The Song of the Day is:
Emerson, Lake, & Palmer – “Karn Evil 9, First Impression, Part 1”
From the album Brain Salad Surgery (1973)
Step inside! Hello! We’ve a most amazing show
You’ll enjoy it all we know
Step inside! Step inside!
We’ve got thrills and shocks, supersonic fighting cocks
Leave your hammers at the box
Come inside! Come inside!
Roll up! Roll up! Roll up!
See the show!
Left behind the bars, rows of Bishop’s heads in jars
And a bomb inside a car
Spectacular! Spectacular!
Greg Lake – Keith Emerson – Peter Sinfeld
I managed to make it out to an independent record store a few weeks ago (shout out to Soundcheck Records), and bought myself a very affordable brand new 3-disc Emerson, Lake and Palmer anthology. I always had a few tracks here or there of the band, but now I am something of a neophyte to their music. This is our first foray into the music of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and it’s one of their key recordings. Even though this is just the first part of the “Karn Evil 9” opus, it’s still over 8 minutes. The whole thing actually extends on for nearly a half hour. It’s all the best and worst of prog rock at once… well technically, it’s not the worst of prog rock. The worst can be pretty terrible, but the endless excesses in this song can certainly exhausting for all its virtuosity. Along with Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd and King Crimson, ELP were among the elite groups of this genre from the very onset. ELP was actually a supergroup, with its members coming from other groups. Greg Lake was the featured vocalist and bassist on King Crimson’s seminal In the Court of the Crimson King (offering him a sporting chance at becoming a two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, were the Hall ever to embrace prog rock a bit more). Keyboardist Keith Emerson was a member of the British psychedelic group The Nice and drummer Carl Palmer came from the shock rock group the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and later formed another supergroup Asia with Yes guitarist Steve Howe. Unlike most of their peers though, ELP wouldn’t just show a mastery of their instruments by endless noodling, they would actually play entire classical works by some of the greatest composers who ever lived. These composers included Modest Mussorgsky, J.S. Bach, Sergei Prokofiev and Aaron Copeland. Of course, they were capable of creating near-classical compositions themselves as songs like Emerson’s “Piano Concerto, No. 1”, “Tarkus” and “Karn Evil 9” prove. They could also write the occasional hit with “Lucky Man”, a song that helped popularize the Moog synthesizer, being their most famous. “Karn” really might be the best distillation of their capabilities, and with the twisted carnival-barker atmosphere, it’s actually pretty fun. The oft-employed Peter Sinfeld, a holdover from King Crimson, wrote the lyrics for “Karn”. The band split at the end of the seventies, and for a brief period in the eighties, they hired drummer Cozy Powell and went by Emerson, Lake & Powell – it was no substitute for the original. They did reform for a few albums in the nineties, but sadly there will be no more reunions as Keith Emerson and Greg Lake both passed away in 2016. Carl Palmer, who is a vastly under-appreciated drummer and songwriter, is the only living member of the group now. The disturbing looking artwork for this album, Brain Salad Surgery, was created by legendary visual artist H. R. Giger, who is perhaps most famous for creating the design of the Xenomorphs in the Alien film series.
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