From the Beginning

Greg Lake wrote and produced the song, a quiet piece in A minor cut during the Trilogy sessions at Advision with Eddy Offord engineering. Lake sings and plays acoustic guitar, electric guitars and bass; Palmer plays congas with timpani mallets and no cymbals; Emerson comes in on Moog for the closing solo, built from overdubbed synthesizer sounds. Lake said the song simply came to him and flowed out naturally.

Released in the US as a single in August 1972, edited to 3:48 and backed with Living Sin, it reached 39 on the Billboard Hot 100, the band's highest American chart single, and seven in New Zealand. Record World admired the sound Lake drew from his band on an acoustic, jazzy number. The 2015 deluxe Trilogy added a previously unheard version, and the band's 2007 box set took its name from the song.

Live and covers

setlist.fm logs 111 ELP performances, their fifteenth most played song, and a 1997 to 1998 tour version is on Then and Now. Lake kept it in his solo sets, and Carl Palmer's ELP Legacy still plays it, in 2025 over video of Lake and Emerson from the 1992 Royal Albert Hall concert. The Czech band Marsyas recorded it as Studená koupel in 1982 and Dokken covered it in 1995. Amerie sampled it on Got to Be There in 2002, with Lake credited as a writer, and Umphrey's McGee first played it in Seattle on the day Emerson died, as a tribute. The upload in the hypersongs web is the album version.