by Will Romano
“What made me love Emerson Lake and Palmer were two things,” says Styx’s Dennis DeYoung. “I loved the fact that a keyboard player could be looked at as a guitar player. But beyond that, it was ‘Lucky Man.’ Because ‘Lucky Man’ is almost like an English Renaissance song, and it’s a great song, whether the synthesizer sweep is in it or not. So, the cake was the song, the synthesizer was the frosting. That is what made it progressive rock.”
Before long, the very name Emerson was synonymous with Moog, and vice versa. “I was fortunate to have Bob Moog available for my music, although I did buy my modular system for thirty thousand pounds,” says Emerson.
“I remember Keith had to raise money to buy his first Moog synthesizer,” says onetime manager David Enthoven, formerly of E. G. Management. “I was thinking, ‘Christ, how am I going to pay for it? How is this thing going to work on the road? How are we going to get it around and maintain it?’ The Mellotrons were a big enough problem. The first synth he got was like a huge plug board, basically. Keith managed to get sounds out of it, but when it broke down, it was a nightmare. The Moog was the show.”
“The modular Moog was just astounding,” adds keyboardist Danny Brill, who saw ELP on their first U.S. tour in 1971. “Our jaws dropped when Emerson played it. Most people hadn’t heard anything like it.”
By the end of 1970, ELP’s debut had reached the British Top 4 and went Top 20 in the U.S. in 1971. While critics failed to see the value in what ELP was doing (legendary BBC DJ John Peel famously called the band’s grand unveiling at the Isle of Wight Festival a “waste of talent and electricity”), they were gearing up for a new album and a world tour, which would soon change everything.
TARKUS
The band’s second studio record, Tarkus, broke all the rules. Fans and even critics point to “Tarkus”—a twenty-one-minute, side-long composition—as Emerson’s ultimate work; an off-the-rails, atonal sonic attack full of rhythmic fury.
Inspired by European art music, the composition was Emerson’s most ambitious to date and was given shape by Palmer’s 10/8 practice rhythm, which matched a left-hand ostinato piano pattern Emerson had been working with. In his memoirs, Pictures of an Exhibitionist, Emerson explained that he wanted to create “a vast sheet of sound that defies conventional structures” and had a “free-floating sense of time signature and key.”
When the keyboard whiz explained to Lake that this was a direction he wanted to pursue with ELP, the singer/guitarist scoffed. Lake felt the music . . . well, he felt there was no music. In short, he hated the song and thought it lacked form.
A disagreement over the song arose and was so big it nearly caused a huge rift, threatening to tear apart the band (Emerson threatened to quit). Lake, of course, would come to love the song and he’d stamp his musical style on it with a few straight-ahead rock moments, such as “Mass” and “Battlefield.” In the end, “Tarkus” stands as one of progressive rock’s masterstrokes.
“‘Tarkus’ was a departure from the regular rock format and a testing ground for furtherance in ELP,” says Emerson. “There was no real reference in ‘Tarkus’ to any existing musical composition. Although I was inspired by [Alberto] Ginastera’s bravado orchestrations at points in my career, there’s nothing in there from him.”
Despite Tarkus’s successes (the album charted in the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic, going to number one in the U.K.), critics were calling ELP’s performances flashy, melodramatic, overblown, or worse.
Certainly a survival instinct took hold for ELP at some point, and it’s no surprise that Emerson struck back with a virulent musical poison such as “Tarkus.”
The packaging completed the band’s extreme musical vision. Just as ELP was pushing boundaries with its music, chasing uptight critics out of theaters, cover artist William Neal, who had been working for a design firm C.C.S. Associates, dreamed up his own sort of nightmare—a biomechanical miracle. A half-tank/half-beast creation—an “armordillo” complete with tire treads and long-barrel gun—informed by Roger Dean’s cover art for Afro-beat band Osibisa’s self-titled debut, which features a mammoth with butterfly wings.
“There’s no doubt that the drawing of the armadillo tank that became [the cover of] Tarkus took the band, and indeed most folk who saw it, by surprise,” says Neal. “After their first album, ELP hadn’t a clue which way to go visually. It just so happened that, in an idle way, like you do on the phone sometimes, I had scribbled this little armadillo tank on a cover sheet for an LP presentation to the band. It shouldn’ t have even been there. Keith Emerson saw it and right away said this could work with some of his musical pieces. Tarkus was reworked, of course, and beefed up, and we did the same reconstruction with the other creatures too.”
The inside gate depicts the genesis of Tarkus, his utter destruction of rival monsters, and the one chink in his armor, exploited by the manticore, a half-man, half-lion beast with a scorpion’s tail. Before long, the image of Neal’s manticore—and by association the mean S.O.B. Tarkus—became iconography representing not only ELP but the entire prog rock genre.
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION
Recorded by Eddy Offord prior to the release of, but issued after, Tarkus, Pictures at an Exhibition was cut on an eight-track machine live at Newcastle City Hall in March 1971.
Tarkus, 1971. Illustrator William Neal’s frightening “armordillo”.
Originally slated to be the band’s sophomore effort, Pictures, which includes “Nutrocker” (originally recorded as “The Nut Rocker” by B. Bumble and the Stingers in 1962), was held back. Sensing the premise of the record was a bit too reminiscent of the Nice’s previous work, ELP decided against releasing it as the band’s sophomore effort.
Pictures at an Exhibition opened a new world for ELP—and its listeners. Inspired by the death of close friend Viktor Hartmann (whose work was exhibited at the Russian Academy of Arts after his death), Modest Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition for piano, illustrating ten “scenes,” steeped in Russian and pre-Christian Slavic myth, which were later orchestrated by Maurice Ravel (the form in which most people of the twenty-first century know it).
“I think the fact that we are European, we are not American, we’re not going to fall heavily on the blues and jazz,” Carl Palmer says. “We had to kind of develop our own musical environment.”
Transferring the symphonic version of Pictures to a three-piece band (the piano piece would have been difficult enough in its own way) brings into sharp focus just how skilled ELP had become at navigating all of the subtle shifts of tempo and moods.
Pictures at an Exhibition (1972)
“When you try to interpret Pictures at an Exhibition, a piece of classical music with three people, trust me when I tell you, you really have to plan it carefully—otherwise it sounds like shit,” says Lake.
While ELP went at the work with wild abandon, the grand spirit of the original is intact. But some didn’t hear it that way. The tension between the classical music establishment and ELP’s so-called bastardizations of great works would dog the band for the rest of its career.
“The interesting fact about Pictures at an Exhibition was that as soon as the ELP version became a hit, the sales of the formal versions, the orchestral version, climbed,” says Lake. “At the time they thought it was just a quirk. They paid no more attention to it. But still, even to this day, there’s a type of blindness in the classical world, really, and I think it’s a type of defense mechanism in order to protect their ailing world, which is, in my opinion, totally the wrong way to go. They should be taking down the walls, opening up the doors to allow people to do interpretations of classical works . . . rather than say, ‘This is not the formal version, this is not the exact score, fuck it, we don’t want to be involved.’ What they should be saying is, ‘Look, this is interesting and may open the door to a lot of classical music to people, who would not have heard it before.’”
In order to engage the audience, Lake added lyrics to the instru
mental pieces, causing mortification among some purists. Yet the clarity and beauty of Lake’s vocals have yielded some of the most moving moments of the entire performance and of Lake’s career.
“All I can tell you is, the moment you start applying lyrics and vocals to classical music, you are almost condemned to becoming crass, you know?” Lake says. “It almost inevitably sounds awful and contrived and banal and all of those terrible things. So to make it sound credible and appropriate and sympathetic was quite an undertaking.”
Lake succeeded, and the soaring “Great Gates of Kiev” is monumental; at once an oppressive piece of music speaking to the sadness, the cry of Mother Russia (which accounts for most of the minor keys used) and the hope of a better world (the uplifting majors), a better life—and a better afterlife.
“While I was coming up with these lyrics and vocals, I was listening to, I’ll be honest with you, the Red Army Choir,” says Lake. “That’s really how I got into that style, because I thought, you know, ‘How am I going to do this?’ I looked to Russian influences, really, which are quite dark in a way. I also wanted the effect of walking through a gallery. I then began to think that the pictures in this gallery are emotional pictures with a Russian sentiment, a Russian harmonic structure. I guess I felt that the Russian people had suffered and that was an element I wanted to capture.
“I think at the end of it all, I held out this feeling of hope,” Lake continues. “That’s why I sing, ‘Death is life,’ at the end of the piece. I didn’t want to end on ‘Death is death,’ you know? It’s kind of bittersweet. The music at the end is tremendously uplifting, and yet the underlying sentiment, the underlying reality of Russia, is tragic.”
TRILOGY
ELP’s official third studio album, appropriately titled Trilogy, falls comfortably into the formula but is also one of the most enjoyable and consistent records of the band’s career.
Whereas Tarkus and Pictures were balls-out affairs, partly or mostly centered on a central theme, Trilogy is scattered and pulls back on the intensity and musical innovation.
For starters, there’s the intelligent, largely acoustic ballad “From the Beginning,” which follows in the footprints of “Lucky Man”; “Abaddon’s Bolero,” based on Ravel’s “Boléro” (here in 4/4 time, not 6/8), which seems an almost obligatory nod to the classical (though some might reckon pseudoclassical) world; the bluesy “Living Sin”; and “The Sheriff,” a lighthearted tune in the spirit of “Are You Ready, Eddy?” and “Jeremy Bender,” which adds a ragtime piano at the song’s conclusion—actually a multitracked Steinway grand piano running at slightly different speeds. ELP’s adaptation of Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown” (from his Rodeo ballet), while reminiscent of the Nice’s take on Brubeck’s “Rondo,” is performed with alacrity—and was played even faster in concert. The opener, “The Endless Enigma (Part One),” quotes Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique (before chirping along in an odd time), and is followed by “Fugue” (which, as does any fugue, dives into counterpoint) and the trumpeting fanfare of “The Endless Enigma (Part Two).”
BRAIN SALAD SURGERY
Brain Salad Surgery was a departure for ELP. It was the record that separated them from most of the rest of the progressive rock crowd, allowing them to ascend to at least the same artistic level as King Crimson and pitting them toe-to-toe with their chief rivals, Yes, at the retail counter. Thus it is all the more strange that the album was the first to be made without the guidance of coproducer/engineer Offord.
“At that time, there was so much tugging and pulling going on between Yes and ELP,” says Offord, who’d worked with both bands simultaneously. “I had reached a point that I had to decide who I was going to work with. They were just jealous of each other and the fact that I was working with both bands. Finally, Yes talked me into going out on the road with them [for the Close to the Edge tour] to help reproduce the studio material live. I was almost becoming a sixth member of Yes. So I had a decision to make, and I decided not to work with ELP”
Carl Palmer’s humongous drum setup reflected his aggressive orchestral approach. (Richard McCaffrey/Getty Images)
Pity, really. Brain Salad Surgery is the band’s greatest work, musically, sonically, compositionally, and technologically. ELP was ahead of the curve in many respects with the album, and, arguably, went to heights that neither they nor anyone else would ever achieve again.
The album opens with a rousing rendition of “Jerusalem,” a cover of a Hubert Parry composition based on the William Blake poem (an excerpt from his Milton: A Poem in 2 Books), which appeared in 1916. It’s been orchestrated both by Parry and Edward Elgar and falls roughly within the period of the so-called English classical renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was not Bach, Bartók, or Janáãek. “Jerusalem” is, through and through, a nod to English classical music.
“Jerusalem” is as universally accepted and revered a song as you’re going to find in the U.K., satiating the public’s need for hymns and national song.
“I’d always heard talk of it becoming some sort of English national anthem,” says Jeremy Dibble, professor of music at the University of Durham and author of C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music. “You’d often read that England had no real classical music of its own. The cry went up in the second half of the nineteenth century: ‘If we are a civilized culture, we should have this art music, too.’”
“Rather than follow my contemporaries into Americana, I’ve stuck to my English heritage for main inspiration,” says Emerson. “Although I do allow myself some moments of departure.”
ELP continued to break through barriers: Emerson wrote an electronic music piece, a rearrangement of the fourth movement of Ginastera’s Piano Concerto no. 1, rife with Moog protosynths.
To match the sci-fi nature of the music, Palmer had an electrical engineer, Nick Rose, design synthetic, or electronic, drums, which, along with Emerson’s synth freakouts, littered the tune in sonic explosions. Palmer’s new percussion arrangement was also full of bursts of tuned percussion, timpani, and tubular bells.
“What happened was, Carl would trigger sounds from the drum kit, using a pickup and preamp that would be placed inside the drum,” remembers engineer Paul Northfield. “It was in the very early days of drum synthesis, but this allowed Carl to be a bit more cutting-edge as a drummer.”
Rise of the machines: ELP’s 1973 milestone recording, Brain Salad Surgery.
“I did use electronics a lot with ELP,” Palmer told the author in 2006, adding that he could trigger repeated rhythmic patterns as well as turn them off via a remote foot switch. “[On] Brain Salad Surgery, the track called ‘Toccata’ had electric drum sounds going off. Everyone thought they were keyboards. Nobody knew it was the drums and nobody wanted to, so I just played it down and let it go. There were all these electronic drums making all of these horrendous sounds, you know? They are kind of dated. But at the time, they worked.”
Despite the raucous noise it makes, “Toccata” nearly didn’t see the light of day. Briefly, Emerson insisted that the Ginastera piece be included on the record, but the band had yet to get clearance for it, mainly because Ginastera’s agents refused to allow the music to be used on a rock record.
The band was running out of time—they had an album to finish, and why hadn’t Emerson taken care of this bit of housecleaning earlier? Emerson hopped a flight to Switzerland, hoping to convince the Argentinean composer to change his mind.
“I remember Keith coming back from going to see Ginastera in Switzerland, in Geneva, and Ginastera told Keith when the played him ELP’s version, he said it was ‘diabolique’” says Northfield. “Keith took that to mean it was terrible. But Keith had misinterpreted what he said. When Ginastera’s words were properly translated, Keith understood that Ginastera was saying that the piece was ‘evil’ and conveyed the essence of his piece, not that he disliked it. Ginastera was so impressed that he endorsed the song on the original LP liner notes.”
Then there are the three compositions, known collectively as Karn Evil 9, that are simply ELP’s shining moment.
Initially, Emerson had envisioned the pieces as links in a sci-fi story, dubbed “Ganton 9,” that told (or foretold) of a planet on which sin, decadence, and organic life (and emotion) had been outlawed.
Lake invited Crimson lyricist Peter Sinfield to add his literary touch to the musical proceedings. Once they were twisted into Karn Evil 9 (Sinfield had heard Emerson’s musical ideas and thought some of it sounded like a carnival, hence the title), the pieces began to take shape. A rarity in the ELP world: suddenly the lyrics were as memorable as the music.
Sinfield’s bizarro wordplays from Crimson’s Lizard daze seemed to have evolved (or devolved?) into full-blown wacko-loon for two of the three Karn Evil 9 “Impression”s. (The second “Impression” is instrumental.) Sinfield simply unleashes a kind of lyrical Circus of Weird, which resulted in many legendary lines, such as, “Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends,” “supersonic fighting cocks,” and “a stripper in a till,” which speak to the overarching concept of artificiality.
The multidimensional lyrics met the challenge of complementing Emerson’s layered arrangements. Within that period of just a few years Emerson had honed his songwriting skills to better orchestrate for a rock band and better execute music he’d heard in his head. Emerson’s ability to change moods in a piece with the use of so few notes is chilling.