Interview with Paul Bielatowicz of ELP Legacy

Stephen Mazikewich

I'm backstage with Paul Bilatovich, and just got finished with Carl Palmer's Emerson Lake and Palmer's Legacy show. It was fantastic. Paul, how do you think it went tonight, Paul? I think it was great.

Paul Bielatowicz: It was great. Yeah, I had a blast. It's always fun, it's always slightly different. Yeah, I had a blast tonight.

First of all, can you tell us a little bit about your guitar training.

Well, I had a personal guitar teacher for about a year when I started off. I went to him because I wanted to sound like Mark Knopfler. I'm a huge Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits fan. Then in going to him, he showed me Eddie Van Halen for the first time, and that just blew my mind.

Now he wasn't of that style, he was more of a classic rock / blues style, so I left. But I just devoured Eddie Van Halen and Van Halen records for a few years while I was at school. So I was kind of largely self-taught. When I was 16, I decided to do a course, a classical course, because that's all that was around then, and was introduced to Debussy. You heard me play the Debussy piece tonight. We did a module on Debussy, and it changed my life.

I almost gave up guitar, almost started piano, but thought, well, I've invested so much into this instrument, I wonder if I can take this music and try and apply the music and the harmony and the techniques to the guitar and try and make the guitar sound like a classical piano. So that's kind of where I went, and how the tapping approach appeared, and how I started down the classical route.

When was the first time you heard Emerson, Lake and Palmer? Do you remember?

Somebody asked me this yesterday, actually. Funnily enough, the first time I heard Emerson, Lake and Palmer was when I got the gig with Carl Palmer, and he said, you need to learn these two hours of materials.

I'd heard lots about ELP, because I was a huge Spock's Beard fan, huge Dream Theater fan, and all of those guys, they all talk about the influences, and ELP always came up. So I'd heard lots about them in interviews, but never actually heard their music, or certainly not knowingly heard their music. So it was a steep learning curve.

I got the gig with Carl, and then I had two months to learn two hours of ELP music, just the most intense two months of my life. I got a big education pretty quickly.

You had big shoes to fill, but boy, you did a fantastic job.

Thank you.

How difficult was it to apply your style, your classical style, which is very prevalent in how he plays, to Keith Emerson?

Well, it's funny, it was almost like this gig was waiting for me. And little did I know that my classical piano influences would then feed into a band, or fit into a band, where I was called upon to play keyboard parts. So it was fortuitous. It was kind of all the stars aligned, and I just found the right gig.

Even your tone sounds like a synthesizer. You had to work on the tone, not just the style, but getting the right guitar sound as well, which is fantastic.

I mean, my playing has also. I've been playing with Carl for 20 years, 21 years next month or this month. So in all of that time, my playing has developed more keyboard-like over the course of my career with Carl, because this is the music I've been playing and gigging.

Joe Andusko: So, with your tone, is that pedals, pickups, your tuning?

It's mostly my laptop. I mean, there's a bit of everything going in there, but yeah, mostly my laptop is a piece of software called MIDI Guitar 2 made by somebody called Jam Origin, and it's incredible.

You'd have to have a MIDI pickup mounted to your guitar. Or a special MIDI guitar that would then convert everything you're playing into MIDI, and then it can be translated into different sounds. But now, this company in Europe have developed this incredible software that just converts everything you play into MIDI, so you can make it sound like anything. It's $150. The cheapest thing, it's incredible. It sounds too good to be true, and it is too good to be true, it's just amazing. I mean, it's just life-changing, especially for me, for this gig.

I see that you're touring with Nektar. Actually I'm going to see Nektar soon, but you are not at the show that I'm going to see. Tell us about that tour, what you're doing with Nektar.

We're opening, it's my band, my trio, amazing musicians, Michael Dutko on bass, and Leah Blustein on drums. And they form my Nosferatu band.

I wrote a soundtrack to the 1922 silent movie Nosferatu. And it's very much a prog soundtrack. There's all the synthesizers I could squeeze in there, all the Pink Floyd moments, and the Dream Theater shredding moments, and vocal harmonies of Spock's beard, and Gentle Giant, and things like that. I tried to make a prog rock soundtrack to that Nosferatu movie.

So that is my live band. And we're going out, I heard that Nektar were looking for a support, and we have the same booking agent, Deko Entertainment. The booking agent asked, "do you want to join them?", and of course I did! So we're going out with them, and I've written a load of new material for it. There's some tunes that we still haven't played together in the same room. I've written them, and I've sent them the music.

So we're going to be playing some new material. In fact, one of the things we're going to do is to perform a song specific to every single venue we play. We're going to change the song for every single venue we play.

So, everybody gets a unique experience? Wow...

Exactly!

Well, Paul, I really appreciate this interview.

My pleasure.

It was a wonderful show, and thank you very much. And good luck on your tour with Nektar.

Thank you so much.

If you prefer to watch the interview rather than read about it, you can watch part 2 of Episode 28 of Stephen's Prog Rock Show channel here: