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 was also 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, a gift from his mother. He began taking lessons from a local teacher named Don Strike, one of whose other students was Robert Fripp, who became close frie...