When artist H.R. Giger was commissioned to provide cover art for Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery, he was a few years away from winning an Oscar for visual effects work on the film Alien. In fact, the surrealist from Sweden was largely unknown outside of some art circles.
Keith Emerson had heard of Giger through Peter Zumsteg, manager of Manticore, ELP’s then-newly launched boutique record label. A visit to Giger’s studio in Zurich convinced Emerson that he’d be the right person to provide artwork for such an ambitious project.
Brain Salad Surgery, perhaps best known today as the home to “Karn Evil 9,” arrived on Dec. 7, 1973, with their most distinctive title (it was nicked from a line in Dr. John’s contemporary hit “Right Place, Wrong Time”) and perhaps their most distinctive cover image. The LP spawned a truly massive tour, and hurtled Giger toward world-wide fame.
H.R. Giger went on to direct a number of films, and also contributed designs to a trio of Alien sequels, Poltergeist II: The Other Side and Species. His work with the now-dearly-departed Emerson Lake and Palmer was followed by album covers for Deborah Harry (Koo Koo), Carcass (Heartwork), Danzig (Danzig III) and the Dead Kennedys (Frankenchrist), among others.
“The artwork represented the music we were working on as fully as I could have imagined,” Emerson once told Music Radar. “The next day, I told [fellow ELP members] Greg [Lake] and Carl [Palmer]: ‘You’ve got to some with me to see what this guy is doing.’ I think they were kind of reluctant at the beginning, but once they saw his stuff, they were incredibly intrigued. I’m so pleased with where we went for the cover. I think it’s one of the best pieces of album art I’ve ever seen, to be honest.”
Through Greg Lake always said that 1972’s Trilogy was his favorite Emerson Lake and Palmer album, the project provided a unique obstacle for the group – something Emerson Lake and Palmer looked to overcome with the subsequent Brain Salad Surgery.
Trilogy, home to a memorable reworking of Aaron Copland’s “Howdown,” had been an of-its-time studio creation – to the point where ELP felt it could never be recreated in a concert setting. That sparked the idea of a stripped-down approach for the 1973 follow up, as Emerson Lake and Palmer sought to move away from the then-new 24-track recording technology toward something more straight forward.
Of course, this being the early 1970s – at the very height of prog-rock excess – well, it wasn’t quite that simple.
“What happened, really, was we’d just made the record Trilogy, and we were unable to perform a lot of Trilogy because it had so many overdubs on it that we were unable to recreate the same overdubs live,” Lake told CoveFM’s Steve Meisner. “So, what we decided to do, on the next record, we decided to make the record live first – so that we could perform it. We actually, and this sounds terribly extravagant, we bought a cinema and we took all of the chairs out. We set up on the stage, and then we started to make the album.”
Brain Salad Surgery also saw the rekindling of Lake’s work with former King Crimson collaborator Peter Sinfield. Together they composed “Karn Evil 9: Third Impression,” as well as “Benny the Bouncer.”
