No, no, no. Why should I be afraid of Bob Dylan? By the time I approached him, I’d sold almost 14 millions albums. Does that put it in perspective for you? But well, yeah, I think he’s one of the great, if not the greatest, guitar-singing songwriter. I wanted to sing a Bob Dylan song, just as a tribute to him, but I didn’t want to do one of the ones that are well-known, so I asked him if he had any new songs that were unrecorded that I could cover, and he sent over this tape of him doing “I Love You Too Much”: he’d written a couple of verses, that’s all, he had the hook, and he said, “Look, would you finish that song? Then it’ll be something that we’ve done together.”
By no record. Somebody recommended him. I’d co-written a song with Bob Dylan, it’s called “I Love You Too Much,” and I wanted to have a very blistering, fast guitar solo on the record, just on this one song. I could hear it in my mind, and I don’t play guitar like that. I was recording at Abbey Road, and I asked my manager, “You know, I really need a guitar player who plays this blindingly fast, riffing rock solos.” And for some reason, he had been working on some project with Gary, and he said, “Oh, the guy that might suit you is Moore. I’ll ask him if he would come in and play it, and you’ll see how it goes. So they got Gary come in to Abbey Road – we met, said “Hello” and went into the studio, he put his guitar on and played the song. And that was it, that was the first time I really heard Gary play in the sense of identifying him. And he was just fantastic.
So that explains how a prog-rocker like Lake would come to record a Gary Moore song, but it doesn’t come close to explaining how Lake would record a song he co-wrote with Bob Dylan on the same album.
Perhaps it’s best to let Greg explain how the pairing came about:
“I wanted to sing a Bob Dylan song, just as a tribute to him, but I didn’t want to do one of the ones that are well-known, so I asked him if he had any new songs that were unrecorded that I could cover, and he sent over this tape of him doing “I Love You Too Much”: he’d written a couple of verses, that’s all, he had the hook, and he said, “Look, would you finish that song? Then it’ll be something that we’ve done together.” SOURCE
Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Man In The Long Black Coat
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