Part and parcel of all prog rock, but especially prog rock during its seventies heyday, are bombastic, often borderline surreal album covers—some might say they’re almost as important to the music’s legacy as the music itself. Could you imagine listening to In The Court of the Crimson King without Barry Godber’s artwork sitting there at the back of your mind? It just wouldn’t be the same experience. Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, as one of the most influential prog rock groups in terms of style and propensity for excess, managed to have a few of their iconic images stick in the public consciousness (such as the HR Giger-illustrated cover for 1973’s Brain Salad Surgery, which is yet another creature connection for those keeping score), but the one that stands out in particular is the starkly colourful William Neal painting for 1971’s Tarkus, which shares its name with the twenty-minute opus on the album’s first side, one of the ELP’s most well-known pieces. What is there not to like about this vaguely sinister-looking armadillo tank, looming over a flatland coloured like a television test pattern, its gigantic turret aimed almost square at us? It’s the kind of outlandish concept that fits into the general tone of ELP’s music, but it’s also just striking on its own—who would think that an animal as innocuous as the armadillo could be transmogrified into that? Certainly it ranks up there as probably the most well-known fantasy creatures invented for a rock album cover.
But the story of Tarkus—the album, the song, and the armadillo artillery that also bears the name—goes beyond just an evocative abstract painting, encompassing a tale illustrated in the gatefold through a series of wordless panels, which is innately connected to the music itself. This is doubly interesting in that, though “Tarkus”, the song, has lyrics, they seem more or less unrelated to the image of the thing itself. This is one of the few cases of a creature story that exists almost through inference.
Interviews with Neal and the late Keith Emerson and Greg Lake about Tarkus (the album) and the creation of its cover explain that the painting and the music itself were made almost in tandem, and almost by accident. The company Neal worked for had been commissioned to create the cover for ELP’s then unnamed album, and in the process Neal drew a small picture of an armadillo with tank treads (never intended seriously as a suggestion for the project), which Emerson took an immediate liking to. “To everyone, it represented what we were doing in that studio” Emerson said, and his thinking about the image eventually led to the album’s name, “Something guttural. It had to begin with the letter ‘T’ and end with a flourish…this armadillo needed a science fiction kind of name that represented Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in reverse. Some mutilation of the species caused by radiation…Tarkus!” Far be it from me to question how exactly the name implies evolution in reverse or a species mutilated by radiation, but at least according to Neal, the name is a portmanteau of “Tartarus” and “carcass”, which is maybe a bit clearer of an explanation. At this point, the creature and musical composition by Emerson began to converge, developing alongside each other.
The story that is supposed to go along with the music, as presented by the gatefold, is described in online sources without any real primary textual evidence, but let’s be honest, it’s not like there’s a complex plot going on in any case. Tarkus is hatched from an egg at the base of a volcano, as visualized by the explosive and cascading sound of the opening movement “Eruption”—whether this is set in some kind of prehistory or a post-apocalyptic future is unclear—and then proceeds to encounter other weapon/animal hybrids and easily lay waste to them. His opponents are associated with the various movements of the song: “The Stones of Years” has an inscrutable mass of parts, including crab-like legs, building-like structures on it back and a cartoony face on stalks; “Iconoclast” features a pterodactyl/jet hybrid; and “Mass” represents something with a reptilian body, grasshopper legs, and a rocket launcher for a face. Each of those creature drawings are immediately followed by an image of their bloody, smoking bodies towered over by Tarkus, a formula whose repetition is actually kinda funny. Tarkus’ final opponent is the mythical Manticore, who defeats Tarkus by stinging him in the eye. Tarkus then retreats into a river as the song closes out with “Aquatarkus”, where a bubbly synth march eventually mutates back into a reprise of “Eruption.” Some of the sources seem to indicate that Aquatarkus is meant to be a separate being of some kind, maybe a reincarnation of sorts, but I think they maybe are letting the prog rock haze get to them, if you catch my drift.
The segments alternate between instrumentals and lyrical sections written by Greg Lake (with the penultimate movement, “Battlefield” having both music and lyrics composed by Lake), and I guess you’re supposed to be imagining the battles taking place while Emerson rocks out on his Moog synthesizer (in his life, he was basically Moog’s mascot) and Palmer provides a resonant drumbeat. There is a definite theme for Tarkus himself throughout the song, a rumbling sort of rhythm that could simulate either his volcanic birth or his tank treads rolling across the featureless landscape of Neal’s art, and each of the “battles” seems to end with that theme overwhelming the rest of the music. The lyrics, which seemed to be one of the last parts constructed for the piece, are absolutely not describing the titanic monster struggles in the visuals, and mostly fit with the oblique and slightly portentous poetry that prog is known for (and that Lake already helped define with his vocals on In the Court of the Crimson King.) It’s a weird situation where the music seems to mostly be meant to accompany the artwork without necessarily reflecting it, like a soundtrack based entirely on the mood being described rather than the story (which makes more sense for Emerson’s more classically-constructed pieces than the ones that aim for a more traditional rock sound.) Of course, the rest of the album does nothing to explicate this further, as the other songs are mostly ragtime piano, church organs, and old time rock ‘n’ roll pastiches (personally, I think “Bitches Crystal” is the best song on the record), a complete contrast to the epic opener, which is probably the most ELP thing they could have done.
So, what are we supposed to take from all this? Is this just a bunch of nonsense cobbled together haphazardly by a group of pretentious rock stars? Both Lake and Neal posit that they are saying something about the futility inherent in war (“a man made mess with symbols of mutated destruction“ as Neal put it.) The choice of imagery made by Neal does indeed bear that out—Tarkus and his many opponents are all weaponized animals, their organic parts merged with mechanical ones made solely for death and destruction. This is clearly meant to be a world where the tools of war have become so entrenched in the fabric of existence that it is reflected in nature itself, which is maybe the “evolution in reverse” idea that Emerson was talking about. Tarkus is not so much a heroic figure as he is just the one with the biggest guns, a slightly different take on survival of the fittest. Lake’s vocals and lyrics are maybe more of a symbolic representation of it (yes, another symbolic representation on top of the animal/weapon hybrids), probing the listener in the slower “Stones of Years”, listing off high-ranking hypocrites that provide their own undoing in the much more rocking and sardonic “Mass” (“the minister of hate had just arrived too late to be spared/who cared”), and finally taking stock in the meaningless results of battle in the melancholic “Battlefield.” The repetition I was talking about in the gatefold images fits this tone to a tee—Tarkus is a thing made for battle who is unstoppable until he suddenly isn’t, and then possibly moves on to another existence in a different environment, a never ending cycle of violence and rebirth. It’s worth noting that the only one of the monstrosities there that isn’t at least partly mechanical in nature is the Manticore, and could there be any subversive meaning to the idea that an explicitly human-faced monster is the ultimate, and apparently unbeatable, opponent? Now I might be letting the prog rock haze get to me.
That’s plenty to glean from something with so little actual text to base it on, but I think part of listening to prog rock is to accept the absurdity of it all, so much and so little meaning packed into one thing. ELP probably embraced that more than any other (which is really saying something), combining their classical musical ambitions and their rock excess with gleeful abandon, which is how they could not only decide that the cover of their album needed an armadillo tank to grace it, but that said armadillo tank and its many violent escapades should form the core of their genre-defining epic. Most of us could only let the image of armadillo tanks and an entire menagerie of armament animals duking it out exist in the imagination, something so wonderfully and memorably bizarre that the rest of the world couldn’t possibly understand, but these guys not only put them out in the world, but used them to make a vague anti-war statement along the way. Does it make sense? Does it have to? It’s a bit like trying to explain a dream, or one’s own creative process, a messy series of events whose meaningfulness may be impossible to pass on to others. But even if I’m not necessarily a prog superfan, there’s a resonance there for me as well—to believe so wholeheartedly in something so outwardly silly, but also visually striking and full of imaginative potential, is at the heart of both ELP’s music and of being a fan of made-up creatures (who often are representative of “evolution in reverse” or a “mutilation of a species caused by radiation.”) Who wouldn’t want that kind of confidence?
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 