The
2nd chapter (Sweet Dreams) is where I really learned a lot about the
early line up of YES and the band that most of the members were in before
called Mabel Greer’s Toyshop. This was very interesting and a lot of totally
new information about Jon Anderson, Peter Banks, and Chris Squire. Bill Bruford
came into this band at the very end before they changed the name to YES (Peter
Banks suggestion). A lot has been
written about Peter Banks and why he left (basically the band was becoming to
structured and he did not have enough space to improvise!). Also in this long
chapter he goes through in a lot of detail the making of The YES album and
Fragile as well. A lot of interesting information about these records to
compliment the liner notes of the Steven Wilson editions, for those of you that
have them!
 |
| Eddy Offord |
The
3rd chapter (Spiral Aim) takes on the making of Close to the Edge
(CTTE) in amazing detail. The authors spends quite a long time making parallels
with a lot of spiritual stuff relating to the number 3, Herman Hesse’s
Siddhartha, Om, etc.. I am not sure everyone will buy this and wonder if he
just got way too deep into this album. There is not that much evidence to
support that YES were thinking so deeply about all this stuff. They were trying
to make the best record they could and were inspired to try anything in the
book and the amazing engineer, Offord, was keen to go for any idea and see if
it worked so in the end, the album was cut and pasted from many many short
layers, loops, multitracks to create a very artful piece of music. One thing I
thought was interesting to learn was that the way they put music together in
these few mins at a time to create the track, that they in the end actually had
to learn how to play it at the end because they always ended up with something
very different from where they started. Cool.. Very creative people and super
talented.
The
4th Chapter, I did not really get. It is called What’s a Khatru and
it is trying to pull out some sort of religious, otherworldly deep deep spiritual
meaning to the YES lyrics, particularly relating to CTTE. He brings up a lot of
questions and speculation that could easily be clarified if he just asked Jon
Anderson. He has clearly met and spoken with him before based on quotes in the
book, so why not just go to the source and ask, rather than spend 20 pages
speculating when you can found out by asking Jon, who is still alive. This was
a hard chapter to read.
Valley
of Endless Seas is about the artwork of Roger Dean and relating to CTTE. Again,
I think he tries to make too much of it all and spends a over a page just on
why the cover is green and if this relates to some deep spiritual thing and
relating that the cover can look like an green overflowing glass of Guinness is
pretty far out! The logo is cool but the
album artwork on the outside is hardly mindblowing in anyway, it is the inside
that is most impressive. Again, he could
just ask Roger Dean, rather than spend so many pages speculating about really
deep, religious, spiritual meanings in the figures hidden in the art, etc.. It
was nice to see reference to Ed Unitsky, an visionary artist that has done some
album artwork for my band (Øresund Space Collective).  |
| Artwork by Roger Dean |
Seasons
will pass you By, the 6th chapter, is mostly about the how and why
Bill Bruford left the band. There is a lot of very interesting information and
insight about him as a drummer and person as well. This also leads into how
Allan White came into the band.
The
Journey takes you away, is about the success of the album, the elaborate stage
and sound set that they took on the tour. The tour was quite long for them
running from July 1972 until April 1973 seeing the band play most in the USA
but also some dates in Australia (New Zealand was all cancelled), Japan and
three dates in the England. Europe never got to see this tour and there were
more concerts in Japan than the UK!! A
lot of details are presented about the sound, lights, etc… a video (YEssongs)
was shot on this tour and released (never on DVD though) and triple live LP as
well but that material was not from the YESsongs video (except one song) and
the rest was recorded in the USA.
They
regard the summit, is about the impact YES and CTTE had on the world in
general. I think some of this is a bit overstated and a bit too much. YES
were for sure a huge inspiration but there were a lot of other super creative
bands out there at this time pushing the limits of rock music, not only YES.
Many of these get mentioned in the book, of course, and mainly a focus on ELP
as it was easy to draw comparisons to them.
For
me, I actually think the band did not peak at this point as the author tries to
push his point. For me, they took it two steps further and I would say that
Tales of Topographic Oceans is the bands highest artistic achievement ever and
they took what they did with CTTE and went even one step further. No one at
this time in rock music had made a 42min song (The Ritual). The Steven Wilson
5.1 mix is just mind blowing. Also, I felt that Relayer even though Wakeman was gone, had the band pushing to it’s most extreme ever. I have always loved
this album and its very aggressive nature but also multilayered, head music…
After this, with Going for the One, the band became more polished, a bit
commercial but still made great records.
Anyway,
there is an epilogue, CTTE tour itinerary, band and artist discography of all
their major works, and all the bibliography at the end. I really enjoyed the
book a lot and I would have liked Will to have just got the answers directly
from the band members on a lot of the stuff that you uses maybe 50 pages of the
book to speculate on and theorize about. He could have just asked Jon and
Steve, the two main music men in Yes.. A very cool book..
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