[La Mano Gaucha]

I think that I got the ELP "Pictures" as a trade I made on the school bus with a pretty girl back in '80 or '81. If I remember correctly, I traded a pristine middle period Bee Gees record for a rather scratchy Cotillion copy of the ELP. I still have that album in my collection. I was about thirteen and she was a year or two older.

For the record, my very first albums were Led Zeppelin "III" and ELP's "Trilogy", both given to me by my dad when I was seven. He was getting heavily into Disco at the time and no longer had any use for those two records. He gave me a plastic record player to go along with them. I remember we bought the player at a K-Mart and the thing was mostly white. I was absolutely stoked. The player eventually perished on a trip to school -- I used to take it to art class because the teacher would let me play my Kiss records when we were drawing or playing with plastisine. The player fell off the roof of the van that would take us to school and was run over by the car behind us... That was the only time I ever cried while I was a schoolboy. After that, my grandpa gave me his 60s Lafayette amp and a Panasonic turntable with some boomy-sounding speakers. That was the stereo I first used to play ELP's "Pictures".