by Will Romano
Yes’s masterpiece: Close to the Edge (1972).
The image, and other Dean illustrations, combined with the heady music operates much on the same level as medieval iconography, which was intent on bringing forth a vision of heaven through meditation. (Anyone who has seen Yes in concert performing “Close to the Edge” and other similar long-form compositions can attest to the music’s liturgical qualities. It instills a kind of sensitivity in the listener, a heightened state of mind.)
It’s no surprise then, to find that the jumping-off point for the conceptual themes in the nineteen-minute title song, was Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, which, in basic terms, documented the spiritual enlightenment of the title character in his development toward becoming the supreme Buddha and founder of Buddhism.
“Around this time, I was thinking about our success and asking, ‘Why me?”’ says Anderson. “Why me out of all of those people who were trying to make it in London? Why would I get that chance of success? I’m getting success and I have money in the bank and it kind of freaked me out . . . to the point of wondering, ‘Okay, If I’m supposed to be doing something, I better get on with it.’ We can’t sit around. This could all disappear tomorrow. When I was twenty-six, twenty-seven years old, I was a lunatic: I couldn’t sleep for the enjoyment and excitement that I’ve been given a chance to be a musician in this life. So I started reading, and Hermann Hesse was a very big experience for me, and I’d want to put it into lyrical form and express what I was feeling.”
When Close to the Edge was released, it shot to number four in Britain and number three in the U.S., having been heralded as the band’s greatest work to date. Indeed. The influence and importance of Close to the Edge are immeasurable. Close to the Edge lives up to its name: It sees the band at its creative pinnacle, the peak of its power, lassoing all of its creative energies, while having the restraint not to see it fall off a cliff.
But the record also leaves a sobering legacy. Frustrated by the pace of the recording, Bruford quit the band and took a job with rivals King Crimson, leaving Yes to bring in drummer Alan White, who’d worked with John Lennon and George Harrison, reconfiguring the complexion of the band once again. (White was always a steady but solid and hard-hitting drummer in contrast to Bruford’s more jazzy touch.)
“Bill was very much a purist when it came to music,” says Offord. “So we would lay down a basic track—drums, bass, guitar, maybe, or organ or something, and it sounded really good. Jon was always the one who wanted to push more the classical side. So he wanted to add this and that. ‘Oh, let’s try this...
.’ ‘Let’s try that.’ And it was a tendency for it to become too, especially from Bill’s point of view, overdubbed and too much going on that you lost the original basis of the band. I remember Jon said one day, ‘This sounds pretty good. We’ll put this in the background and it’ll be great.’ Then Bill said, ‘Why don’t you put the entire record in the background and be done with it.’ He was sick of his parts being covered up by all of this nonsense.”
Said Bruford himself in a 2001 interview I conducted: “I left Yes for the money. I knew I was going to get paid too much. That is when the problems start. Once you get paid, what follows next is repetition.”
TALES
Close to the Edge threw down the gauntlet. The band’s next studio effort, the four-song double album Tales from Topographic Oceans, was more outrageous, more adventurous, and perhaps full of more vagaries than any of Yes’s previous albums combined.
“Jon [wrote] a lot of the stuff on Tales based on dreams,” says Howe. “If [people] want to bitch about the lyrics, they can look at any song and say, ‘What’s it all mean?’ If they do, they’re kind of missing the point, you know?”
The plan was for Yes to work out in the country, in a pastoral and idyllic setting, to record the expansive compositions. Getting sidetracked was the first of many obstacles the band confronted during the production of Tales.
“The band and I had discussed putting an environment together that was conducive to creating and maybe being in a farmhouse somewhere, getting away from London,” says Offord. “A lot of bands were doing it at that time; going somewhere to create in a nice environment.”
But manager Brian Lane convinced the band to remain within the vicinity of London and set up camp at Morgan Studios in Willesden, where it was believed the band (management and coproducer) could have the best of both worlds while tapping the cutting-edge recording technology available to them at Morgan.
“I remember we recorded that album on the first ever twenty-four-track, two-inch tape machine ever to come into England,” says Squire. “The machine had an attendant army of engineers at all times, because it was always breaking down. When you’re trying to make an album like Topographic Oceans and the recording machine is breaking down, or something was going wrong with it, or going our of phase, it didn’t help us [laughs] get to where we needed to go. There was a lot of blind faith, I guess, that was employed to get through that record.”
Yes were breaking through barriers in every conceivable way for the recording of Tales. Eddy Offord: “One day Jon came into the studio and said, ‘When I am at home and singing in my bathroom, it sounds good. But I come into here into the studio and I can’t seem to achieve the same sound.”’
“I was managing Morgan at that point,” says engineer and audio maven Roger Quested. “The way I remember it, Jon Anderson actually said he wanted to sound as though he was in his bathroom; he wanted that effect. So Yes got the roadies to build a kind of booth—plywood, lumber, tiles and all—in the middle of the bathroom. You wouldn’t do that kind of thing at Abbey Road. Accommodating the client like that. Yes booked the studio for about four or five months or something.”
“I don’t know how long we were in the studio, but I think it was closer to two or three [months],” says Squire. “Rather than what should have been six or seven. I was doing sixteen-hour days, seven days a week for a long time on that. I was hardly getting any sleep at all and driving a half hour home every night and half an hour back every day as well. It was like . . . it was a bit of a potboiler. Let me tell you, that was a very frustrating time.”
“I think it was hard because it was a double album, and it took forever,” says Offord. “And I guess maybe the division was [apparent] in the band and Rick was kind of more outcast and everyone was frustrated. In retrospect, there were some good parts of the album; I think maybe the band remember it as being a time of turmoil.”
The much misunderstood Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973).
It was a painful birth, but the results were stunning. The very first song, “The Revealing Science of God,” encapsulates many of the melodic themes appearing throughout the record as well as Yes’s musical grandeur—from harmony vocals and constant tempo changes to an evocative lead melody (played by Wakeman on Minimoog) and an uncluttered sense of sonic and rhythmic interplay, perhaps unparalleled in Yes’s history up to that point.
The record became a number-one hit in Britain, having been released at the tail end of 1973. (It was released in the States in early 1974, where it went to number six.) But as with the band’s last epic recording, Close to the Edge, Tales took its toll on the band. Wakeman, who was never thrilled by the prospect and general concept of Tales, and who was feeling underutilized as a songwriter, quit soon after a tour to support the album. People either love Tales or hate it, he said in a 2003 interview, “and I don’t love it.”
The record did garner critical praise (Time applauded Yes for its effort). However, on the whole, Tales is remembered today, perhaps unjustly, for its perceived faults. (Some fans and critics were even confused by the cover: was it ripped from the pages of Erich von Däniken’s best-selling book on ancient astronauts, Chariots of the Gods? Was the scene depicting an underwater world, a sunken Atlantis, or outer space?) Some critics cite Tales as the beginning of the end of prog’s heyday.
Yesterdays (1974) : a compilation.
Yes ba
nd photo circa 1971. Middle row, Bill Bruford, Jon Anderson, and Steve Howe; back left, Rick Wakeman; and bottom front, Chris uire. (Photo courtesy remier Talent)
“When Yes wrote ‘Roundabout’ or ‘All Good People,’ I couldn’t have liked them more,” says legendary Styx front man Dennis DeYoung. “But when they were on the ‘bottom of the ocean’ [Tales from Topographic Oceans], I went, ‘What was that?’ Let’s face it: I like Yes musically. But at sixty years old, I still don’t know what any of their songs are about.”
WAKEMAN ON ICE
Wakeman had gone, but he’d already established himself as a successful solo artist when he was a member of Yes. Prior to the release of Tales, in 1973, Wakeman rolled out that rare beast of the rock music world, the instrumental concept record, with his The Six Wives of King Henry VIII (a Top 30 U.S. hit).
Assisted by his former mates in the Strawbs, then-current (and former) Yes members Bruford, White, Squire, and Howe, along with an arsenal of keyboards, Wakeman tackled a rather dark period of English royal history with tongue-in-cheek aplomb. Only Wakeman, with his sardonic humor, could have thought up the inclusion in the liner notes of the birth, divorce, and execution/death dates of Henry’s unfortunate wives.
The Six Wives is a bit of a tone poem, as the keyboardist attempted to translate a historical character’s identity through music, much in the same way Strauss interpreted Nietzsche through “Also Sprach Zarathustra” and Elgar based Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36 (casually known as the Enigma Variations) on thirteen different (untold) personalities in the composer’s life.
Wakeman’s “King Arthur on Ice” tour (in support of his The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and The Knights of the Round Table record on A&M) is often used as an example of prog rock’s excess and ridiculousness, but critics fail to point out that that the joke wasn’t lost on Wakeman. This writer believes (to this day) that Wakeman’s earlier concept records and subsequent tours (Journey to the Centre of the Earth, a record that soared to the top of the U.K. Albums chart on the very day the keyboardist officially announced he’d quit Yes; Myths and Legends; The Six Wives of Henry VIII) operate on two levels: Firstly, they excite the imagination and inspire a romanticism with European iconography; secondly, a subtle undercurrent of satire pervades these early solo releases, so much so that they could be interpreted as a virtual aural/orchestral equivalent of a Monty Python movie.
Unlike some of his prog rock brethren, Wakeman seemed self-conscious enough to realize that his epic productions could be shot through with sly humor without lapsing into comedy rock or self-parody. You could take the music and production at face value, one would suppose, and thus it would be parody, but it seems Wakeman beat critics to the punch. Some may disagree, but this author believes Wakeman possesses a sense of the absurdity of life, and that some of his most extravagant musical ideas were simply an outgrowth of this.
“There’s a wittiness about Rick, and there’s a certain amount of tongue-in-cheekness about his production and presentation, and this fact that, ‘I can, so I will,”’ says post-production guru Simon Heyworth. “You know, ‘It will cost a lot of money and I don’t care.’ There is something endearing about that in a way.”
RELAYER
To fill the keyboardist chair left vacant by Wakeman (though no one could truly replace him), Yes tapped Swiss master Patrick Moraz, one of the early users of the Minimoog synth, who had followed Keith Emerson as the keyboardist in Lee Jackson and Brian Davison’s post-Nice band Refugee, turning heads with such grand works as “The Grand Canyon Suite” (not the Ferde Grofé classic piece but original music with Moraz blowing a thirteen-foot Alpine horn) and “Credo,” from the band’s self-titled Charisma label debut.
Relayer (1974). Yes’s experimental, jazz-fusion excursion.
Moraz’s classical training, solid progressive rock background (prior to Refugee, he worked with his own psychedelic band, Mainhorse), and experimental streak were the perfect fit for a band that, after such major works as Close to the Edge and Tales from Topographic Oceans, was looking to feed their ambition and broaden their musical scope.
An accident when he was a teen, in which he broke a finger, sidetracked Moraz from being a concert pianist. “I was told by my teachers that I would never play again,” says Moraz. “That was devastating but I trained my left hand for six months and became ambidextrous.”
The classical world’s loss was prog rock’s gain. Lee Jackson remembers a young Moraz and his monumental talent: “The Nice were making what we would now call a video and getting ready to perform a concert in Basel in Switzerland in 1969,” says Jackson. “We were filming by day. We did the concerts and November 2, 1969, I remember was Keith Emerson’s birthday. We’re in a hotel having a bit of a party with some of the young ladies of the town who had attached themselves to our entourage and Keith gets on the piano, as he’s wont to do, in the hotel lounge, and we see this man in a straight suit with a briefcase, and he’s standing by the piano, watching Keith. He says, ‘Excuse me. Could I trade fours with you?’ We’re thinking, ‘Who is this? He’s gonna trade fours with Emerson?’ He sits down and Keith went [whirlwind of noise to depict fast playing]. Then this guy goes [whirling, ascending noise, the response to Emerson’s riffing]. We went, ‘Oh, shit.’ At that point we realized that this guy knew what he was doing, you know? ...They were playing duets and it was fantastic. I got his card. That was Patrick Moraz.”
Yes manager Brian Lane called Moraz for an audition/jam session with the band in the countryside of Devon at what would later become Steve Howe’s barnyard studio. Yes had auditioned other keyboardists, including Aphrodite’s Child’s Vangelis (Evangelos Odyssey Papathanassiou), but no one had yet emerged to fill the spot.
When Moraz arrived for the rehearsal, he found Vangelis’s rig already set up. He listened to the Yes members jamming and improvised counterpoint melodies to the band’s songs. Yes were immediately impressed.
“After the exchange, they started to play the first few bars of what became ‘Soundchaser,’” says Moraz. “Chris and Jon said, ‘Why don’t you come up with an introduction for the song?’ I invented it there and then. I showed it to them and explained it to Chris and Alan, because only the bass and drums enter the introduction with the keyboards. I know that my keyboard section of that introduction is the one that’s on the record. Eddy Offord had designed an unbelievable array of recording technology for a mobile studio.”
From the outset, the band’s upcoming record, eventually called Relayer, was shaping up to be another adventure in sound and rock composition. Tales from Topographic Oceans was so structured, the band needed something of a musical cold shower and had decided to head in a different musical direction—more into jazz and electronic/avant-garde music.
“Relayer was a bit of jazz-rock album for Yes,” says Squire. “We tried a number of different things, and maybe that’s a key to longevity—not being afraid to try a slightly different direction, or not accepting that you are capable of doing one thing, really.”
When Relayer was released in late 1974, featuring the twenty-two-minute epic “The Gates of Delirium”, it continued Yes’s hot streak, going to number four in Britain and number five in the U.S. Critics, predictably, called Relayer pretentious. But pretentious or not, Yes had done the near-impossible : Though music was in an era of experimentation, the band had dared to go where few rock bands had before, and had scored major hits with both Tales and Relayer.
GOING FOR THE ONE
Thinking the time was ripe for the individual members to strike out on their own, Howe, Anderson, White, Squire, and Moraz released solo records—Beginnings (featuring members of the band Gryphon, who had toured with Yes), Olias of Sunhillow, Ramshackled, Fish Out of Water, and The Story of I, respectively. Simply put, it was an explosion of music—much too much music for one band to record.
It’s no surprise that glimmers of Yes poked through at various moments on these individual member records, proving that solo stardom
was not truly in the cards for the Yes men. Nonetheless, the records, along with retrospective compilation Yesterdays, all did respectfully well at the retail counter, with Anderson’s Olias scoring a Top 10 British hit.
Despite the successes, in retrospect, the middle 1970s were lost years for Yes, just as they were for ELP. Though the band did live shows during this time, no studio records were forthcoming from Yes for nearly three years. (It was longer for ELP.) When the band reconvened to begin writing and recording their next studio album, Going for the One, punk was just beginning to make rumblings in British pop culture. Yes couldn’t have been more unhip.
What’s more, trouble was brewing: Some of the members were displeased with Moraz and his rock star behavior. It soon became evident that Moraz needed to leave. But as to why, ask the members of the band and you’ll receive a different response.
“After Relayer, when we started to work on Going for the One, he wanted to take Yes into a very jazzy area,” says Howe. “We told him, ‘Get lost. This is not a jazz band. Go away.”’
“Patrick at that time hadn’t come to the studio, and he was out and about,” says Anderson. “You’d think that you wouldn’t have to tell anybody to be there at rehearsal. That’s when you come to realize that you have the wrong guy. So it was time to change.”