I’ve always liked prog. Huge, bombastic arrangements with wide dynamics and a mish-mash of disparate styles have been features of much of the music I’ve loved since childhood, in varying combinations. But like many, I’ve struggled with some of the bigger names. I’ve never really connected with Genesis (though I’ve found a lot to love in The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway) and try as I might, I’m just not a full-on Pink Floyd convert.
But the weirder and more aggressive stuff really works for me. Many of the Rock in Opposition bands, like Henry Cow and Univers Zero, are longtime favorites, and King Crimson are, to my ears, the best thing to ever happen to British rock music. I also quite like stuff on the rockier end of the spectrum, like Wishbone Ash and Dust.
I’m really harping on my bona fides here because I want to make it clear that I am not a prog-hater. I promise, I like this stuff!
Which brings me to why we’re here: Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery, a record I have spent the last week trying to force myself into enjoying.
As many of my thought experiments begin these days, I was set off by an Instagram post. A record store asked their employees which record they would delete from history if given the opportunity. One derisively responded Brain Salad Surgery, noting that they felt tricked by the (very cool) H.R. Giger cover art only to be rug-pulled by the record itself.
Because I am, I’ll admit, a contrarian, I felt a reflexive anger at this particular selection, despite never having actually listened to the album myself. Of late, I’ve been making myself reconsider a lot of the kneejerk opinions I’ve formed over the years. It has often been rewarding, and I’ll find myself coming around on albums that I hated in my teens and early twenties. “Surely,” I thought, “This’ll be another surprise favorite!”
My first experience with Brain Salad Surgery came on one of my days off, a Friday. I woke up, went to the living room where my tattoo artist roommate was working on new designs, and asked if she minded if I put an album on while I played video games. “No problem,” she said, foolishly.
Brain Salad Surgery opens with a pleasant-enough and fairly straightforward rock song, “Jerusalem.” One can hear how they developed into AOR practitioners not too many years later. While I wasn’t particularly impressed, I thought back to a recent listen of In the Court of the Crimson King and, encouraged by the emotional heights of some of that band’s more digestible rock moments, pressed onward.
Then, everything went to shit. For the next 41 minutes, I was assaulted by what everyone who’s heard ELP knows to be their worst quality: their penchant for endless noodling. The line between progressive rock and jam band buffoonery can be quite slight, but Emerson, Lake and Palmer transcend the boundary by combining the two into a torrential combination of absolute nonsense. You get a bit of everything: vocoder narrations, white guy jazz, guitar wankery, showtune-y cockney interludes, and a thirty-minute suite that refuses to release the listener from its clutches.
“Maggie,” my roommate said, “This is the worst shit I’ve ever heard.”
What was perhaps most frustrating was that there were individual moments where I couldn’t quite agree with her. While almost all of it was indeed agonizing, there were stray musical phrases that I found somewhat interesting, only to hear them completely bulldozed by yet another guitar freakout or nauseating stylistic shift. It’s almost worse when there’s something to latch onto; a snatch of hope in the middle of Hell.
“Please put something good on when this is over.” I did. We made a hard left to Script of the Bridge by The Chameleons, and everyone’s mood improved dramatically.
Sometimes, the consensus opinion about a record is more or less correct. When I told Mike Villapiano (co-founder and Cheap Heat practitioner) about my experiment he said “Yeah, ELP fucking sucks.” While it was a little validating to hear, I still find myself frustrated by my own disappointment, the same way I am when I dislike any “classic” record. What is it I’m not getting? Are my tastes too plebian?
But no. Sometimes, shit just sucks.