The prog-rock album that simulates oral sex: “Tone down the phallic object”
Any prog rock band is going to do everything they can to make their albums stick out above everyone else.
No matter how many times someone can claim to play some of the most intricate lines ever laid to tape, there are bound to be a few moments where the song either doesn’t work, or they’re rivalled by people who can play circles around anything else that they were doing. But even if every band has their way of turning people’s heads, Emerson, Lake and Palmer managed to create the kind of album that made people gawk at what they were seeing when they released their masterpieces.
Then again, there were already people who were annoyed by ELP by the time they had first started making their first songs. It was one thing for prog bands to test out what did and didn’t work whenever they made records, but since this band was three of the most talented musicians that the world had ever seen, it was hard to look at the album as anything other than a bunch of musical masturbation whenever they started playing.
They did have a lot to offer when making records like Tarkus, but Brain Salad Surgery was one of the few times where all of their overindulgence seemed to pay off a little bit. The massive stretch of ‘Karn Evil 9’ was one of the most ambitious pieces they had ever made up until that point, and while they were ready to make the best album of their career, their choice for an album cover was drumming up controversy before the record had even hit store shelves.
The rock and roll scene had already been a bit more liberal when it came to showing more risque album covers, but there were still limits on where you could go. Blind Faith’s debut had already stooped to certain levels of indecency by showing a topless underage girl on the cover, but even if they had to quickly change that record, HR Giger had something a lot more detailed in mind when working on the artwork.
Whereas Tarkus had a massive illustration of the battle that the title track talks about, the original idea of Brain Salad Surgery was to make the whole thing an ode to oral sex, with Giner saying, “The obvious thing was to combine lips, penis and skulls. Those elements flowed into the picture. Nevertheless, Keith suddenly informed me that the title of the album was going to be Brain Salad Surgery. I was dismayed until he explained to me that this expression, likewise, connoted fellatio.”
And that’s not even the most explicit part about the final product. Even when talking about the whole thing after the fact, Keith Emerson remembered Giger needing to make a few changes to the cover because of how graphic it was, saying, “After much deliberation, we reluctantly had to appeal to HR Giger to tone down the phallic object in front of the subject’s mouth until it looked like a shaft of light.”
That being said, there are certain pieces of the album that do look a bit more graphic if you know where to look for it. And to put it all in an album that is supposed to be some of the most head-scrambling music ever made at the time, it’s hard to figure out whether the phallic pieces of the cover were done as a joke or were intentionally left in by the other members of the band to serve the music better.
The final version does still strike an imposing presence among all of the other prog rock masterpieces of the time, but considering how dirty the artwork is supposed to be, it’s hard to believe that not as many people are trying to get a cheap laugh out of the artwork nowadays. No one really needed to worry about making the album completely PC during that time, but the fact that the band nearly got away with oral sex on one of their records is one of the most insane things that a prog rock band could have got away with at the time.
