by Greg Lake
We were helped in all this by our new manager, Stewart Young. He was a young accountant working with his father when we first came across him – we had gone to his firm to sort out some financial issues. When his father mentioned Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Stewart had never heard of us and thought we were a law firm. Luckily, he went to see us in concert and was amazed – and the relationship grew from there. He had no experience in the music business, but he was exactly what we needed: he had great management and financial skills and a real understanding of what we wanted to achieve and how to go about doing it.
One day we were playing live in the cinema and a lyric came to me:
Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends . . .
It became part of ‘Karn Evil 9’ and the title of our next live album.
During the time that all this was taking place, I had been meeting up with Pete Sinfield, my old writing partner from the King Crimson days. I explained to Pete some of the issues we had encountered performing the Trilogy album and that we were now looking to make a record that somehow contained the essence of a live theatrical performance.
In the midst of one of these discussions, I think we must have started reflecting on the whole In the Court of the Crimson King theatrical pageantry and noted that there could possibly be some link or loose connection between these two ideas. In any case, a few weeks later ELP set up in the new Manticore theatre and we began writing and developing some of these new ideas together.
The whole period we spent at Manticore was packed full of energy and vision for the future. We had now reached a point in our career where we knew we had the strength and the necessary resources to do something really meaningful.
Part of what had changed between 1970 and 1972 was the size and type of venues in which we were being asked to perform. Sometimes these ranged all the way from small 1,500-seat clubs right up to 20,000-seat arenas. It was proving difficult, as a small three-piece band with a basic back line of equipment, rented lights and PA, to adapt our set up to the wide range of venues.
I suggested creating a more controlled environment where we would carry our own permanent stage lighting and PA in order to maintain the same acoustics and the same type of show every single night. Everyone could immediately see the sense in this idea, so we set about designing a brand new proscenium-arch stage set that would remain constant no matter where we performed.
As the rehearsals were taking place in Fulham, the stage set itself was being constructed at Shepperton film studios, just to the west of London. All in all, this was a period of incredible and intense activity on all fronts.
The stage itself was an extremely innovative design for its time, consisting of an aluminium framework construction from which could be hung over 100 spotlights, flying monitor speakers, the PA and so on, with rooms beneath for mixing, guitar changes and so on.
The stage set became a little private world that we would take with us everywhere we performed, the idea being that the only thing that would change every night would be the audience.
Although we did experience some early teething difficulties, it very soon became a fluid operation and went on to form a basic template for other bands’ future festival and large rock shows.
ELP were often criticised for running an overblown or overproduced show, but to this day I always smile when I see these huge event shows roll out their Persian carpets on stages that bask beneath their now even larger proscenium arches, and reflect on how this whole rock extravaganza production concept first began. The Persian carpets are useful because they cover the crisscross of wires over the stage, reduce slippage, absorb some of the noise so you can hear each other play and – this is the prima donna element – they make you feel more comfortable and at home on stage because they add familiarity and are softer on the feet when you are standing there performing for a couple of hours. They also help insulate you from getting an electric shock from the microphone, which happened to me on stage in 1973. And yes, my carpet really did cost $6,000.
Just prior to recording Brain Salad Surgery, we embarked upon our fourth European tour. We kicked off in Germany at the Ostseehalle, Kiel, on 30 March 1973, immediately followed off by the Philipshalle in Düsseldorf on 31 March. Apart from the show itself at the Philipshalle, where we introduced the audience to part of our new thirty-minute piece, ‘Karn Evil 9’, as well as performing ‘Tarkus’ and ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, this was to turn out to be a momentous occasion for a completely different reason. This was the day I first met my wife Regina at a reception that had been held there for us.
The tour, called ‘Get Me a Ladder’, had some shaky moments when a few shows got cancelled due to bad weather, followed by a dose of very severe laryngitis, which meant that I couldn’t sing, but musically we soon hit our stride. (Which was just as well as the tour was being filmed by a television crew for a documentary to be shown in the UK on Boxing Day 1973.) The tour ended on 4 May 1973 at the Velodromo Vigorelli in Milan, Italy. The locals were a literally riotous lot: famously Led Zeppelin fans had clashed with the riot police at the venue in 1971, and when our original show was cancelled twice due to the weather and my laryngitis, a crowd gathered outside our hotel and started throwing stones. Fortunately, the rescheduled show in front of 50,000 people proved to be a happy if somewhat unruly conclusion to the tour.
Although we were not so aware of it at the time, this tour was to become a significant event in the band’s European career. It not only defined our success as a band with our own brand of music, but it had also confirmed that we were at the very cutting edge of live show production.
We returned home to finish working on our new songs at Manticore, and recorded the Brain Salad Surgery album at Advision and the Olympic Studios in Barnes. Pete Sinfield co-wrote ‘Benny the Bouncer’ and ‘Karn Evil 9: 3rd Impression’ with myself and Keith. ‘Karn Evil 9’, which is made up of three ‘Impressions’, would become regarded as one of our classic works and a favourite at our live performances. Each part had a different theme about the loss of humanity as humankind supposedly progresses, about time and travel, and about trying to get back to our original identity despite the computerisation of the world. It has the distinction of having Keith’s only vocal credit on an ELP record: he provided the voice of the muse on the ‘2nd Impression’ and ran his voice through his Moog kit to create the computerised voice in the ‘3rd Impression’.
Keith wrote ‘Toccata’, which is based on part of a piano concerto by Alberto Ginastera, and told a funny story about getting permission to adapt the work. Most of the great European composers that influenced our music were well and truly dead – so we didn’t usually require permission – but Ginastera, an Argentinian, was alive and well and living in Geneva. Permission was not granted by his publishers, Boosey & Hawkes, so Keith flew off to Switzerland with Stewart Young to try and convince the composer himself to change his mind. Keith played him the music, and at the end he thought he heard Ginastera exclaim: ‘Terrible!’
Luckily, it turned out that he had shouted ‘Formidable!’ so ‘Toccata’ could be included on the album. It gave Carl the chance to experiment with electronic percussion, and I think he was one of the first drummers to use it on a recording. Ginastera was willing to publicly praise an ELP version of his music and said, ‘Keith Emerson has beautifully caught the mood of my piece.’
The other songs on the album were ‘Still . . . You Turn Me on’, a folk-style song I penned in the tradition of ‘Lucky Man’ and ‘From the Beginning’, which became an airplay hit in the States, and our version of William Blake and Hubert Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’, which was the opening track. Carl, Keith and I were all proud of ‘Jerusalem’ – we loved the beauty of the melody as well as the words, and worked hard to get it right, taking two eighteen-hour sessions just to do the mixing. We thought we had done the song justice and wanted to release it as a single, but the BBC banned it from receiving airplay because they thought it was disrespectful and ‘degraded’ th
e hymn. How times have changed. Like ‘Lucky Man’, some people misunderstood the song – they thought I wrote the lyrics, rather than William Blake back in 1804, and believed they were somehow related to the Israel–Palestine conflict.
The album cover featured a biomechanical female skull design by the surreal Swiss artist H. R. Giger and, for the first time, the ELP logo. There was a theme throughout our music about the struggle between man and machine, so the biomechanical image was a perfect match. The artwork also reflected the naughty original title of the album, ‘Whip Some Skull on Ya’, a euphemism for fellatio, which we ended up abandoning, but the replacement title was a reference to the same thing so the cover idea didn’t really need to change. However, it had to be toned down a bit to make sure the record did not get banned – there was a sort of phallus beneath the woman’s mouth which was a bit too graphic and had to be turned into a shaft of light. Giger later became famous for designing the creature in Ridley Scott’s Alien.
Brain Salad Surgery was released on 19 November 1973. It received some excellent reviews but, by now, it was obvious that some critics hated us and wasted a lot of inches insulting us personally rather than writing about the music. When we played live on stage we could hear the reaction of the audience, and we knew they loved our music. If some people love you, other people won’t – that’s just the way of the world. The negative critics didn’t affect the sales anyway, so maybe the record-buying public thought the personal attacks were as bizarre as we did. The album reached number two in the United Kingdom and number eleven in the United States. To celebrate its release, we embarked upon our fifth North American tour on 14 November, starting at the Hollywood Sportatorium in Florida, where we opened with ‘Jerusalem’.
British rock bands were making a big impression in the States at the time – you could call it a second ‘British Invasion’ – a rock invasion after the pop invasion of the 1960s. Our little effervescent island had produced David Bowie, Elton John, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, all of whom were making an impact on both sides of the Atlantic. British music labelled as progressive was at its height, with Yes, Jethro Tull, Genesis and so on all selling records. I was often asked – I still am – what it felt like to be part of that. The truth is that we never even thought about it. We would say hello to other bands at airports and some of us had appeared on the same bills, but we never really got together – we never felt as if we were part of any sort of ‘movement’ and there was not some sort of British rock band union. I shared an apartment in London with Chris Squire of Yes for a while in the early days and we remained friends, but the bands didn’t mix. We were not looking over our shoulder at what the likes of Yes were doing, musically or on stage, and wondering whether they were influenced by us or whether we could learn from them. All we were concerned about was ELP, and trying to make our music and performances as good as they could be.
By now the ELP stage show had begun to build into a huge amalgam of music and technology which, when viewed through the prism of a three-piece rock band, was quite impressive. By then, Carl Palmer had developed his hand-engraved revolving stainless-steel drum kit, which weighed in at four tons and kept our crew of roadies busy erecting and dismantling it at every new venue: constructing the Japanese pagoda framework and setting up the drum kit, the huge Paiste gongs and the church bell. Meanwhile, David Hardstone and IES, his innovative sound company, had developed our thirty-channel quadrophonic PA system, incorporating thirty-six-ton stacks of thirty-two speakers. The equipment took a huge logistical operation to transfer from venue to venue.
This period is remembered by many as ELP’s golden era. While Trilogy, for me, might be the best studio album we ever made, they might well be right. During the Brain Salad Surgery era, we had pushed technology and stagecraft even further, and perhaps even more importantly, the band still felt like a family, all pushing together in the same direction. This combined spirit really came out during our live shows. Later on, the band started to splinter as our individual egos took centre stage and we pushed in different directions, rather than as a united force.
The tour continued to storm right across the United States until we came to the last show that was the unforgettable performance at Madison Square Garden, New York, on 17 December 1973. This was one of those shows that I still get people coming up to me and talking about to this very day. Apart from the fact that any show at the Garden is special, it was the final show on a remarkably successful tour, so we decided to pull out all the stops.
On top of this, it was also Christmas-time, which is why, towards the end of the show when we were performing ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, we segued into the Christmas carol ‘Silent Night’, with my voice joined by the extraordinary sound of the Harlem Gospel Choir, dressed in their maroon and white robes. And then, of course, there was the artificial snow, pre-arranged to fall inside the Garden while the final verse of ‘Silent Night’ welcomed in the Christmas season.
It still sends shivers down my spine. It was probably the most spectacular single stage production I have ever been involved in.
The audience went crazy, but how could we add to that moment with another climax to mark the end of the show? With Keith, of course, rising fifteen or twenty feet up into the air on a full-size grand piano, revolving around amidst smoke and flames, playing a Chopin etude.
After the performance, we were elated and exhausted.
We returned back to the UK for Christmas and for a well-deserved rest.
On 5 January 1974, Regina and I married at St James’s Church in Spanish Place, George St, London W1. We have been married now for over forty years, which in the music business is, of course, quite remarkable and this, I have to say, is entirely due to her strength of character, devotion and forbearance. Without a doubt, this proved to be one of the most meaningful days of my entire life.
Just a few days after the wedding took place, ELP were back on the road again in the USA for another North American tour. As with the tour the previous year, the band were flying high and performing at the very top of their game. Every show was a sell-out and perhaps the only downside that had started to become apparent was the sheer fatigue of continually moving along at such a pace and being on duty pretty much every waking hour. If it wasn’t a show or a sound check, it was a rehearsal or an interview or a planning meeting or flying to the next city. Quite often, when a day off arrived, we would all simply spend the whole day in our beds. I had always enjoyed looking around the different cities and experiencing other cultures wherever we went on tour, but by now we had started to feel like we were cogs in a machine as we went from the airport to the hotel to the venue and back to the hotel, and started the process all over again in another city on the following day.
Nevertheless, by this point in our career virtually every show had something memorable about it. The show at the Anaheim Convention Center in California on 10 February 1974 was recorded for the live album, Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show that Never Ends – Ladies and Gentlemen. It resulted in surprising sales for a live triple album (it had to be six sides to include almost the entire concert), selling over 500,000 copies in the United States alone and reaching number four on the Billboard 200 charts, and peaking at number six in the United Kingdom. The album is not just a rattle through our most famous songs: it was full of the little twists and turns, improvisations and unrecorded music that would feature in a full ELP concert. There are improvised snatches of everything from the Laurel and Hardy theme tune to Joe Sullivan’s ‘Little Rock Getaway’ to Rachmaninoff’s ‘First Prelude’ and King Crimson’s ‘Epitaph’ among the likes of ‘Tarkus’, ‘Karn Evil 9’, ‘Take a Pebble’ and ‘Hoedown’.
On this particular leg of the tour, one show that still sticks in my memory was the California Jam festival at Ontario Speedway, which took place on 6 April 1974.
ELP were added late to the bill in order to help boost ticket sales. It became a record-breaking show in terms of paid tickets – supposedly over 350,000 pe
ople – and the promoters became so worried that they stopped selling tickets. Estimates vary regarding the real size of the audience that attended, and all I can tell you is that from up on stage, the audience stretched back as far as the eye could see – perhaps there were half a million or more. It had the loudest amplification system ever installed at the time, and we brought out a team from IES just to make sure our sound quality was as good as it could be. The festival also ran to schedule, which was highly unusual in those days.
On the bill that day were Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, the Eagles and numerous others. For some strange reason, the promoters had still not determined a running order for the show by the time we arrived on site. We were asked when we would prefer to go on and perform, and we said that we really didn’t mind.
I think that, in the end, all the managers of the headline acts ended up drawing straws and it turned out that we were chosen to finish the show after Deep Purple’s set. It seemed that some of the members of Deep Purple were not happy about their position on the bill because they had wanted to play at dusk. Whatever the reason, they apparently threw some of their equipment into the audience and, at some point towards the end of their performance, Ritchie Blackmore smashed the head of his guitar into one of the very expensive ABC movie cameras that were being used to film the event. This resulted in a huge fine, which was summarily deducted from their fee.
ELP eventually got on stage around 9 p.m., and it was freezing cold out there in the desert but we performed one of the best shows of our entire career – we were at the zenith and it went like clockwork – so it’s probably just as well that Deep Purple got on and off when they did.
We returned to the UK sometime later in April to embark upon yet another UK and European tour including a four-night run of sold-out shows at the Empire Pool – which was renamed Wembley Arena – in London and two nights at the Palais des Sports in Paris. Just to give an idea of our performances at that time, and how we had evolved as a live band incorporating both early and more recent songs, the Wembley set list was typical of the tour (although we often still also played ‘Jeremy Bender’ and ‘The Sheriff’):
