Now rebooted and re-released, with Brain Salad Surgery, Emerson Lake & Palmer served up a unique blend of thinking man's rock that swept the globe. Here's how it all came together... Words: Mike Barnes rain Salad Surgery is the group at the pinnacle of its powers,” says drummer Carl Palmer of Emerson Lake & Palmer’s fifth album. “It’s very well recorded and it was definitely one of our most creative periods. If I had to choose one of our albums, that would be the one.” It’s a viewpoint echoed by his erstwhile bandmates. Keyboard player Keith Emerson sees it as a “step forward from the past”, which “represented the camaraderie of the band at the time”. Bass player and vocalist Greg Lake reckons that it was “the last original, unique ELP album”. The album was released in late 1973, by which time the group were, in Lake's words, “already huge”. One of the first so-called supergroups, formed from members of The Nice, King Crimson and Atomic Rooster, Emerson Lake & Palmer’s rapid rise to fame swept aside the old notion of ‘paying your dues’. Although all three musicians had endured times of schlepping up and down motorways in a transit van, the newly formed trio’s first gig was at the Plymouth Guildhall, followed by a second at the 197o Isle Of Wight Festival. From then on, superficially at least, it all seemed so easy. “It looked to Benchmark: the trio some like we were the sons of famous take a break while they fathers and didn’t have to work to get ran, London 1974. there,” quips Lake. BACK TO CONTENTS Their fourth album, 1972’s Trilogy, 34 progrockmag.com had reached Number Two in the UK and Number Five the USA, but in rehearsing and arranging the music for Brain Salad Surgery, ELP made a decision to pursue a quite different approach. “Music technology was really expanding,” Lake explains. “Tape recorders were going from 8-track to 24-track. We took advantage of the new possibilities and did a lot of overdubbing. But being a three-piece band, when we played it live on tour, it didn’t really sound as good as the record, so we made sure we could perform the next album live before we had even recorded it.” The group had bought a cinema in Fulham, which they renamed the Manticore Cinema, and they rented it out as storage and rehearsal space to groups. But in the rehearsals for Brain Salad Surgery, they left their gear set up on stage and rehearsed it as if playing a live show. The album was recorded in Advision and Olympic Studios, with Lake on production duties. None of the musicians remembers much about the studio sessions due to the fact that, because the band were well rehearsed and ready to go, they were over relatively quickly. “It's probably the most inventive album we made,” Palmer says. “But you don’t realise that at the time you’re making it as you’re so wrapped up in it. And you never know quite how it will turn out.” Compared to the brighter, more open sound, of Trilogy and Tarkus from 1971, Brain Salad Surgery is tougher and darker, or at least more shadowy. Lake agrees and thinks this could be down to a couple of factors. Eddy Offord, who had engineered their previous albums, was absent, and so that task fell to Chris Kimsey and Jeff Young. “Firstly, every engineer has a palette,” says Lake, “and it’s amazing how different a group can sound in different studios. Secondly, unlike the previous albums, Brain Salad Surgery is almost a live recording done in a studio. The sound was quite raw and quite ambient.’’ It opens in a blaze of light, though, with a flamboyant version of William Blake and Hubert Parry’s Jerusalem, with Palmer playing gongs and timpani, and executing lavish multiple tom-tom rolls around his stainless steel kit. Emerson garnishes proceedings with exultant Moog clarion calls, while Lake’s magisterial voice holds the middle ground. In the early 70s, the BBC were far more censorious than they are today, their rather matronly guardianship of the nation’s morals earning them the nickname of 'Auntie’. From the 60s, the institution was on the lookout for music with overt sexual or drug references, which they would then progrockmag.com 35 with The Nice, just before I formed ELP. NBC grabbed onto the idea that banned on grounds of taste. It was it would be great to get rock bands joyously bombastic, but surely not together like Jethro Tull and The Nice a danger to the nation’s youth? and mix it with Ray Charles, [pianist] BRIAN GREGORY WILSON ELP ARCHIVE/TONY ORTIZ “I can only assume that the motive Daniel Barenboim and [cellist] for banning it would be that it was Jacqueline du Pré, [violinist] Jerry patriotic and that we were somehow Goodman [later] of Mahavishnu blaspheming something cherished by Orchestra, all to be conducted by Zubin the nation,” says Lake. “We did it as Mehta in a TV movie called The well as we could and there was no Switched-On Symphony. I remember mockery about it.” waiting to do my stuff and I heard Emerson Lake & Palmer were well this storming piano, and the pianist’s known for their classical adaptations. name was João Carlos Martins from Emerson had pioneered rock and Argentina. I went, ‘My God, this is the classical fusions with The Nice, most incredible work I’ve ever heard.’ arranging classical repertoire for the He came down in the dressing room three-piece group and playing with and had the score, which looked like The press added to orchestras. Palmer had made his name the hype behind the someone had splurged ink all over it. with The Crazy World Of Arthur album’s 1973 release. “I said, very timid like, ‘Hi my Brown and Atomic Rooster, but his name’s Keith. What was that you love of classical music was in his genes. played?’ and he said, ‘It’s a piece by “My grandfather was a professor of Alberto Ginastera; he is my teacher.’ music at the Royal Academy, his I got back to England and found the brother was a classical percussionist, recording of him playing it, and I went their mother — my great-great down Bond Street, into Chappell’s, grandmother - was a classical guitar Despite the usual slew where they had a sheet music copy.” player, so I’ve always been interested of mixed reviews, the Emerson went to visit the composer in that sort of music,” he explains. her identity. “We put it right,” says album earned ELP gold in Geneva, got his seal of approval and “One of my first jazz albums was one Lake, “and made sure that she was paid and platinum discs from struck up a long-lasting friendship. the US to Japan. It was of Jacques Loussier’s Play Bach series. fairly, and on all future copies of the enough to make Carl’s Ginastera’s piece is more angular and I always thought [playing classical record it was properly credited.” hair curl. modernist than the group’s reworkings of Bach, Copland, Janácek and Mussorgsky, but it put Emerson in mind of his music teacher’s advice when he admitted a desire to learn Tchaikovsky’s first Piano Concerto. “She said, ‘Don’t play all the stuff that people know; play something different.’ And I thought, ‘Well, this really is completely different.”' Emerson Lake & Palmer’s version of the composition takes huge liberties, but echoes the extensive use of percussion in the original, with the inclusion of Palmer’s synthesised drum solo. This was a unique, custom-built set-up that involved two mics on each drum, one of which picked up the acoustic sound, the other acting as a trigger for pre-set synth sounds. Palmer cites this piece as an example of the group’s experimental spirit, but wasn’t sure the audience really ‘got’ it, material] was a great way to go.” though: many thought the electronic Lake recalls, though, that their bleeps and note patterns were produced attitude to compositional credit was by Emerson’s keyboards. a bit “naïve” in the early days. Emerson Lake’s Still... You Turn Me On is one had presented the dramatic music of his dreamiest acoustic songs. These for The Barbarian on their self-titled had always provided dynamic contrast 1970 debut album to his bandmates, to ELP’s power play, both live and on neglecting to mention that it was lifted record, and here Emerson joins in on from Allegro Barbaro, a piano piece by harpsichord. Was the idea that the Hungarian 20th-century composer song was addressed to a certain person Béla Bartók, and it ended up being For Brain Salad Surgery’s Toccata, in the audience? credited to the group. Emerson made sure everything was “Only nominally,” Lake replies. A rather embarrassing incident done by the book. He takes up the “When I think about the lyric, I’d followed. Bartók’s widow phoned EG story of how he first heard the piece, think about a face in the audience Records, who, thinking it was a hoax the fourth movement, the Toccata looking up at me. When the audience call, told her in no uncertain terms to Concertata, of Alberto Ginastera’s Piano looks up on the stage they see a star, go away. Music publishers Boosey & Concerto No.1. but a star is just a perception, so it was SONY MUSIC PRESS/F.GOLCHAN.