The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  “Close to the Edge” continued from the nature sounds to a clanging showcase of Wakeman’s, Bruford’s, Howe’s, and Squire’s playing, like four solos stacked atop each other, culminating every few bars in a single chord joined by a wordless Anderson yowl.

  “The rest of the band gave him such a hard time about his lyrics,” Eddy Offord remembered. “They’d all say to him, ‘Jon, your fucking lyrics don’t make any sense at all! What is this river, mountain stuff—it’s absolutely meaningless drivel!’ And he’d say, ‘Look, when I’m writing lyrics I use words like colors. I use words for the sounding of the words, not the actual meaning.’ ”49

  The lyrics were added to Bruford’s irritations. “What does ‘Total Mass Retain’ mean?” asked Bruford during one session, in full view of reporter Chris Welch.

  “What’s wrong with ‘Total Mass Retain?’ ” retorted Anderson. “I had to think of something quickly.”

  “Why not call it ‘Puke’?” said Bruford.50

  The lyrics made complete sense to Anderson. “Total Mass Retain,” for example, was a deep metaphor for the subjects barely explored on the previous album. “It’s got this deep sad feeling for the mass rape of our planet,” he explained, “for the evilness which creates the wars, and there’s no answers to all these things. It’s common sense in knowing what’s right and what’s wrong.”51

  The song built with every measure, every section. Eight minutes in, the main melody—or what seemed to be the main melody—faded, replaced by a soft mantra titled “I Get Up, I Get Down.” Wakeman played single notes in 4/4 time. Howe’s guitar let off some ambient buzzes, sounding a lot like Robert Fripp’s. At 12:09, Wakeman switched to a church organ, a sound that blasted around whatever room the record was being played in. Anderson returned, then Wakeman took over again. For the better part of a minute, the Yes sound was replaced by the music a British listener might have heard in church. Suddenly, at 13:56, Wakeman’s Moog sliced right through the sound. “We destroy the church organ through the Moog,” Anderson explained. “This leads to another organ solo rejoicing in the fact that you can turn your back on churches and find it within yourself to be your own church.”52

  This was an ambitious record, and Yes knew it. It could have only been written and composed by this band, not by the Yes that had included Peter Banks or Tony Kaye. “They didn’t leave,” Anderson told Rolling Stone during the sessions. “We decided to get someone else. It doesn’t help them to say that. We’ve always said that Tony decided to leave the band, because it’d get him a better situation. The truth is that we blew them out because they weren’t really into what we were trying to get together. Peter was a bit lazy, that’s why. He liked his clothes a bit more than his music. Tony had a marvelous mind, he was a great guy to talk to, but he didn’t have so many ideas. He wasn’t willing to expand himself.”53

  The rest of Yes was willing, though Bruford was reaching his limit. “Alternative takes and optional instrumentations began to sprout like mold around the edge of the control room, on short bits of brown two-inch recording tape,” he’d recall. At one point, after the band agreed to use one take of one of the many sections, they discovered it missing—the cleaning lady had disposed of it. They scrambled, though, and they found it, and anyway they owed her more than she’d taken. “Since we were there all night, she had to sort of clean around us, and would frequently be asked for her opinion on this or that, since none of us were in any fit state to decide.”54

  Bruford was done. He would take up Fripp on his offer; he would quit Yes, delivering half his royalties on Close to the Edge, and gifting some drums to his replacement. For the first time, the band was losing someone whom everyone considered a real talent. “You can’t just get up and leave the restaurant without paying the bill,” Brian Lane told Bruford.55 That was how Yes thought about music? Bruford would take the pay cut.

  YES HAD BROKEN OUT, so who was next? Progressive bands, as the music papers persisted in calling them, absolutely dominated the rock charts and the tour circuit. And they all seemed to have produced epics. Van der Graaf Generator had closed 1971 with Pawn Hearts, a cycle consisting of three songs. “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers,” which closed the record, stretched over the entire second side. Robert Fripp played on the second movement. The record’s cover, by frequent Genesis artist Paul Whitehead, portrayed some of Peter Hammill’s intellectual and cultural heroes floating in space.

  Van der Graaf was less driving, less guitar focused, than most of the bands it shared billings and label space with. Those tendencies led to more experimentation, and more downright otherworldliness. “I got the transistors organized and suddenly found myself in a completely new world of bass playing,” David Jackson told Melody Maker. “Put harmonics through the transistors and there’s an infinite total range, especially with the wah-wah.”56

  And then there were the lyrics. “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers” contained ten distinct sections, written by different members of the band but assembled in the studio and given ambitious, inscrutable lyrics by Hammill. It was, he explained, “just the story of a lighthouse keeper” that happened to be an allegory about how to rationalize the fact that people die and the individual cannot save them. “In the end . . . well, it doesn’t really have an end,” Hammill told Sounds. “It’s really up to you to decide” (ellipsis in original).57

  If this came off as pretentious, that was fine; that required more from the audience. “I suppose it could be melodramatic,” Hammill told Sounds reporter Steve Peacock, who had been critical of the record, “but melodrama is like pretention really isn’t it? It’s in the eye of the beholder, it’s not a quality conception, it’s just how one feels about something. I can see what you mean, but it was just something I had to do. . . . Unless you approach it in the right frame of mind—which actually is no frame of mind—it won’t mean anything to you. You can’t relate to it on any normal level.”58

  All of the concept songs seemed to evolve in the same way, and out of the same ambition. Artists had the arrogance to write massive compositions. Audiences had the patience to listen. Studios had the capability to stitch them together. David Hitchcock, who had produced the side-long apocalyptic poem “Supper’s Ready” for Genesis, recalled “sticking together loops of tape that went around the room,” by hand.59

  Labels had the audacity to sell it, all of it. Ever since Soft Machine had broken out, music journalists had argued that a “Canterbury scene” was producing a crop of baroque, strange progressive bands. This was true, insofar as the components of the Wilde Flowers became the Softs and Caravan, and as neither band engaged in the mysticism of some of the London groups. “The people who played at Canterbury made this particular noise and had a particular brain pattern,” speculated Caravan’s Richard Sinclair.60 “We were certainly not driven to be a commercial pop band, that’s for sure.”61

  Caravan had been well reviewed, and it inspired the occasional story that asked, then answered, why it was not the next big thing. In 1972, a reporter for Disc and Music Echo followed Caravan to a gig to explain why it lacked “that unfathomable quality that inspires young men to roll up their shirt sleeves and young ladies into orgasmic relief.”62

  Caravan did not have that; it offered, instead, the purest distillation of the Canterbury Sound. The band’s own contribution to the epic-rock canon was “Nine Feet Underground,” nearly twenty-three minutes of music that closed the album In the Land of Grey and Pink. “Dave was really bursting with music and really needed to get this composition out,” Sinclair explained, “so he wrote twenty minutes’ worth. . . . I like writing heaps and heaps of music that changes key and changes time.”63

  Lots of bands did. Gentle Giant had burst out in 1970, distinguishing themselves from the rest of the progressives by weaving Renaissance musical themes into their music. They opened for Yes; they delighted the music press with records that defied easy categorization. In 1972, they spent a summer backing Black Sabbath on a tour of the US—eighteen gigs
, from the Deep South to the Midwest to California. They would play only fourteen of them, but this was not because the audiences rebelled. “We weren’t precious about our music,” singer Derek Shulman said. “We’d get over by being entertaining on stage. The fans that came out to see Black Sabbath and Gentle Giant and the Eagles and whoever else were quite open to it. Music, as a culture, was quite new. It wasn’t narrowly cast.”64

  The exception came at the Hollywood Bowl, the biggest show of the tour. There was only a small cell of hecklers, but they were armed, and a cherry bomb hit the stage and exploded. Phil Shulman, the multi-instrumentalist behind much of the band’s sound, called the audience “cunts.” That did it. “The booing that went up was spectacular,” remembered Derek Shulman. “Funny enough, that same show we were so whacked out that Tony Iommi literally fell flat out, on his face.”65

  The rest of the American tour dates were scrapped, for the usual reasons of rock excess. In Britain, progressive bands could still contemplate breakout success and feel slighted when it failed to arrive. Egg, a boldly experimental group, struggled to capitalize on its success with “Seven Is a Jolly Good Time.” “We’re fed up with the colleges,” keyboard player Dave Stewart told Melody Maker. “That’s where the money was, but it ain’t now. Students are very conditioned, concerned more with maintaining their cool than with listening. It really seems to pervade student life. They’re very concerned with liking the right things. The pressure on them to go to a gig is not ‘Do I like the band?’ but ‘Is everyone else going?’ or even ‘Am I expressing my social liberation by going?’ ”66

  In that same interview, the members of Egg—who would soon bolt for more successful bands—explained that an audience had always been there, out of reach. “Zappa has talked about electronic chamber music,” said Mont Campbell, the band’s multi-instrumentalist, “and I think we’re in that category. It’s an orchestral thing, in that each instrument is playing its own written lines, independently. The music is getting more complicated, in order to explore the integration of the various parts, rather than just complicated ideas for their own sake.”67

  Dave Stewart agreed: complicated music was the next wave. “The Soft Machine were very popular, but the only new thing they did was with time signatures—and it got very repetitive, not an organic part of the music. It was a fetal stage, if you like, and I don’t think there’s been anybody in rock who’s really been concerned with developing the time side.”68

  BILL BRUFORD WAS GONE, but Yes had an album to tour and sell. Close to the Edge dropped in September 1972; the band canceled a few gigs in the US but was otherwise able to hew to a schedule that had it playing sold-out arenas. It took only a little while for Alan White, a journeyman drummer who had played on John Lennon’s albums, to get caught up on Bruford’s material. “I had to adapt to Yes’s music, but I think they also had to adapt to me,” White told a reporter for Sounds.69 “I knew the band wanted a drummer with a little bit more weight than Bill anyway. I was more of a rock ’n’ roll player.”70

  Jon Anderson, as soon as Howe joined, had talked about making a double album. “We’d made the decision that all the music we’d ever write for the band would be for stage, not for radio,” says Jon Anderson.71 Their music became more virtuoso, more ambitious, more spiritual, with even denser transcendental lyrics. Yes’s long pieces were just that—pieces, not jamming, with the audience welcoming the ambition.

  Wakeman, on his own, was trying the limits. While on the band’s US tour, he happened to grab a copy of the book The Private Life of Henry VIII at the Richmond airport. “I wanted to do an album without vocals because I can’t sing,” he told Sounds’s Penny Valentine. “I can’t write lyrics either. Dirty poems yes, lyrics no.” But then he delved into the book. When “I started reading about Catherine of Aragon . . . this first theme I’d laid down earlier came into my head. It sounds daft but it really was a surge of excitement, because I’d found a concept which was what I’d always needed but hadn’t realised.”72

  Wakeman’s solo album The Six Wives of Henry VIII was released on A&M at the start of 1973. The cover suggested a messing-with-the-classics ethos in the mold of Wendy Carlos—the titular wives arrayed in a grand room, their husband looking on, as Wakeman shambled past them in jeans and sneakers. “Catherine of Aragon,” which kicked off the record, started with Wakeman’s piano melody and let it be bent by his trunkfuls of equipment, which included two mini-Moogs, two mellotrons, a Hammond, and an ARP synthesizer. On other tracks, Wakeman ran his fingers over a harpsichord and over the church organ at St. Giles-without-Cripplegate.

  It was a hit, moving right into the top ten and being reviewed favorably across the British press. The timing was perfect, because the reporters who had built up progressive music were about to take down the first idol. Jethro Tull put out A Passion Play in July. They had played the test-your-patience game before, with Thick as a Brick, but they’d been “taking the piss” out of the whole “concept album” trend.

  Who told the same forty-minute joke twice? A Passion Play jigged its way over the line from camp to aggrandizement, with a Joycean retelling of . . . well, of a passion play. “Son of Kings make the ever-dying sign,” sang Anderson, “cross your fingers in the sky for those about to BE.” The liner notes credited the music to a troupe of fictional actors (“John Tetrad was born in Birmingham and spent his early life in the engineering trade before embarking on a theatrical career as ‘Willie’ in Pass Me a Pippin.”) and advised that “latecomers may be asked to wait until a suitable break in the performance.”73

  Critics went after A Passion Play like a piñata made up to look like Hitler. “I cannot recall an album by a British rock band that has given me more pain to endure,” groaned Chris Welch, one of the most sympathetic prog embeds, reviewing the LP for Melody Maker. “I am left with the feeling of never wanting to hear another British rock group album again. I don’t want to hear arrangements, Moog synthesizers, electric guitars, or bloody clever lyrics for as long as the polar caps are frozen: if this is where ten years of ‘progression’ have taken us then it’s time to go backwards.”74

  The band was crushed. “That was the front page!” remembered Ian Anderson. “Our manager, Terry Ellis, hatched a plan for the next issue. He planted a story: ‘Jethro Tull Quit!’ It was a bit of a joke between him and Melody Maker editor Ray Shulman, that we’d quit because of the bad review. That was on the front page! I remember the day I walked down on the street and saw that issue, and I thought: What the fuck is this about?”75

  Yes never thought about scaling back. They wanted to reach transcendence, not radio. “We’re close to the edge of spiritual awareness within the framework of the group, making music,” Jon Anderson told the New Musical Express. “We have this long song, which we felt could hold a listener’s ear for the whole length, rather than just a track here and there that they like.”76

  The band debated whether to record their next album—which would be Tales from Topographic Oceans—in the country (for inspiration) or in the city (for convenience). The compromise: they booked London’s Morgan Studios and made it look like the country. The drum kit was plunked inside of a picket fence, facing a cardboard cow. Rick Wakeman’s keyboards were balanced on hay bales, near potted plants. When Anderson decided that white tiles would enhance the acoustics, gaffers put up a bathroom wall. “About halfway through the album,” producer Eddy Offord would tell Chris Welch, “the cow was covered in graffiti and all the plants had died. That just kind of sums up the whole album.”77

  Offord put on a braver face for the contemporary press, inviting an NME writer to hear the work in progress. “You cannot turn on creativity at the turn of a studio clock,” he proclaimed. “No one would have asked Picasso to start work at 2 o’clock and paint a masterpiece by five.” The interviewer bought it. “Yes,” he wrote, “sounded gutsier than I’ve ever heard them before.”78

  Everything was hyperambitious. “We got Slinkys, put mikes on them, and threw them
down stairs,” said Steve Howe in a 2009 BBC interview. “If you put a lot of reverb on it, it sounds great. . . . It’s a nice kind of insanity.”79 The gatefold cover, Roger Dean’s fourth for the band, smashed together wonders from all over the planet. Here was a rock from Stonehenge; there were the plains of Nazca; over in the back was the temple at Chichen Itza.

  “I was accompanying the band to Japan,” Dean recalled, “and the wives and girlfriends put whatever dope they had into a cake, which nobody knew about. On the flight, Jon served us slices of the cake. And so, from Alaska to Tokyo, I was talking for hour after hour after hour about this book I was working on about landscapes. I talked his ear off about the religious-spiritual significance of them, of ley lines, of dragon lines, while all the while the most beautiful landscapes of Siberia were passing underneath us.”80

  Inside the sleeve was Anderson’s spiritual schematic for the album. “Leafing through Paramhansa [sic] Yoganda’s Autobiography of a Yogi,” he wrote, “I got caught up in the lengthy footnote here.” He had thought deeply, then taken his ideas into the studio, and then the band had composed on the spot, standing or sitting amid the cows.

  “The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn)” started with thirty seconds of soft sounds meant to evoke lapping waves. Then came Steve Howe’s guitar, playing sustained, single notes, imitating whale song. Wakeman—who would claim to have hated every minute of this—arrived on an organ and quickly dominated the mix. The rest of the band arrived one by one, until every instrument was engaged. Alan White frantically hit his cymbals. Chris Squire plunked the bass, faster and faster. At 3:33, Wakeman bent a note on the synthesizer and the song transformed into 4/4 pop. The band bore a load, moved it slowly in one direction, snapped back quickly, and moved again. You could listen, but you couldn’t relax. For twenty minutes, the experiment came off.