumbs up for your video and pronunciation

Great video Michael! - a most amusing critique. Sounds grizzly..

Real soft spot for Love Beach , much prefer it to the 2 90s albums and would says its Carl Palmers best ‘ restrained’ drumming performance after this felt his attempt to simplify was not suited to his style of playing , but on here and with the Gretsch wooden shelled kit he sounds great .

There are some bits on that album I actually like. Especially on the memoirs side. I haven't watched the video yet so I'm just going to put that right here and have a willingness to bet that you will follow with something similar.

Unfortunately Love Beach started out on its left foot with the cover and album title alone. Had they titled the album - for example - Memoirs and had a somewhat related picture (officer in the trenches reading a letter, etc.) it would've at least had some semblance of the stoicness ELP is known for. But as you said...Love Beach...the cover...oof. You touch on production of the album falling in Emerson's lap after Lake and Palmer bailed as soon as the recording sessions were over, Emerson was living in Nassau and felt at home, the others couldn't stand it. You mention that Lake's guitar playing (and voice) being front and center on the first several cuts, but it's really an extension of his acoustic playing. Many - but not all - of his ELP compositions don't have the classic guitar riff (i.e. Lucky Man and most of his Works Volume 1 material); they are somewhat minstrel like where the focus is on the voice and the lyrical tale. Taste of My Love has to be the absolute nadir of the ELP catalog, possibly only surpassed by some of the outside writer material from In the Hot Seat. Interesting that you found The Gambler being somewhat wild west tinged, it struck me as truly Caribbean flavored thanks to the cliche'd female background vocals (another cringing reminder of that horrific track Thin Line from In the Hot Seat which had a similar background vocal approach). For You is probably the best of the Lake-Sinfield compositions on the album with decent structure and feel and the lyrics are only mildly blase, but the outro is rather painful and feels rather slapdash. Canario is definitely the highlight of Side 1 as you noted; I believe Palmer plays/has played it in his current band (the Carl Palmer ELP Legacy). Had ELP ditched Taste of My Love and either Love Beach or All I Want is You and replaced them with a solo piano piece from Keith and some tracks from their vaults (Oh My Father would have been a great candidate) or even devoted the entire side to Carl Palmer's (at the time) unreleased Percussion Concerto it could have been saved - a big perhaps - from the scrapheap of prog irrelevance. Memoirs... is so difficult to get into for all the ELP fans who were used to the aggressive Hammond and soaring Moog and sci-fi/dystopian lyrics from Tarkus and Karn Evil 9, but I think it's a fine piece and is a decent showcase for Keith talents. Thanks for the nice overview.

If you replaced the artwork and album title with something a little more "proggy", would it still be derided the same?