Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, Pt. 2

The most famous four minutes Emerson, Lake & Palmer ever recorded are the back half of a song that a vinyl record was too short to hold.

On the original vinyl of Brain Salad Surgery, side one ran out in the middle of a song. Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Karn Evil 9” lasts 29 minutes and 37 seconds, far more than one side could carry, so its first movement was cut in two, fading out at the end of side one and fading back in once the listener had turned the record over. What met them on the other side was a line of welcome aimed straight at whoever had just flipped the disc. “Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, Part 2,” four minutes and 47 seconds long, became the best-known music the trio ever made, and it started life as the far side of a break in the vinyl.

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The welcome had a second source, older than the side break. Around January 1973 the band and manager Stewart Young bought an abandoned ABC movie theater in Fulham, West London, and turned it into a rehearsal room and headquarters for Manticore, the label they launched that March. Lake wanted a record the trio could play on stage after the overdub-heavy Trilogy, so they worked the new material the way a band works a set: play it, rewrite it, play it again. That habit of addressing a room gave the opening of “Part 2” its tone, a band talking to an audience that happened to be listening at home.

The name came later than the music. Keith Emerson wrote every note of the suite and first called it “Ganton 9,” after an invented planet where all evil and decadence had been dumped. Pete Sinfield, King Crimson’s former lyricist, joined at Lake’s invitation, heard a fairground in Emerson’s keyboards, and renamed the piece with a pun on “carnival.” The credits have blurred since. The band’s official channel lists Emerson, Lake and Sinfield as the song’s writers, and all three shaped the suite, but the original album gives the music of “Part 2” to Emerson and its words to Lake, with Sinfield’s lyric credit landing on the third movement.

A half-hour suite, cut where the needle stopped

Recording began in June 1973 at Olympic Studios in Barnes, London, with Lake producing and Chris Kimsey engineering, and the first movement was the only thing cut there. The rest followed at Advision from August. When the first mixes came back from AIR Studios in October, the band rejected them and remixed most of the album. Manticore released Brain Salad Surgery in Britain on December 7, 1973, through Atlantic, and the Official Charts ranked it No.2, held off the top for two weeks by Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans. In America the band issued no singles at all. Billboard’s album chart still ranked it No.11 and kept it listed for 47 weeks, longer than any other ELP album.

The stage was where the record had been aimed, and the tour that followed ran some 100 shows with close to 40 tons of equipment and a grand piano that Emerson played as it revolved in midair. On April 6, 1974, the final night of its second North American leg, the trio co-headlined the California Jam at the Ontario Motor Speedway with Deep Purple. Crowd counts for that day run anywhere from 168,000 paid to 350,000; Carl Palmer has recalled about 120,000 paying and another 100,000 breaking through the fences. ABC, which produced the festival, aired only around 55 minutes of the band’s set. That footage is what Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s official channel used for the official visualizer it published on August 6, 2026.

By then “Part 2” had long outgrown its place in the running order. The band’s 1974 triple live album, taped in Anaheim that February, took its title from the song’s opening greeting and reached No.4 on the Billboard 200, the highest the trio ever charted in America. Emerson and Lake both died in 2016, and Sinfield in 2024. In 2026 Radar Pictures put a feature film based on the suite into development, with Isaac Ezban set to direct and Palmer among the executive producers. CD editions have long since stitched the first movement back into one piece. The part everyone knows is still the four minutes that opened side two, a stretch of music that became famous because a record ran out of room.