“Keith Emerson on telly – Not Much Kop! Started History Project – History of Music since 1900’s – doing it wiv Dick who’s writing the soul & TM parts”
ELP collectively can ‘do no wrong’ in my 1973 eyes. Keith Emerson by himself evidently can?!
This “History of Music” project is something I was – and still am – very proud of.
It took me forever to research everything using – remember this was YEARS before the age of the internet and Google – old magazine articles, encyclopedias, chart books and more, collating everything into a cohesive document.
This is the cover I designed and made,using the cover of an old hardback book and some brown corrugated paper
Reading it all again 36 years later its phenomenal the depth I went to and the information I imparted. This project taught me a LOT that I previously didn’t realise, and I KNOW this book made me appreciate a FAR greater number of genres of music than I was (then and later) otherwise listening to. I remember getting pretty obsessive about it, cross-referencing information and making sure everything I wrote was correct. Nowadays stuff like that is MUCH easier for kids, but for this 15 year old music geek discovering stuff was half the fun.
The project was written in conjunction with my school-chum Richard M (Dick) who, as far as I can remember, wrote his Soul/R&B/Motown section completely freehand and without any notes. His appreciation of that kind of music must have been so natural. (We swapped e-mails a few years back, he’s still into the same stuff almost to the exclusion of everything else!)
The book was all compiled together, a mixture of written pages, typed pages and a few sheets of photos etc.
Over time, the sellotape holding it all together has gone bad and it’s beginning to fall apart at almost every seam. Indeed, scanning it for inclusion on this blog pretty much ‘finished it off’ in its original state, such was its fragility. (Even the staples used to hold some of the pages together have rusted!).
I’ve held onto it though, mainly because I think it represents a hugely important moment in my teenage years that would define me later in life. I learned a lot and was then able to impart a lot of what I’d learned to ‘the public’ when I later worked in the music industry.
I hope Teenage Rock Opera readers will indulge me over the next few days whilst I show some of the contents?……
Excerpts from a 70's Teenage Rock Opera 