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Reconsidering prog in light of reissued Yes
BY BRETT MILANO
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If there are four words that are guaranteed to polarize fans of ’70s progressive rock — and to send anyone who doesn’t like that kind of music running for the hills — it’s Tales from Topographic Oceans. For better or worse, that 1973 double album by Yes was one of art rock’s defining moments, the point at which it either reached its creative zenith or succumbed to its own excess. A remastered version of the album is the centerpiece of a new string of Rhino reissues that mark the first real overhaul of the Yes catalogue. The first four albums, through 1971’s Fragile, came out earlier this year. The newest batch, which includes 1972’s Close to the Edge, 1974’s Relayer, and 1977’s Going for the One, neatly wraps up Yes’s most fertile period, a time when such unlikely bands as the Who (on Quadrophenia) and Led Zeppelin (on Houses of the Holy) were taking their cues from Yes’s grandiosity, or at least using more keyboards. Until that period in Yes’s career, the leading prog bands had been steadily outdoing one another in having longer and more complicated songs (throw in visionary spiritual lyrics and you’ve pretty much defined the genre). Genesis filled most of an album side with "Supper’s Ready"; Emerson, Lake & Palmer stretched "Karn Evil 9" to a side and a half; Jethro Tull did two consecutive albums (Thick As a Brick and A Passion Play) with one multi-part song each. Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon could also be heard as one extended song, though its tracks had individual titles. Yes themselves did their first side-long epic on the title track of the album that preceded Tales from Topographic Oceans, Close to the Edge. But Topographic Oceans was a whole new beast: a quartet of densely arranged, lyrically oblique, fiendishly complex 20-minute pieces all keyed to singer Jon Anderson’s discovery of Eastern religion and hung with titles that many fans couldn’t pronounce, let alone fathom. And the album started an anti-prog critical backlash that continues to this day. Before Topographic, most of the bands mentioned above got consistently favorable reviews in Rolling Stone. Afterward, they did not. And even some fans weren’t pleased when Yes performed the whole album in sequence on the tour that followed its release. Rick Wakeman, Yes’s star keyboardist, disliked the album enough to quit after that tour — one popular rumor says that he showed his disdain by eating curry on stage during one of the denser passages. Even guitarist Steve Howe, who wrote Topographic with Anderson, was quick to change the subject when I mentioned it in a late-’80s interview (Howe was then promoting his failed pop-crossover band, GTR). "Tales from Topographic Oceans? Nobody on that record can even remember how to play any of it," he quipped dismissively. Seen in retrospect, though, by prog standards Yes weren’t all that radical. King Crimson were far stormier, Can and Kraftwerk were more robotic, and Tangerine Dream’s own double epic (1972’s Zeit) sustained one drone for four sides. But Topographic became a lightning rod for criticism — it was something like the Metal Machine Music of prog — because Yes were a commercial success, a band whose best album tracks ("Roundabout," "Your Move," "And You & I") were regularly edited down to hit singles. And here they were going out on a limb with an 80-minute adaptation of Shastric scriptures with no producer to talk them down. "I think Atlantic let us do it because we’d had a run of success," notes bassist Chris Squire over the phone from the band’s Los Angeles office. "Even if they didn’t understand it, they probably thought that so many thousands of kids were buying it that it couldn’t be wrong. We were just experimenting, I suppose — there had been a blueprint of side two of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, and we were onto something when we did Close to the Edge. But Topographic was a whole different ball of wax. It’s something that we invented as we went along and didn’t know where we were going — and I’ll admit, it sometimes sounds like that. It was really Jon Anderson’s thing, and I had my reservations about whether we should have done such an adventurous project at that time. But it did contribute to Yes’s overall longevity that we took the risk." Were the band members down with Anderson’s lyrical concepts? "Not really," Squire reveals. "I used to sing most of the harmonies, and half the time I didn’t know what the hell I was singing about. Jon has always been fairly abstract, and I think that explaining it is a difficult thing for him to do. But that’s the way we worked — Jon was trying to make the vocals part of the instrumental tapestry, and that approach was important to us." Topographic is actually the spottiest of the four newest reissues. Close to the Edge doesn’t have an unnecessary note, and it’s also the most indicative of what Yes were all about: aiming for moments of profound elation and risking any degree of excess to get there. Each of the band’s members had so much instrumental virtuosity that excess came naturally. So Topographic does its share of padding: the slow side, "The Remembering," has a few keyboard washes too many, and the finale, "Ritual," includes an unnecessary and noisy drum solo. But then there’s that elation, which comes through more often than not. In addition to throwing on bonus tracks — mostly in-progress versions of album songs, with slight variations that trainspotters will love — and giving the albums a sonic upgrade (early Yes CDs were notoriously shoddy), Rhino dug up slightly longer versions of a couple of tracks. Topographic’s opener, "The Revealing Science of God," gains 90 seconds of instrumental preamble that enhances the song: instead of starting with the usual chant, it begins with dead silence and keeps building, then builds some more as the vocals enter, with shrieking synths conjuring images of the sky opening up. Just when it reaches a heavenly climax, it resolves into one killer of a keys/bass riff — even at their loftiest, Yes knew the value of cheap thrills. True to their Beatles roots, Yes were always a melodic band. As for Anderson’s lyrics, they often sound so gorgeous being sung that you have to consult the lyric sheet to realize that some of the peak moments ("And I heard a million voices singing/Acting to the stories that they had heard about/Does one child know the secret and can say it/Or does it all come out along without you?") don’t make much sense. It would be nice to think that these Yes reissues could have anything like the impact of Led Zeppelin’s recent live CD/DVD package, which revived Zep’s scarred reputation in some corners. But that seems unlikely. In fact, Yes are farther off the radar screen than they’ve ever been — last summer they drew half a house at the Tweeter Center, and this year was the first in half a decade that they haven’t hit town. Yet they’ve made a creative comeback in the past three years, reassembling their best line-up (the Topographic cast of Anderson, Howe, Squire, Wakeman, and drummer Alan White) and rededicating themselves to the style of their peak era. Their MTV crossover hit "Owner of a Lonely Heart" (written by ’80s member Trevor Rabin) hasn’t been played in recent years, but two of Topographic’s four sides have. And their last studio album — 2001’s Magnification (Beyond), which was recorded with a full orchestra — was their best in at least two decades. Nevertheless, its commercial impact was negligible. Squire admits that the band’s future plans are nebulous: there’s talk of a tour with the Dead next year and a new studio album with producer Trevor Horn (who sang with Yes for one album after leaving the Buggles, then produced "Owner of a Lonely Heart," along with various Seal and Frankie Goes to Hollywood hits). But nothing’s been confirmed: "It seems a little ridiculous, but we never plan more than 18 months ahead." Meanwhile, the idea of a full-fledged prog revival gets more unlikely by the year. In fact, so many people have forgotten what real prog sounds like that albums with only the slightest spiritual connection — like Radiohead’s last three, and Mars Volta’s un-proggily bleak De-Loused in the Comatorium (Universal) — are given the prog label. Even the best neo-prog bands have tended to revive the old sound without adding anything new, though Sweden’s Flower Kings managed to beat the standing record for longest song with "Garden of Dreams" (from their 1999 album Flower Power, on Century), which sustained an outlandish 59-minute length. There might be hope in the recently reshuffled Spock’s Beard, who became the subject of some intrigue when leader Neal Morse wrote a spiritually themed double album (Snow, on Metal Blade), then became a born-again Christian and went solo last year. The remaining members have pulled a Genesis, promoting drummer Nick D’Virgilio to lead singer and dropping the high concepts for shorter, more accessible songs. Their new Feel Euphoria (Inside Out) does recall mid-period Genesis at times. But mostly they sound happy to be taking their heads out of the ’70s and borrowing from Radiohead’s electronics on the title track, Tool’s new metal on "Onomatopœia," and Guided by Voices’ neo-psychedelia on "East of Eden, West of Memphis" (probably the first prog number to allude to Elvis). Although it’s not truly "progressive" in the sense that we’ve heard a lot of music like it before, there are enough sonic and melodic surprises to make it feel fresh. But it’s unlikely to have any significant impact on prog’s damaged reputation.
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