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As a singer and instrumentalist, Greg Lake had his greatest success and influence in the progressive rock outfit Emerson, Lake & Palmer and, before that, as a founding member of the original King Crimson. He has also been reasonably popular as a solo artist working in more of a hard rock idiom. As a boy, growing up in a poverty stricken part of the seaside resort town of Bournemouth, he got his first guitar for his 12th birthday, as a gift from his mother, and began taking lessons from a local teacher named Don Strike, one of whose other students was Robert Fripp, who became close friends with Lake. Around the time he was 12 years old, Lake also wrote a folk-style song that played a major part in his future, entitled "Lucky Man." Lake learned to read music and also to play pieces by Paganini, among other classical composers, but his aspirations lay with emulating the sound of his favorite band of the era, Cliff Richard & the Shadows, and their lead guitarist, Hank B. Marvin. Lake pas...