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Greg Lake Is Not a Fan of "Progressive Rock"

http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/uponsun/2012/05/greg_lake_elp_jimi_hendrix_prog_rock.php?page=2

 

It's kind of like one of the great rock legends, but did ELP ever actually get together with Jimi Hendrix?

 

Jimi used to come and watch King Crimson. I tell a story in the show sometimes about the first time I saw Jimi play. Everyone wondered who he was. They thought he was a soul band. But what happened was, when Keith [Emerson] and I got together we went looking for a drummer. The first person I talked to was Mitch Mitchell because the Experience had just broken up and Jimi was off doing this Band of Gypsies thing. 

 

Mitch was available at the time, and he said maybe we should get Jimi together. He'll be finished with this band of Gypsies thing in a few weeks, and we can get together and maybe the four of us should play. I said, "Fair enough," and that's how we left it. A couple of days later, we got a call from Roger Stigwood, who was the manager of the Bee Gees and Cream called up and said "Look, I've got the perfect drummer for you. It's a guy called Carl Palmer." 

 

So we said okay, get him to come down and we'll have a talk with him. We set up an audition . . . When we played together, it was instantaneously obvious that the chemistry was right. That was the band we were looking for. And so that was it really. We made a decision on the spot. A short while after Jimi was found dead in an apartment in London . . . The press got a hold of the story that we might jam with Jimi, and speculated that the group would be called HELP. 

 

But, alas, it was just a rumor. 

 

Yeah, and that's all there was to it. I tell stories like that in my show, different stories connected to different songs. I try and make it entertaining. I just was determined not to be one of those legends-in-his-own-lunchtime storyteller-type things. It's so boring. Just dull and strumming a guitar.

 

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No, they are aptly described in my Haiku for Physics 106:

 

Physics for pre-meds

Mercenary hoop-jumpers

I just want an A

 

 

We had a joke when I was in Organic Chemistry:

 

Q - How many Pre-meds does it take to change a light bulb?

 

A - Five. One to change the bulb, and four to yank the ladder out from under him.

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We had a joke when I was in Organic Chemistry:

 

Q - How many Pre-meds does it take to change a light bulb?

 

A - Five. One to change the bulb, and four to yank the ladder out from under him.

Yeah, that was the sort of dark humor that existed when I was a student, too. It was among the reasons I never took chemistry as an undergrad.
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Yeah, that was the sort of dark humor that existed when I was a student, too. It was among the reasons I never took chemistry as an undergrad.

 

I took chemistry in two different universities.  In the first, labs were well designed and stocked to the point of being preceded by an instructional video.  Boring, labs always worked, learned some chemistry.  In the second, labs were trashed and poorly stocked and manned by grad students who didn't speak English or care.  Less boring, learned less about chemistry and more about doing science with no funding or equipment.  Not sure which was the better education.

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The Chemistry Department at my undergrad institution considered it their duty to chase losers out of the university, and they defined "losers" to be people orher than chemistry majors. And they were so maliciously bad about foreign TAs (who, shall we say, engaged in criminal levels of favoritism towards those of their own national origin) that the Legislature stepped in and passed a statute that required proof of competence in spoken English ... the test had to be administered on campus by people of US origins while the TA candidate was a registered student ... and put teeth into the law. (Math was almost as bad as chemistry, but chemistry had proveable malice involved.) That happened after I graduated.

 

I was the envy of my fellow students because I never had to take a chemistry class: neither the physics department nor the astronomy department required any chemistry courses for their majors.

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Whereas my physics labs taught an entirely different lesson.  The apparatus was ancient and poorly designed, so you would never get a correct value for g or whatever, but the TA would absolutely dock you two letter grades if your data led you to an inaccurate value.  So we all quickly learned to falsify our data.

 

It annoyed me because it made the lab writeups really tedious (on top of the whole integrity issue).  It's quite difficult to work backward from a desired answer and come up with real-looking data that would give it.

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It annoyed me because it made the lab writeups really tedious (on top of the whole integrity issue).  It's quite difficult to work backward from a desired answer and come up with real-looking data that would give it.

That varied from TA to TA for me, but the freshman labs were so subject to gross systematic errors that getting the right answer was just repeated exercises in tedious futility. I later referred to them collectively as "Dot Drawing 101" because the only thing you did everylab multiple times was plot points ... lots and lots of points. I positively loathed spark tape because of its deadly dual attributes of producing deeply flawed data in large quantities.

 

The sophomore circuits lab got us introduced to the undergrad lab manager, who hated undergrads and made sure we knew it, and collectively everyone but the physics faculty hated him. There were wildly obscene graffiti about Bill Vail everywhere in the old Physics Building and all across campus.

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My best friend from high school went to Colorado State, where they used freshman chemistry as a weed-out class.  He said he showed up to the first day of class (in a lecture hall seating ~350) and the professor started class by saying:

 

"Hello, I'm Dr. So-and-so, and this is freshman chemistry. Please take a moment and introduce yourself to the person on your left.  Now introduce yourself to the person on your right.  Now tell them goodbye, because they're not going to be here next semester."

 

My freshman chemistry experience was a little more pleasant.  Of course, I took the chemistry class for scientists and engineers, so that may have had something to do with it.

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