Lake Bares Bottom

For Emerson, Lake and Palmer freaks who can’t get enough Brain Salad Surgery, there’s good news. The salad chefs have tossed up a powerful single, “Brain Salad Surgery,” which features the tune for which the smash LP was named. Perversely or not, the “Brain Salad” song did not appear on the album, and although it has been released in Great Britain, the 45 won’t leap the Atlantic unless there’s a good response to the promotional copies being aired on FM radio. The cybernetic rockers found their recent U.S. tour “to be the easiest one for some time, in terms of things you have to go through on the road,” said lightning-driven percussionist Carl Palmer, in a recent interview. “We found a lighting company in America (Tom Fields and Associates from Boston) that can work with us and add to the show instead of appear on their own trip. They’re very good and more theatrical than the rest.”

“We were really happy with it,” Greg Lake added with a mischievous wink, “and it would be nice to take it to England and Europe.”

Greg, who wrote the lyrics to “the dirty ballad about a brain salad,” didn’t escape the colonies without…a touch of moral scandal. Members of ELP entourage “had their bottoms spanked” by the Salt Lake City Police, it was reported, when they were arrested for swimming nude at a motel they were staying at in the Mormon metropolis. Manager Stewart Young said that Lake, road manager Alex King, valet Brian Magoo and concert promoter Jerry Pompele “used a sauna bath in the motel, then decided to go swimming - in the nude.”

“The problem was,” he recounted trying to keep a straight face, “that it was a public pool. That’s naughty. At any rate, they had a visit from the police and were taken to jail - handcuffed. They were released on $100 bail.”

“The policemen,” continued Young, “spanked them on their bottoms and told them never to do that again.” A wire service story out of Salt Lake City said the men pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct charges and were fined $75.

Following the incident, Lake and cohorts took their smarting behinds over to the Salt Palace concert hall and played to a sold-out house.