The Supergroup: When Rock Royalty Led Me Back to the Beginning
How Asia, a worn-out record, and a free cassette opened the door to a whole new musical universe.
When Musicians Come Together
There's a word I seem to run into everywhere these days.
Collaboration.
As a writer and filmmaker, I use it constantly. I'm collaborating with this person, developing something with that person, or talking to someone about a possible partnership.
And music is full of collaborations, too.
One singer joins another on a song. A band brings in a guest musician. Artists from completely different genres get together and create something nobody expected.
I love that.
There's something exciting about musicians stepping outside their usual circles and discovering what they can create together.
And sometimes those collaborations do more than produce a great song.
They introduce audiences to music they might never have explored otherwise.
Think about Run-DMC and Aerosmith.
When they released their version of "Walk This Way" in 1986, it wasn't simply a meeting of rock and hip-hop. It brought different audiences together and helped introduce a younger generation to Aerosmith.
Image: Aerosmith and Run-DMC. Source: Rolling Stone.
That's a pretty remarkable thing for one song to accomplish.
But as I was thinking about collaboration this morning, my mind wandered back to growing up Gen X.
Now, before anybody gets excited, I'm not about to tell you that our generation invented musical partnerships or that everything was better when we were kids.
Every generation experiences music differently.
I'm simply talking about what I remember.
And I remember discovering something that wasn't quite the same as a collaboration.
The supergroup.
A band made up of musicians who had already established themselves somewhere else.
People who had played in successful bands, developed reputations, and sometimes helped define entire musical movements.
Then they came together to create something new.
Of course, Young Angel didn't know any of that when she encountered her first supergroup.
She was far too busy listening to the music.
And wearing out the record.
Heat of the Moment
It was 1982.
I heard a song on the radio called "Heat of the Moment."
And I loved it.
There was something about that sound.
The guitars were powerful. The keyboards were dramatic. The melody was irresistible.
And that voice!
Oh, my goodness.
The song had energy, but it also had something else I couldn't quite explain.
A sense of grandeur.
Like the music belonged to a much bigger world than the three or four minutes coming out of my radio.
The band was called Asia.
Image: Asia. Source: Wikipedia.
And I decided I needed that album.
So off to Tower Records I went.
Now, I was actually there to buy something else, but that's another story for another day.
Let's just say I wasn't about to leave without Asia's debut album.
I bought it, took it home, and put it on the record player.
And that was that.
I was hooked.
Completely.
A Musical World of Its Own
There are albums you like.
There are albums you love.
And then there are albums that somehow become part of the atmosphere of your life.
For me, Asia's self-titled debut was one of those albums.
Image: Asia album cover, Asia. Source: Spotify
Even today, I can put it on while I'm working and find myself bouncing in my chair, hollering the lyrics, and enjoying it every bit as much as I did back then.
Some people probably wouldn't understand why.
But I do.
There was something otherworldly about that record.
Something misty.
Almost magical.
It wasn't just the songs.
It was the entire experience.
The extraordinary Roger Dean artwork, with its fantastic creature rising out of the water, looked like something from another universe.
And the music seemed to belong in that universe.
The keyboards created these enormous atmospheric spaces. The guitars moved through the arrangements with precision and personality. The drums were powerful without overwhelming everything else.
And the compositions!
Sometimes listening to those instrumental passages felt almost like listening to a symphony.
Not because they were necessarily playing classical music, but because the instruments seemed to have carefully considered roles.
A keyboard passage would establish a mood.
A guitar would answer.
The rhythm would shift.
The music would build, expand, and eventually come together in a way that felt almost cinematic.
The solos weren't just interruptions where somebody got to show off.
They were part of the experience.
And the vocals brought a human warmth to all that musical grandeur.
I loved it.
I still do.
And I think there was another reason that album spoke to me.
It called to the nerdy, lonely people.
The dreamers.
The kids who loved science fiction, fantasy, unusual stories, and music that didn't always fit neatly into a little box.
The ones who sometimes felt a little outside the ordinary world.
Asia made music that seemed to understand us.
At least, that's how it felt to Young Angel.
And nobody had to explain that feeling to me.
I heard it.
More Than One Hit
"Heat of the Moment" was my introduction, but it was hardly the only reason I kept playing the album.
"Only Time Will Tell" had those wonderful keyboards and a melody that stayed with you.
"Sole Survivor" had a dramatic intensity that made it feel like the soundtrack to some epic adventure.
"Wildest Dreams" brought tremendous energy, while "Here Comes the Feeling" delivered another of those big, glorious musical arrangements.
And then there was "Without You."
Oh, that song.
John Wetton's voice moves through it with such emotional power. There are moments of intimacy, moments of longing, and then these enormous passages where everything opens up.
The music rises around him, and he carries the song through it.
That was exactly the kind of singing that fascinated me.
And if you've been following Rock ’n’ Roll Angel, you already know what Young Angel did when she encountered a song like that.
She took it to her vocal coach.
Susan Steele and the Art of Singing
I've talked before about Susan Steele, the wonderful woman who helped me develop my voice.
Susan was the mother in law of my best friend, and she taught me something I've never forgotten.
My voice was my instrument.
It belonged to me.
I could learn how to use it, strengthen it, adjust it, and make it do what I wanted.
But I had to understand it first.
So she gave me assignments.
Every month, I'd select a song, and we'd work through it.
Not just sing along with the record.
Really work through it.
Breathing.
Phrasing.
Enunciation.
Breaking words down into vowels and understanding how they needed to be sung.
Learning where to take a breath, how to control a phrase, and how to let a note develop.
Susan was frequently amused by my choices.
Queen. Billy Squier. Manfred Mann. 38 Special.
And Asia.
Yes, I brought her "Without You."
Because apparently Young Angel had no interest in making things easy for herself.
Ha!
But that's how I learned.
I listened to singers who fascinated me and tried to understand what they were doing.
And John Wetton was one of those singers.
Image: John Wetton. Source: Rolling Stone.
There was a richness to his voice, a dramatic quality that suited Asia's music beautifully.
I wasn't trying to become John Wetton.
I was learning how to bring that kind of emotion and control into my own singing.
And in doing so, Asia became more than a favorite band.
Their music became part of my singer DNA.
The funny thing?
I still didn't know who these guys really were.
Four Guys Who Had Already Been Somewhere
It took me a while to understand what made Asia such an extraordinary gathering of musicians.
Because these weren't four guys who met in somebody's garage and decided to start a band.
They had already spent years making music.
And not just any music.
They came from some of the most influential bands in progressive rock.
John Wetton — bass and lead vocals
Wetton had played with King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep, and UK.
Image: King Crimson. Source: Pitchfork.com
He brought a powerful, expressive voice and considerable experience with adventurous, technically demanding music.
Steve Howe — guitar
Image: Yes. Source: GuitarWorld.com
Howe was already famous for his work with Yes, one of the great progressive-rock bands.
His playing combined rock, classical, folk, and other influences in ways that made him instantly recognizable.
Geoff Downes — keyboards
Image: The Buggles. Source: Wikipedia
Downes had been part of the Buggles (remember them), whose "Video Killed the Radio Star" became an early MTV landmark.
He had also played with Yes.
And here's something that still makes me laugh.
I already knew Yes!
I knew their music from their renewed visibility in the early 1980s.
But I hadn't realized that Asia contained musicians connected to Yes.
And Steve Howe had been part of Yes for years before Asia even existed!
I was listening to these bands without realizing how closely their histories were connected.
Carl Palmer — drums
Image: Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP). Source: Wikipedia
And then there was Carl Palmer.
An extraordinary drummer whose earlier work included Atomic Rooster and one of progressive rock's most important bands:
Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
Remember that name.
We're coming back to it.
These four musicians brought together an enormous amount of experience.
And in 1982, they created something that reached a new generation.
They Weren't Dusty Old Rock Stars
Here's something I find fascinating about Asia's success.
These musicians had already established themselves in the 1970s, when progressive rock was exploring elaborate compositions, unusual time signatures, extended instrumental passages, and ambitious musical ideas.
By the early 1980s, popular music was changing.
Songs were becoming more tightly structured. Radio and MTV were helping shape what audiences heard. A new generation was discovering rock music on its own terms.
And Asia stepped right into that moment.
They didn't simply reproduce what their previous bands had done.
They took their musical experience and created something different.
Something melodic.
Accessible.
Powerful.
And commercially successful.
Their debut album reached No. 1 on the American album chart, spending nine weeks at the top. It became one of the biggest albums of 1982.
"Heat of the Moment" became a major hit, and "Only Time Will Tell" followed.
Not bad for a bunch of musicians whose most famous work was supposedly behind them!
And that's what I find so wonderful about it.
They weren't dusty and outdated.
They were relevant.
They had something new to say.
And people were listening.
Some longtime progressive-rock fans and critics had mixed feelings about the band's more commercial direction.
But Young Angel wasn't reading all those reviews.
Remember, we didn't have the internet.
There was no social media feed telling me what I was supposed to think about an album.
If I wanted reviews, I had to read music magazines, newspapers, or publications like Rolling Stone.
And at that point, I hadn't quite put on my rock-journalist shoes.
I listened.
If I liked the music, I played it.
If I didn't, I moved on.
Simple as that.
And Asia?
I played the heck out of Asia.
Literally.
The Trouble With Vinyl
Now, people today talk about vinyl with a kind of romantic reverence.
And I understand why.
I love vinyl.
The album covers. The liner notes. The experience of taking the record out of its sleeve and placing it on the turntable.
There's something wonderful about it.
But can we talk about the other side of vinyl for a moment?
Because not everybody had one of those beautiful, terribly expensive stereo systems.
Some of us had whatever record player we could afford.
And depending on the equipment, the condition of the needle, and how often you played a record, those grooves could take a beating.
A properly maintained turntable could be quite gentle on vinyl.
But cheaper equipment, worn needles, dust, and heavy tracking could do real damage.
And when you played an album over and over and over again?
Well.
Eventually, you might begin to hear the consequences.
A little distortion.
A little crackling.
A favorite passage that didn't sound quite the way it used to.
And sometimes the record simply wasn't giving you the music you remembered.
That happened to my Asia album.
I wore the poor thing out.
So I went back to Tower Records.
Because obviously, I needed another copy.
What was I supposed to do?
Stop listening?
Please.
The Cool Guy at Tower Records
Now, I've mentioned before how much Tower Records meant to me.
It wasn't simply a place to buy music.
It was a place to explore.
A place where you could discover things you didn't know you were looking for.
And sometimes the people who worked there became part of your musical education.
On this particular visit, I ended up talking with one of the cool guys who worked at the store.
He teased me about how quickly I'd worn out my Asia album.
Apparently, I'd managed to destroy it faster than anybody expected.
But not fast enough to qualify for a free exchange.
Ha!
So there I was, buying the same album again.
And then he told me he had something to make up for it.
A cassette.
From the discount rack.
Now, I don't know exactly how that worked.
Maybe the store allowed employees to give away a certain number of inexpensive items to regular customers.
Maybe it was simply an easy decision because I'd just purchased another album.
Or maybe it wasn't complicated at all.
I don't know.
I just remember that he handed me a cassette and promised I'd like it.
Naturally, I wanted to know why.
And he explained that one of the guys in Asia had come from the band on that tape.
Well, that was interesting.
The cassette was from a group called Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
And that little gift changed my musical world.
Three More Names to Remember
Emerson, Lake & Palmer (often called ELP) formed in 1970.
The group consisted of three musicians who were already accomplished in their own right.
Keith Emerson, the extraordinary keyboardist from the Nice.
Greg Lake, singer, bassist, guitarist, and former member of King Crimson.
And Carl Palmer, the drummer who had played with Atomic Rooster and would later become part of Asia.
There he was.
My connection.
The drummer from the album I'd just worn out had already helped create an entirely different musical universe.
And what a universe it was.
ELP became one of the defining groups of progressive rock, bringing together classical influences, rock energy, extraordinary technical skill, and a willingness to experiment.
They could turn a classical composition into a rock performance.
They could build elaborate instrumental pieces that seemed to travel through several musical landscapes.
They could be dramatic, beautiful, strange, and occasionally downright outrageous.
And I loved them.
But my introduction came through a cassette from the discount rack.
Their first album.
The one simply called Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
A Little Cassette With a Big Surprise
That debut album came out in 1970.
Image: Emerson, Lake & Palmer debut album cover. Source: Spotify.
It had only six tracks.
Six!
Now, it was a full-length album, with some long and ambitious compositions.
But when you're accustomed to records with ten or twelve songs, six tracks can make an album feel almost like an EP.
And EPs?
Oh, that's another conversation we need to have one day.
But the number of tracks wasn't the important part.
The music was.
There was "The Barbarian."
"Take a Pebble."
"Knife-Edge."
"The Three Fates."
"Tank."
And one of the band's most recognizable songs:
"Lucky Man."
Oh, my goodness.
Greg Lake's voice.
The acoustic guitar.
That beautiful, almost haunting melody.
And then, near the end, Keith Emerson's Moog synthesizer takes the song somewhere entirely unexpected.
It's one of those moments when you realize you're listening to musicians who aren't particularly interested in following the usual rules.
They want to explore.
And they have the ability to take you along.
That song alone was worth the cassette.
But the album introduced me to much more than one memorable song.
It introduced me to an entirely different approach to making rock music.
And, just as importantly, it made me curious.
What else had these guys done?
The Cassette-Eating Monster
Of course, before we go any further, we need to talk about cassette tapes.
Because every Gen Xer knows what I'm about to say.
Cassette players could be wonderful little machines.
They made music portable. You could play tapes in your car, carry them around, and eventually take your music almost anywhere.
But they could also become mechanical monsters.
You'd be listening to your favorite song when suddenly something terrible happened.
The music slowed down.
The singer's voice began to wobble.
And then came that horrible, garbled sound.
A musical death rattle.
You pressed STOP.
Then EJECT.
And discovered that your beloved cassette had been swallowed by the machine.
Magnetic tape everywhere.
Sometimes it was wrapped around the mechanism. Sometimes it was stretched. Sometimes it was hopelessly tangled.
And sometimes you could rescue it with a pencil and a tremendous amount of patience.
The pencil!
Emergency equipment for an entire generation of music lovers.
Ha!
Well, I managed to break that ELP cassette, too.
Because apparently I had a talent for loving music beyond the physical endurance of whatever format it came on.
But the damage was done.
Not to the cassette.
To me.
I was in love with Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
From the Beginning
As I continued exploring ELP, I discovered more of their music.
And while "Lucky Man" was a wonderful introduction, it wasn't the song that affected me most deeply.
That honor belongs to another Greg Lake composition.
"From the Beginning."
From the 1972 album Trilogy.
Oh.
My.
Goodness.
The first time I heard that song, I was moved beyond reason.
There's something about the guitar work.
The precision.
The delicacy.
The way the notes seem to move around one another.
And then Greg Lake begins to sing.
That voice.
Warm. Rich. Beautifully controlled.
The song doesn't need to shout.
It doesn't need to overwhelm you.
It simply unfolds.
And when Keith Emerson's synthesizer enters, it adds another dimension to the atmosphere.
It's extraordinary.
I remember listening and wondering:
What kind of musicians ARE these people?
Because this wasn't simply a catchy song.
It was composition.
It was craftsmanship.
It was musicianship at a level that made me stop and listen.
And I remember thinking something that probably sounds funny now.
We don't make music like this anymore.
Imagine that.
There I was in the early 1980s, already looking back at music from the early 1970s and wondering where that kind of artistry had gone.
But that's what the song did to me.
It made me aware of a musical tradition I hadn't fully understood.
And it made me want to hear more.
The Musical Family Tree
By this point, I was beginning to understand something about the music I loved.
The bands weren't isolated.
The musicians weren't isolated.
They were connected.
One musician played in one band, then moved to another.
A guitarist developed a style with one group and brought it into something new.
A drummer helped define a musical movement, then joined musicians from other backgrounds to create a different sound.
And sometimes those connections weren't obvious until somebody pointed them out.
Later, when I heard DJs using the word supergroup, I finally had a name for what I'd been discovering.
And once I started looking backward through my musical memories, I found more examples.
Cream, with Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker.
Bad Company, bringing together musicians with histories in Free, Mott the Hoople, and King Crimson.
Fastway, formed through connections involving Motörhead's "Fast" Eddie Clarke and UFO's Pete Way, with former Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley joining the lineup. Pete Way didn't ultimately record with the band, but the musical pedigree was part of its beginnings.
And Whitesnake, which was a slightly different situation.
David Coverdale had already been the lead singer of Deep Purple, and Whitesnake's history included other Deep Purple veterans such as Jon Lord and Ian Paice.
Whitesnake wasn't assembled in quite the same way as Asia, but it demonstrated how musicians with established histories could come together and create another important chapter in rock music. And we'll tap into Whitesnake laer. They do deserve their own Rock 'n' Roll Angel deep dive.
Later, the Traveling Wilburys would bring together George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne.
Image: Traveling Wilburys. Source: Wikipedia
Talk about rock royalty!
The more I learned, the more I realized that the history of rock 'n' roll wasn't simply a collection of separate bands and albums.
It was a network of musicians.
A musical family tree.
And Asia had given me my first real reason to explore it.
The Bridge Between Generations
Here's the thing that fascinates me most about all of this.
Asia didn't simply create a successful album.
They introduced four established musicians to an entirely new generation of listeners.
And they did it by creating music that mattered to that generation.
They weren't asking us to appreciate their old accomplishments.
They weren't demanding that we listen to their earlier bands before we were allowed to enjoy their new one.
They made something fresh.
Something exciting.
Something that belonged to the moment.
And we responded.
I certainly did.
I didn't buy Asia because Steve Howe had played with Yes.
I didn't buy it because John Wetton had been in King Crimson.
I didn't buy it because Geoff Downes had worked with the Buggles or because Carl Palmer had played with ELP.
I bought it because I heard "Heat of the Moment" on the radio and fell in love with the music.
The music came first.
The history came later.
And when I finally learned that history, it didn't replace my love for Asia.
It expanded it.
Suddenly I understood that the sounds I'd found so extraordinary had roots stretching back into some of the most adventurous music of the previous decade.
And I began following those roots.
That's why I think supergroups can be such a wonderful thing.
At their best, they don't simply bring musicians together.
They bring audiences together.
They connect musical styles.
They create opportunities for discovery.
And sometimes they introduce an entirely new generation to artists who still have so much to give.
Asia did that for me.
And a guy at Tower Records helped finish the introduction.
Still Listening, Still Discovering
I still listen to that first Asia album.
All these years later.
I can put it on while I'm working, start singing along, and find myself bouncing in my chair like the young woman who first brought it home from Tower Records.
The music still feels otherworldly.
Still misty.
Still enormous.
And those compositions still amaze me.
Asia made other albums, and there are wonderful songs throughout their catalog.
But that first album?
That's the one.
The one I bought three times.
The one that became part of my vocal education.
The one that led me backward through the history of progressive rock.
And the one that eventually brought me to Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
I sometimes think about that record-store clerk.
He probably had no idea what he'd started.
To him, it may have been nothing more than a friendly gesture toward a regular customer who'd worn out her favorite album.
An inexpensive cassette from the discount rack.
No big deal.
But to me, it became the beginning of a lifelong love affair with another extraordinary band.
And when I hear "From the Beginning" today, I still remember that feeling of discovering something so beautiful and so musically accomplished that I couldn't quite understand how three people had created it.
I suppose that's one of the great gifts music gives us.
It keeps opening doors.
You think you've found something wonderful, and then you discover there's another world waiting just behind it.
Sometimes all it takes is a song on the radio.
Sometimes it's an album cover that speaks to your imagination.
And sometimes it's a free cassette handed to you by a guy at Tower Records.
So here's to the supergroups.
To the musicians who weren't finished creating just because they'd already accomplished something remarkable.
To the generations of listeners they brought together.
And to the wonderful surprises waiting in the discount bin.
Because Young Angel went into Tower Records that day looking for another copy of an album she'd already worn out.
She came home with a whole new musical universe.
And she was only getting started.
Sources & Further Reading
For readers interested in exploring the history of Asia, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and the musicians behind these extraordinary bands:
Asia — Official Band History and News: Original Asia — Background on the band's original lineup and the enormous success of its 1982 debut.
Billboard, May 29, 1982 — “Breaking Asia: Radio, Retail Acceptance Means Instant Success.” Contemporary reporting on the band's formation, musicians, and rapid rise to No. 1.
Asia — Asia (1982): The nine-song debut featuring "Heat of the Moment," "Only Time Will Tell," "Sole Survivor," and "Without You."
Emerson, Lake & Palmer — Official Website: emersonlakeandpalmer.com — Band history, recordings, and the group's progressive-rock legacy.
Carl Palmer — Official Discography: carlpalmer.com — His recording history, including Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Asia.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer — Emerson, Lake & Palmer (1970): The six-track debut album featuring "Lucky Man."
Emerson, Lake & Palmer — Trilogy (1972): Featuring Greg Lake's "From the Beginning."
AllMusic: allmusic.com — Album reviews, musician biographies, and discographies for further exploration.
The memories of Tower Records, my vocal lessons with Susan Steele, the worn-out albums, the cassette, and my personal experiences discovering this music are my own.
Thanks for taking this trip back with me.
Did you discover Asia when their first album came out? Were you already an Emerson, Lake & Palmer fan? Or did one band lead you to another in a way you never expected?
And please tell me I'm not the only one who remembers the horrible sound of a cassette player eating a favorite tape!
I'd love to hear your memories.
Share your stories in the comments, and if this brought back a little of your own musical history, share it with someone who remembers those days, too.
Follow and subscribe to Rock ’n’ Roll Angel for more music, memories, pop culture, and wonderfully strange adventures from growing up Gen X.
Come find me beyond the memories:
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Until next time...
Keep the memories alive.Keep the stories coming.And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
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