Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, Part 2

Karn Evil 9 runs 29:37 across the album, the band's longest studio recording. Vinyl time limits split its 1st Impression over two sides, so Part 2 fades in to open side two; some CDs run the whole suite as one track. The 1st Impression was the only part taped at Olympic, in June 1973, with Lake producing and Chris Kimsey engineering. Lake wrote the words and Emerson the music, and Pete Sinfield, who had heard a carnival in Emerson's music, suggested the name Karn Evil.

The suite sets humanity against technology. In Part 2 the decadent old world is put on show as exhibits in a futuristic carnival, with Lake singing as the barker; its opening line is the album's best-known lyric and named the 1974 live album. It was never a single, but it did well on radio, and Emerson reckoned that opening side two had helped. Music Week placed the suite in its top ten prog tracks in 2005.

Live and afterlife

setlist.fm logs 203 ELP performances of Part 2 on its own, their ninth most played song. The whole suite is on Welcome Back My Friends (1974), the California Jam performance is on Then and Now, and later versions appear on Live at the Royal Albert Hall and High Voltage, recorded at their last show in 2010. Lake sang it with Trans-Siberian Orchestra in 2006, Ringo Starr's All Starr Band took it up from 2001, and Paul Gilbert has covered it.

It has had a long second life in sport and television: the theme of the BBC's Generation Game, the 1986 New York Mets at Shea Stadium, the intro to Bon Jovi's 1988 to 1990 tour, an episode of Freaks and Geeks, and in 2026 a reworking by Zac Brown Band to open NBC's Sunday Night Baseball. A science fiction film inspired by the song was announced in 2020. The upload in the hypersongs web is the album version.