Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery, Manticore K 53501

Brain Salad Surgery is the fourth studio album by progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer, released in 1973 and the first under their Manticore Records imprint. It fuses rock and classical themes. Greg Lake wrote the lyrics for the album with the assistance (on two tracks, "Karn Evil 9: 3rd Impression" and "Benny the Bouncer") of former King Crimson bandmate (and, beginning with this album, frequent ELP collaborator) Peter Sinfield. This was the first Emerson, Lake & Palmer album to have no songwriting contributions from Carl Palmer. The cover art is by H. R. Giger. According to the 1996 re-release notes, the title came from a lyric in Dr. John's 1973 hit, "Right Place, Wrong Time" from his In the Right Place album (released 26 January 1973): "Just need a little brain salad surgery/Got to cure this insecurity." It replaced the working title Whip Some Skull on Yer; both titles are slang expressions for fellatio.

  
Outer sleeve/cover front and back




The artwork that's visible when opening the front of the cover

 The album cover features distinctive Giger monochromatic biomechanical artwork, integrating an industrial mechanism with a human skull and the new ELP logo (also created by Giger). The lower part of the skull's face is covered by a circular "screen", which shows the mouth and lower face in its flesh-covered state. In the original LP release, the front cover was split in half down the centre, except for the circular screen section (which was attached to the right half). Opening the halves revealed a painting of the complete face: a human female (modelled after Giger's then-partner Li Tobler), with "alien" hair and multiple scars, including the infinity symbol and a scar from a frontal lobotomy. The two images of the woman are very similar, but the outer image (in the circle) contains what appears to be the top of a phallus below her chin, arising from the "ELP" column below (the second painting originally had the complete phallus, but this was removed at the insistence of the record company). The back cover was solid black with the album title in plain white lettering.

The paintings for the cover are titled "Work No. 217 ELP I" and "Work No. 218 ELP II". The original acrylic-on-paper paintings were lost (or stolen) after a Giger exhibition at the National Technical Museum in Prague, which ended 31 August 2005. Giger's ELP logo, using a circular enclosure of the "E" and upper portion of the "P", around a column formed by the "L" and the vertical of the "P", became a standard for the band and has been used extensively since. Giger states in his book that Emerson, Lake & Palmer never paid the bill for his artwork for this album.

"The mid-'70s were full of attempts to shock the public," Emerson says of the band's choice of artist. "You'd do it on the stage, in artwork, and do it in your music; try to push the limits. We chose this artwork because it pushed album cover art to its extreme." Keith Emerson had the album's primary imagery airbrushed onto the fuel tank of a Harley Davidson motorcycle, pictured on his official page with himself and separately with Moog synthesizer inventor Robert Moog astride.

On later vinyl printings (and most CD releases), the front cover is a single piece, and the alternate ("face") view is used on the back cover. However, the 1993 Victory Music CD reissue packaged the album in a special Digipak with the original split cover art, which also unfolded to reveal a small poster with the lyrics and band photos from the original album inner sleeve. The 1996 Rhino edition used a lenticular cover, with the two images morphing into each other when the case moved. Both paintings were created in pure shades of grey airbrush, to appear metallic and mechanical. However, on some releases of the album, the cover was printed with too much red, making the image (in Giger's words) "cow-shit-pile-brown".

Front side of the die cut poster

 Back side of the poster

Released	19 November 1973
Recorded	June–September 1973, Advision Studios and Olympic Studios, London, England
Genre	Progressive rock
Length	45:04
Label	Manticore
Producer	Greg Lake

 
Side A                                                                        Side B
Manticore K 53501 - BRAIN SALAD SURGERY (LP, fold-out die cut sleeve with poster).... 25GBP

Track Listing

Side one
No.	Title	Length
1.	"Jerusalem" (William Blake, Hubert Parry as adapted by Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, Carl Palmer)	2:41
2.	"Toccata" (Alberto Ginastera, arr. Emerson)	7:16
3.	"Still...You Turn Me On" (Lake)	2:50
4.	"Benny the Bouncer" (Emerson, Lake, Peter Sinfield)	2:15
5.	"Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, Pt. 1" (Emerson, Lake)	8:39

Side two
No.	Title	Length
6.	"Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, Pt. 2" (Emerson, Lake)	4:43
7.	"Karn Evil 9: 2nd Impression" (Emerson)	7:05
8.	"Karn Evil 9: 3rd Impression" (Emerson, Lake, Sinfield)	9:05

Inner sleeve