by Will Romano
“Karn Evil 9, Third Impression,” the perfect finale to the record and, despite Emerson’s protests, bookends with, and comments on, the opening tune, “Jerusalem.”
If “Jerusalem” speaks of natural, sexual potency and, ironically, building a spiritual nation through vigilance, then “Third Impression” (which uses warlike/erotic imagery similar to that in “Jerusalem”) describes mankind in an epic struggle, apocalyptic in nature, with a monster of his own creation—artificial intelligence.
“Third Impression” is a nightmare scenario that leaves little hope. At least in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, we’re presented with a spaceship’s operating systems computer—HAL 9000—that was confrontational but with purpose (to test humanity). ELP’s computer serves no such purpose. It’s here to conquer mankind, not see it prosper and evolve.
As if we needed further reinforcement, the “Third Impression”—and hence the record—concludes with the ing notes, first very slowly and then in rapid gunfire manner. It seems unstoppable—and inhuman. The machines have taken over.
Brain Salad Surgery was to become a near-perfect progressive rock album, but throughout the production process, hurdles had to be overcome. For one thing, the original title of the album (Whip Some Skull on Ya—a euphemism for fellatio) was rejected by Atlantic Records, distributor of ELP’s then–newly established Manticore label. It wasn’t until Mario Medious, Manticore label president, hijacked the line “Just need a little brain salad surgery / Got to cure this insecurity” from Dr. John’s “Right Place, Wrong Time” that the title was approved. What does “brain salad surgery” mean, you might ask? Same as “whip some skull on ya.”
Then there was the iconic cover image that almost wasn’t. The band agreed to use two pieces of artwork already completed by H. R. Giger (then a relative unknown outside of Zurich, Switzerland, as this was years before his popular book Necronomicon and his involvement in design for Ridley Scott’s hit sci-fi/horror movie Alien). Both were original paintings using airbrush and freehand techniques in the same vein as his now-famous, as Giger describes it, “surrealistic biomechanical dreamscapes.”
Giger’s scaly, reptilian creatures and images were simpatico with ELP’s detailed and gothic musical scope, that cyborgization of the free and precise, of the acoustic and electronic—and certainly in tune with one of the record’s themes of humanity’s epic struggle with computer technology and artificial intelligence.
The trouble was, one of the paintings prominently featured the puckered lips of a beautiful alien woman (Giger says it was based on his wife Li) moving toward the tip of a penis, presumably to perform some emergency brain salad surgery. (The other Giger painting, which was used on the front cover, featured a human skull being crushed by an elaborate torture device.)
Predictably, Atlantic Records were horrified by what they believed was a pornographic painting, and said the phallic imagery had to be removed in order to get the album into stores. Giger was reluctant but eventually agreed to airbrush the extraneous extremity and camouflage it so it appeared to be a “shaft” of light.
“It was quite graphic,” says Northfield. “If you look at a center label on an English copy of the record you can still see it pretty clearly.”
The record cover, like some of the earlier ELP efforts by William Neal, was a work of art and major feat of printing. The front was cut into two interconnecting flaps, forming the abovementioned skull-vice image (with a central circular portal allowing us to peek at those luscious lips). When the flaps are opened, the image of Li is fully revealed and the LP can then be removed from its inside pocket.
Imagine arguing with a record company about a penis. Imagine wanting to have a penis on your cover about to be “operated on.” Never let it be said that ELP lacks a sense of humor.
Brain Salad Surgery appeared in the fall of 1973 and went Top 5 in Britain (it climbed to number eleven in the States) just as ELP played to enormous crowds in sporting arenas across the globe into 1974.
No one rolled like ELP: Thirty-six tons of equipment included Palmer’s two-ton stainless-steel drum kit (containing nine Paiste cymbals, two gongs, a 134-pound church bell, timpani, tubular bells, and more); Emerson’s eight abused Moog synths (including the monstrous modular rig) and a grand piano (among other keyboards); and Lake’s mini arsenal of guitars and one Persian rug, an item for which Lake was mocked by the press and public at large. Lake’s defense for allowing himself such self-indulgence? He says he was electrocuted once in Germany via a vocal microphone, which allegedly blacked him out. When he was conscious again, he’d asked the ELP road crew to put down a rubber mat to ground the electrical cords. When Lake saw that the mat did little to beautify his stage area, he then requested carpeting be put down over it. Figuring Lake’s tastes ran to the expensive, the crew came up with his now-infamous rug, reputed to have cost six thousand pounds.
“I think with Greg it was a bit like Elvis buying Graceland,” says Pete Sinfield. “Interesting psychological probe there, of someone who grew up poor and developed lavish tastes.”
WORKS
In 1974, taking a break from recording, ELP turned its attention to running the Manticore label, releasing the extravagant live triple album and Top 5 U.S. hit, Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends—Ladies and Gentlemen, Emerson Lake & Palmer, which documented the band’s recent international sweep and featured sprawling versions of “Tarkus” and “Take a Pebble” (not to mention the three “impressions”) and a faster-than-a-speeding-bullet rendition of “Hoedown.” Manticore also released studio albums by recent label signings, the Italian prog rock acts Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM) and Banco del Mutuo Soccorso.
After the world tour, ELP affairs took a backseat. By 1975, the trio were working separately: Palmer was being educated at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in orchestral percussion; Emerson was busy laying down “Honky Tonk Train Blues” (composed by the Chicago-born boogie-woogie pianist Meade “Lux” Lewis) with big-band swing arrangement for a twenty-piece jazz orchestra by Alan Cohen (which became a U.K. Top 21 hit); and Lake recorded a pair of Christmas tunes (both cowritten with Sinfield) which were released as the single “I Believe in Father Christmas,” backed with the English fairgrounds tune “Humbug,” the former becoming a kind of evergreen, a “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for the prog rock crowd.
“The Christmas song was written not as a single, not as a pop song, but as a serious commentary on what’s happened to us over the years,” says Lake, who calls the Christian holiday “a time of correction,” referencing the Christmas truce during the World War I. “Christmas was really just the vehicle that Pete [Sinfield] and I chose to show how cynical people have become. Christmas used to be goodwill amongst all men, peace on earth. How has it descended into nothing more or less than a marketing opportunity?”
Once it became obvious that the three members of ELP could only do so much without the momentum of the band to carry them, they decided to regroup, rather than record solo records, and pour their energies back into writing new material.
The last time the band had recorded in the studio together was 1973—three years prior. Lake said ELP took time off from recording to find a proper direction to go in as a band. They did. Having exhausted, they believed, the technological options available to them, they turned their gaze toward symphonic music.
The project that emerged involved the Orchestra de l’Opéra de Paris for what would become a double LP showcasing each member’s individual talents as a musician, and their talents collectively, dubbed Works, Volume I.
Each member was allowed one side of an LP to develop his own material, and the fourth side would be relegated to band compositions.
Coproduced and cowritten by Sinfield, Lake’s “side” is part Neil Diamond, part Mediterannean romance, part blues-bump parody (with strings attached). “Lend Your Love to Me Tonight,” “Nobody Loves You Like I Do,” and “Hallowed Be Thy Name” (featuring Emerson, Palmer, and a ninety-plus-piece
orchestra) are largely forgettable, although “C’est la Vie” and “Closer to Believing” (which Lake says took him and Sinfield two months to write) leave a positive impression.
You always hear about composers interpreting and intersplicing key aspects of their lives and influences into their master works. “Piano Concerto No. 1,” orchestrated by John Mayer (who conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra), is a slice of Emerson’s psyche, musical heritage, and personal life, the first time since the Nice’s “Five Bridges Suite” that he tackled an orchestral arrangement.
“Everything in my piano concerto comes from my heart and is entirely original,” says Emerson. “There’s not one line in it [about which] anyone can say, ‘He ripped that off.’ I was fortunate at the time to have a beautiful nine-foot Steinway grand piano in my barn studio. I just looked out over the countryside, with birds singing, and composed. The last movement—‘Toccata Con Fuoco’—was written about my house burning down.”
The most musically diverse portion of Works, Volume 1 is turned in by Palmer, who was never particularly known for his songwriting. Here, however, classical, funk, and jazz-rock fusion meld nicely, sometimes within the same song.
Putting his percussion education to good use, Palmer interprets Bach’s “Two Part Invention in D Minor” partly on vibraphone (a new skill Palmer perfected courtesy of his lessons with James Blade, who also appears on the track on marimba); the second movement of Sergey Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite, dubbed “The Enemy God Dances with the Black Spirits”; a new orchestral version of his drumming showpiece “Tank”; and (as if picking up on the California session/fusion vibe breaking into the mainstream at the time) “L.A. Nights” (cowritten by Emerson, featuring Joe Walsh of Eagles fame on guitar), most of which was recorded nearly two years prior.
While the three solo sides have their moments, one thing is certain: ELP operated more efficiently and (for the most part) creatively as a team. The opening track of the fourth, and final, side, the band’s version of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” features the then-new multitiered keyboard, the Yamaha GX-1 polyphonic synthesizer (which Emerson uses for the horn and woodwind textures in the tune).
The Nice: Elegy (1971)
Trilogy (1972)
Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show that Never Ends–Ladies and Gentlemen, Emerson, Lake & Palmer (1974)
The Atlantic Years (1992)
The Return of the Manticore (1993)
“Fanfare” reached number two on the British charts, but the song nearly didn’t happen. Copland was not thrilled when he caught wind of the fact that a rock band was interpreting his work.
What’s surprising—and this will shock classical music aficionados—is that Emerson was accomplishing something similar to what Copland had with his compositions: bringing different forms of art to the masses. Copland was a populist, and perhaps ELP were too, despite their elitist reputations. But Copland either failed to see the value in having a rock band record his music, or denied there was a connection between his populist bent and Emerson’s sensibilities.
“The band sent Copland the music to ask permission, and he said something along the lines of, ‘If I was able to stop you, I would,”’ remembers Sinfield.
Copland’s response was certainly radically different from Ginastera’s, but that didn’t stop ELP. They pressed on, regardless of whether the composer had given his blessing or not. Crazy: Rock audiences were introduced to Copland, as Works, Volume I became a Top 20 U.S. hit in 1977. But this did little to calm Copland, who apparently could hold quite a grudge.
More than a decade later, when Emerson and Palmer joined forces with Robert Berry to form the band 3, Copland reps refused to let the band televise a performance of “Fanfare for the Common Man” at Atlantic Records’ fortieth anniversary concert bash at Madison Square Garden in May 1988.
Adding insult to injury, the Works tour of 1977 was perhaps a bridge too far. ELP, instead of using symphonies in the towns they were touring, decided to travel with a sixty-plus-piece orchestra, which drained the band financially, despite the fact that they were selling out arenas.
The band refers to the nights when the orchestra and band were in synchronicity as being magic, but ELP eventually had to break free of the strings and continue touring as a three-piece to cut their losses.
Some of the reviews for the tour were predictable. The New York Times called out ELP for its inflated stage performance, puking up the same tired old criticisms of pretentiousness regarding progressive rock and its vulgarity in mixing classical and amplified music.
Manticore’s Mario Medious succinctly summed up ELP’s struggle when he said in 1977: “The band know they’re not going to make any money out of it, even playing baseball stadiums, but they feel it’s their music, their lifework they’re presenting.”
Works, Volume 2 appeared in November 1977, showing yet another side of the band. Composed largely of older recorded material, some dating as far back as the Brain Salad Surgery sessions of 1973 (e.g., “Tiger in a Spotlight,” “Brain Salad Surgery”), and including the popular “Honky Tonk Train Blues” and “I Believe in Father Christmas,” Works, Volume 2 is a mixed bag of musical influences as far ranging as early jazz, folk ballads, and vocal standard.
It was downhill from there. Nineteen seventy-eight’s Love Beach did little to rejuvenate the band’s image. Who could blame the public? The very name Love Beach is synonmous with prog rock going commercial—and going totally lame in the process. Atlantic Records in America even agreed to slip a Manticore-approved, ELP “tour gear” merchandise catalog into the LP sleeve, further solidifying the image of a band that had “sold out.”
Despite some bright spots (“Canario” by Joaquin Rodrigo and one or two catchy MOR rock love songs), Love Beach is a hybrid of pop and classically influenced rock; unleashed in a punk-infused world, it seemed to prove all the critics right: ELP were tired, boring, and strangely provincial. Even the sprawling, dramatic package of the Works, Volume I double album (and to an extent its successor, the single LP Works, Volume 2) had been more focused, and even seemed to convince the general audience that the band was still pushing ahead in some acceptable creative direction.
In Concert was the last legitimate record released by ELP in the 1970s. Recorded at Olympic Stadium in Montreal during the Works tour of 1977, it appeared in 1979, featuring songs “Peter Gunn,” “Knife Edge,” the third movement of Emerson’s “Piano Concerto No. 1,” “The Enemy God,” “C’est La Vie,” and a spine-tingling version of “Pictures at an Exhibition,” in which Lake’s voice soars above busy instrumentation during “The Great Gates of Kiev.” By 1980, the band had broken up: A rather inadequate greatest hits was issued shortly thereafter.
Palmer once said that he would have liked the band to have gone out on a high not a low note. ELP spawned a few spin-off bands and finally re-formed in the 1990s.
Despite what Palmer called a “dreadful” record, 1994’s In the Hot Seat, ELP were again relevant. In Concert was expanded and rereleased under the title Works Live, and was joined by a slew of best-ofs, and two boxed sets (The Atlantic Years and The Return of the Manticore, with the latter featuring fine liner notes by longtime friend and music writer Chris Welch) were spreading the gospel.
Perhaps Palmer got his wish after all: ELP didn’t end on a low note—the band never really stopped. ELP is a state of mind; the show that never ends.
(Peter Still/Getty Images)
YES
Going for It All
BRILLIANT. INNOVATIVE. MYSTICAL. Dysfunctional. Accessible. Enigmatic.
Rarely has a rock band (let alone a progressive one) embodied so many contradictory musical traits and remained intact (in one form or another) across a span of over five decades. Yes are truly one-of-a-kind and are arguably the most popular and enduring of the progressive rock bands established in the late 1960s.
Images of the band remain imprinted in our minds—Rick Wakeman’s sequined cape; dry ice fog
ging up the stage as the band performed one of their most beloved epics, “Close to the Edge”; the block-serpentine letters coiling around one another to form the band logo; guitarist Steve Howe’s chunky Gibson ES-175 ... Classic.
Jon Anderson and bassist Chris Squire founded Yes in 1968. The two met at a Soho nightclub in London, called La Chasse, and discovered they shared a mutual love of the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel. They began writing material together, recruiting drummer Bill Bruford (found through an ad in Melody Maker), guitarist Peter Banks, and classically trained organ player Tony Kaye.
“Jon Anderson and I were talking about what we liked as far as music, and by then I had also became a big Simon & Garfunkel fan, so was keen on their vocal harmonies,” says Squire. “I was also being influenced by what was going on at London’s Marquee club, which had become my local venue for music.”
Bruford’s love of jazz and jazz drummers like Art Blakey and Max Roach is evident in the angular approach the rhythmatist takes to percussion. Bruford told this writer that he “happened to be in London in 1968, which was a very fertile time in music. I watched Much Mitchell trying to be Elvin Jones with Jimi Hendrix in a local pub in Beckenham, and I think I wanted to be Max Roach with Yes. It sounds childish—we were only eighteen.”
Because of Squire’s background in the church choir, he brought his knowledge of harmony to the Yes creative melting pot. “I was singing in a choir even before I started to play bass,” Squire says. “I was aware of musical structure—how the top-tine melody interacted with the bass line. I think it was quite common for a lot of people of my age to be in a church choir when they were kids.”
