The Nice “Elegy” « Cool Album of the Day

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The Nice “Elegy”

Posted 21 Feb 2011 in 70s, Albums of 1971, Albums of the 70s, Prog-Rock

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#293 in the Series) is The Nice, Elegy

The Nice was one of those bands that I found ‘retroactively.’ I was a big fan of Emerson, Lake and Palmer in the seventies. Were they my favorites? Actually, yeah, pretty close! I knew about Greg Lake’s earlier work as I was already a King Crimson fan as well. I had to do a looking research to find out about Carl Palmer’s and Keith Emerson’s beginnings.

Ok, I did some reading and found that Carl spent some time with two bands. Atomic Rooster and before that, The Crazy Work of Arthur Brown. They of ‘I am the God of Hell Fire… and I bring you, FIRE’ fame. Hey, I knew that song, cool!

So I looked a little more and found that Keith Emerson was in a band called The Nice. I was able to find a few of their albums as well. It was so ‘nice’ back then. Albums were cheap enough where you could buy a disc because you liked the drummer, or you liked the producer or maybe read a good review. That would be a harder and harder thing to do as praises rose.

This was The Nice album that I played the most, Elegy. Probably because it had some interesting covers. It was fun to hear different takes on Bob Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages’ or ‘Leonard Bernstein / Stephen Sondheim’s ‘America.’ It also include Tim Hardin’s ‘Hang On To a Dream.’

Full 'Gatefold' Album Cover

Only four songs on Elegy, and I’ve been able to find them all for the video playlist below. The version of ‘America’ is very cool. It was taken from a live guest performance of Keith Emerson playing with Paul Shaffer and his band on Late Night.

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