Emerson Lake & Palmer

Among the giants of progressive rock, Emerson Lake & Palmer remain to this day the most misunderstood. Many criticize them for their coldness, their pretentiousness, their excessive virtuosity. Even in an age when the classics of the past are revered with humility, Elp still struggle to find their place.

This problem doesn't afflict the rest of progressive rock, a genre that remains influential today, enchanting the most discerning listeners with its fairy-tale, pastoral and romantic tones. In Elp these three elements - undoubtedly the ones that radiate the most emotional warmth - are completely absent. That doesn't mean their music is icy, though; rather, it means the trio is less representative of progressive rock than is commonly believed.

While the structures and the overall approach are obviously all there, the moods that prevail in Elp's music are fairly atypical, at least among the genre's biggest names.

First of all, there's the sense of challenge the three musicians give off. While in other bands the instruments cooperate to create a sound that transcends the individual members, in Elp each member's traits remain sharply distinct, as if trying to override the others. Emerson plays eccentric, blazingly fast parts, Palmer fills every available space with his drums, Lake provides the voice and sets the mood. Each of them, in other words, seems disconnected from the others, and this makes the music rather hard for today's audience to digest, forced as they are to follow several lines at once.

Another element almost entirely absent from other prog bands is irony, something their critics tend to conveniently overlook, since acknowledging it would force them to retract their accusations of academicism. Elp were composers and arrangers of great intelligence, but they were also good-humoured mates who always liked to slip a daft track onto their albums, just to lighten the mood. And as we'll see, even in their most serious pieces there were grotesque moments meant to create contrast and to suggest that, evidently, this music could be laughed at too.

Finally, iconoclasm. ELP were, in essence, three anarchists. If you'll allow the oxymoron, they were the punks of progressive rock. Their approach was irreverent, raucous, destructive. Over the course of their career they reinterpreted pieces by Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Bartók, Janáček, Copland and Ginastera, forever balanced between homage and upheaval. The pieces by those composers were torn apart by distortion, with the keyboards pushed to the very limits of their technical capabilities and the drums pounded mercilessly. There are moments in those interpretations that verge on pure noise, some of the most deafening music of a decade — the Seventies — that knew a thing or two about deafening music. This is also how we can tell that ELP were not cold-blooded virtuosos: otherwise they would never have agreed to muddy the tone of their instruments to such a degree, casually veering into the most bizarre cacophonies.

All Emerson, Lake & Palmer cared about was pushing further and defying convention, even at the cost of being disrespectful, if need be. This constantly overexcited, neurotic tone, hungry for wonder and paired with an extreme narrative complexity that draws on the dynamics of classical music, jazz and electronic experimentation, effectively makes their music grating to untrained ears.

A preamble that was necessary, especially since we're dealing here with ELP's album par excellence. Not necessarily their best — it's impossible to take a firm stance within a discography that remained flawless for a good five years — but undoubtedly their most representative, the one where all the traits described so far are pushed to their most conspicuous extreme, in a miraculous balance.

"Brain Salad Surgery" hit stores in December 1973, almost a year and a half after "Trilogy" — a considerable gap for the era, given that major names were putting out as many as two albums a year. The extended timeline was due both to the birth of the band's own label, Manticore, following the dissolution of their contract with Island, and to the fact that the band pushed themselves to the limit during the sessions, buying up a wide range of electronic instruments and thoroughly combing through the studio's new technological resources. Just to complete "Jerusalem", a mere 2'45" long, took fifty-four hours of work.

A poem written in the early nineteenth century by the visionary William Blake and set to music a century later by Hubert Parry, "Jerusalem" was chosen for its evocative power, having become over time one of England's most beloved songs, both as a religious hymn and as a patriotic banner. The idea was to release it as a single, to conquer a market previously unknown to ELP, that of the 7-inch. Unfortunately, they hadn't reckoned with the media's puritanism. Their version was deemed an outrage, the BBC placed it on its list of banned tracks, and other broadcasters quickly followed suit.

And yet, for once, there was truly nothing irreverent in their reinterpretation. The trio simply aimed to make it as majestic as possible. Palmer delivered a fine, thundering performance, turning to timpani in the passages that called for greater solemnity, Emerson layered two Hammond organ lines to give the sound more body, and Lake finally showed off one of his most intense performances, launching his airy, powerful voice like a charging steed over his bandmates' arrangement, at once churchly and futuristic.

Besides remaining, to this day, the best version of the song, it's also an important moment in the history of electronic music. By using a prototype Moog Apollo to enrich the electric organ backdrop, it is in fact the first recording to feature the sound of a polyphonic synthesizer (unless one counts the antediluvian Novachord, an altogether different era, function and purpose).

The forward-looking drive is even more overwhelming on "Toccata". Emerson was fascinated by Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera's first piano concerto and decided to arrange its fourth movement in an electronic key. The keyboardist paid Ginastera a visit, bringing along the recorded tape, so as to avoid any potential legal trouble. After listening to it, the composer said he was astounded and, concluding that no one had ever rendered his music so vividly, gave the band his blessing.

ELP's version of "Toccata" is an avalanche of sounds that seem to come from a fearsome dystopian future. It opens and closes keeping the same Stravinsky-like rhythmic aggression as the orchestral version, while in the middle section Palmer juggles timpani, tubular bells and intermittent synthetic hisses produced with a set of electronic percussion. Here too the innovation is striking — before them, only the Moody Blues had gotten there, with "Procession".

The first original track is "Still... You Turn Me On", a Lake ballad that plays the same role "From The Beginning" played on "Trilogy". It's a gentle, structurally simple song; Lake's voice steals the scene to such an extent that the refinement of the arrangement almost goes unnoticed, amid streams of synth and effects-laden guitars, but also delicate accordion and harpsichord melodies.

Lake's shift in tone on "Benny The Bouncer" is striking. The crystal-voiced angel turns into a seedy saloon drunkard, his tone as rough as sandpaper. Just beneath him, Emerson lets loose one of his most complex ragtimes, while Palmer follows at full tilt, playing the drums with brushes. It's the last moment of lightheartedness before the tour de force.

Split into three movements, listed as impressions on the tracklist, "Karn Evil 9" is ELP's definitive statement. All their artistry, all their values — or rather, all their systematic dismantling of values — summed up in a twenty-nine-and-a-half-minute behemoth. A composition of inhuman difficulty, it originally began at the end of side A before going on to take up the entire second side.

The first impression is the most rock-oriented, essentially a thirteen-minute charging song without a moment's respite. Emerson alternates between Hammond and Moog, firing off solos and riffs in a continuous stream, while Palmer wears out cymbals and snare with tight, tumultuous rhythms, at times almost martial in flavor. The alternation of dense and sparse passages is striking: there are several stretches where the arrangement swells, drawing even on a piano and a prototype Taurus I, a pedal synth bass that lends the whole thing a surprising depth. But just when the architecture couldn't get any denser, it suddenly deflates, leaving only a trickle of synth, or the drums rolling freely. All these maneuvers happen repeatedly within the space of a few moments and succeed in adding further color to Lake's vocal melody, which is already effective on its own.

The second impression is an Emerson piano concerto, with Palmer once again wielding the brushes. Roughly 14'30" into the suite (1'10" counting only this section), there's a thrilling variation with a Caribbean flavor on the theme of Sonny Rollins's "St. Thomas", played on the Minimoog. Also interesting is the digression immediately following, where the mood turns somber and Lake's bass traces a chordal outline that, listened to closely, manages to evoke pre-war gothic cartoons.

The third impression also features a prototype synthesizer supplied to the band by Robert Moog, the Lyra, which would never make it to market, but which here cuts a fine figure with a trumpet-like sound capable of lending the piece a feel that is at once medieval and sci-fi. After a long Hammond solo, the piece reaches its climax, with Lake intoning a hymn in alternation with Emerson's electronically processed voice. The epic ends with twenty-four Moog notes sent into a loop, accelerating constantly, as if mimicking a computer glitching out.

It's worth taking a step back here to reread the suite considering the other side of the coin, the lyrics, written by Lake together with Peter Sinfield, who at the time had only recently left King Crimson.

Unless it's one of Lake's ballads, one is naturally inclined not to dwell on the lyrics when it comes to ELP. In "Karn Evil 9", though, this can actually limit one's appreciation of the music, whose textures are rather well rendered in the words that accompany it.

In the first impression, we discover a future world in which mankind, overwhelmed by its own ego, has been sucked into a vortex of cruelty and violence. What's described is a carnival-like show in which deformed creatures are put on public display for ridicule, and every kind of torture is thrown in the face of the gleeful spectator, something halfway between "A Clockwork Orange" and a Grand Guignol performance. The setting is unsettling, yes, but Lake's grotesque taste tinges it with a dark, paradoxical comedy, which culminates in the roll call of all the specialties of that circus of perversion, from the gypsy queen greased with vaseline and ready for the guillotine, to the seven virgins in the company of a mule (mercifully, we're spared the details). One of the most significant lines is "There behind a glass is a real blade of grass, be careful as you pass, move along, move along". The meaning is clear: what's on display is the last blade of grass left, turned into exhibition material and, for the listener, the ultimate evidence of the effects of an unrestrained human race on its own planet.

In the third impression, man ends up a victim of his own creations, enslaved by the computers and machines he himself has built, a classic sci-fi trope of every era. This explains the meaning of the final duel between Lake-as-human and Emerson-as-computer, and the deranged synth that closes the album.

"Brain Salad Surgery" was a considerable commercial success. In Britain it peaked at number 2, blocked only by Yes's "Tales From Topographic Oceans", at the height of the rivalry between the two bands stirred up by the British press, Melody Maker in particular. In reality the two bands were on excellent terms, but newspapers have to sell copies somehow. ELP won the "battle" in the US anyway, where they reached number 11 and stayed on the charts for eleven months, against seven for the Yes title.

All this despite the numerous instances of censorship it suffered. Besides that of "Jerusalem" and the radio edit of "Karn Evil 9", which was of course never forgiven for its long litany of atrocities, the album also risked ending up without a cover. What is one of the most beautiful and celebrated artworks in rock is in fact the result of a compromise.

During a short tour of Switzerland, the trio had been invited to Zurich by H.R. Giger. The artist had transformed his own home into a sort of cyberpunk cathedral (the term had yet to be coined, but the aesthetic leaves no room for doubt). The band was fascinated by that place and asked Giger to design the artwork for the album they were working on. The painter thus created two overlapping panels. In the first, an industrial mechanism has been fused with a skull, just below which opens an empty circular space through which part of a woman's face is visible. Lifting the first panel, the face appears in full, revealing deep scars and hair that looks like a preview of "Alien", Giger's most famous creation. What many don't know is that a giant phallus originally appeared just beneath the woman's chin, which was reluctantly removed when the band ran into trouble getting the cover printed.

Though toned down, Giger's work remains extremely powerful and perfectly captures the sense of tension that defines the album's key moments. Starting with the verses written a hundred and seventy years earlier by William Blake, in which industrial-revolution England appears as a technological hell.

And was Jerusalem builded here, among these dark satanic mills?

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11/10/2015