Source: The Yes Chronicles
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Concert/8459/theyesalbum.html
Review: The Yes Album
Author Unknown
"When it was released, there was a two-month postal strike in England. None
of the record stores could mail in their chart returns. So the music papers
took their charts from Richard Branson's (original) Virgin store (in
London). ... Fortunately, because we had most fans in London obviously our
album sold really well in the Virgin record store, and for that reason, it
got to number one in the chart. ... That got us noticed over in New York
... 'Oh my God, this little folk group seem to have a number one album!'"
-- Chris Squire, from Chris Welch's Close to the Edge: The Story of Yes (1999)
The Yes Album
Atlantic 1971
Rating: ****1/2
Best song: "Yours Is No Disgrace"
Produced by Yes and Eddie Offord
Photography by Phil Franks and Barry Wentzel
Engineer: Eddie Offord
Recorder by Colin Goldring
Personnel:
Jon Anderson: vocals
Steve Howe: guitars, vocals
Chris Squire: bass, vocals
Tony Kaye: keyboards
Bill Bruford: percussion
Track listing (standout tracks in bold):
Yours Is No Disgrace
Clap
Starship Trooper:
a. Life Seeker
b. Disillusion
c. Wurm
I've Seen All Good People:
a. Your Move
b. All Good People
A Venture
Perpetual Change
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The way Yes's first two albums flopped commercially, the band never would
have had the chance to set the world on fire in today's rock 'n' roll
market, where you're expected to be a multi-million-unit-selling hitmaker
from the first moment you walk into the studio. But even back in the good
old days, the record companies eventually ran out of patience and good
will. That's the situation Yes found itself in before going into the studio
to cut The Yes Album. This was going to be the band’s make-or-break album.
If they didn't score with this one, Atlantic Records was ready to drop
them, and the "Yes" we know today easily could have become just a footnote
in rock history, a curious little English jazz-folk-rock band that cut two
pleasant little albums with ambitious musicianship and interesting cover
songs and then vanished without a trace.
As it turned out, the third time was a charm. The Yes Album hit number 1 on
the UK album chart and began the band's journey toward superstardom.
When Peter Banks left Yes (or, to hear his side of the story, was fired),
the band originally courted King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp as his
replacement, but Fripp declined. The connections between Yes and King
Crimson, though, would be many over the years, as Bill Bruford would become
Crimson's drummer in 1972, Jon Anderson had already been a guest vocalist
on Crimson's 1970 Lizard album, and Crimson bassist Tony Levin would appear
on the album and tour by the Yes spinoff band Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe
in 1989 and on Yes's Union album in 1991.
So, with Fripp out of the picture, Chris Squire put in a call to a
guitarist he had seen playing in a couple of other bands--a guy named Steve
Howe. Squire sold Howe on Yes's unique approach to music, and he met the
band for a rehearsal. The rest, of course, is rock history.
The new lineup retreated to a farm in the English countryside to write,
rehearse, and refine their craft, and all the woodshedding paid off with
big dividends. Even though there are still obvious connections to the first
two albums, the polished sound and maturing musicianship on The Yes Album
was light-years beyond anything the band had done previously--not to
mention pretty far beyond what most other rock bands were doing at the time.
The first thing that may strike you about this album, though, is just how
much guitar there is. As much as Banks was invisible through most of Time
and a Word, Howe is equally out front and very visible, especially through
the first four pieces of this six-composition album. It's as if the band
wanted to show off its newest member and his talents to the world in the
most blunt manner possible. Well, actually, that probably was the case. And
that's both good and bad--good, because there was now a guitarist onboard
of equal strength to Anderson and the rhythm section; and bad, because it
meant that the band still wasn't quite at the point at which each member
would be an equal contributor to a perfectly balanced whole. The weak link
this time around was Tony Kaye, who was resisting expanding his repertoire
of keyboards to include Moogs and Mellotrons, preferring to stick to the
more traditional piano and organ. It was one of those classic cases of
"artistic differences" leading to an impasse in which it became clear that
Kaye's days with the band were numbered. His bandmates were ready to move
on to the next level, and he wasn't interested in going there.
In the meantime, he provides a perfectly solid backdrop of mostly organ,
some piano, and--probably against his will--even a little Moog for everyone
else to build upon. And, in somewhat of a surprise, Squire and Bruford take
on a slightly more reserved role here, but only slightly, suggesting that
maybe their out-front dominance on the first two albums was an attempt to
compensate for the lack of a strong guitar presence.
Musically, then, the biggest parallels to the first two albums here are the
frequent jazzy guitar stylings and the vocal harmonies. The latter abounds
on The Yes Album, from the tight three-part harmonies almost all the way
through "Yours Is No Disgrace," to the overlapping lead and support vocals
on "Perpetual Change," to "Your Move," which opens with an a cappella line
sung twice and closes with wordless vocals ("diddit, diddit, diddit ...")
over a layered background of Howe, Squire, and Anderson singing the refrain
from John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance." ("Instant Karma" also gets a
mention in this song, which is noteworthy since Alan White, who played
drums on the John Lennon classic, would be joining Yes in less than two
years.) Howe wasn't and isn't the best of singers, but at least on this
album he's blended into the whole well enough that his voice doesn't become
a distraction. Banks certainly had a superior voice, although he lacked the
eclectic versatility that became Howe's calling card. In fact, with the
jazz-inflected noodlings on "Yours Is No Disgrace" and "Perpetual Change,"
Howe seems to be showing that he can do a good Banks imitation and then
move on from there, showing he can also do much more.
With The Yes Album, the songs are beginning to grow longer, marking the
advent of the band's common practice of creating music in extended formats.
However, at this stage the band hadn't quite perfected the "epic"
songwriting style yet. The album's final piece, "Perpetual Change," comes
the closest to achieving that goal, while the album's other extended works
are either a collection of shorter songs cobbled together or conventional
pop tunes with extended instrumental breaks. "Starship Trooper" is the
former, "Yours Is No Disgrace" the latter. And then there's "I've Seen All
Good People," whose two parts don't even interconnect--it's really two
songs that just share a lyrical line.
Not that any of this detracts from the quality of the musicianship or the
entertainment value. To the contrary, "Yours Is No Disgrace" is not just an
impressive vocal showcase; it also contains a first-rate instrumental break
where everybody, especially Howe, gets a chance to stretch out. It's a
great, colorful little passage, filled with all kinds and styles of guitar
panning from channel to channel, and it would serve as Yes's big "jam"
piece onstage, where everybody could cut loose for a few minutes. And it
would be one of the last real "jams" we'd hear from Yes, because as the
band’s music became more intricate and complex and deeply structured, with
every part and every instrument relying on every other one around it to
form an integrated whole, there wouldn't be any room for improv--it would
be like breaking out of the fourth movement of Beethoven's 9th to launch
into a 12-bar blues number. For the time being, though, "Yours Is No
Disgrace" would stand as the closest Yes had come to matching vocal
brilliance with top-notch instrumental craftsmanship. Only "Roundabout,"
one year later, would improve on this rarely heard balance.
"All Good People," the second half of "I've Seen All Good People," is
another straight-ahead, 4/4, boogie/rock 'n' roll jam, with some tasty
guitar licks from Howe, and even some exuberant piano doodling from Kaye,
that both suggest '50s rockabilly. Another Yes concert staple to this day,
it's usually saved for the encore to get the audience out of their seats
and dancing before the curtain falls for the night. In sharp contrast, the
first half of the song, called "Your Move," is a folksy acoustic ballad,
with Anderson's lyrics exploring the game of chess as a metaphor for life.
Howe once again leads the music, here with his vachalia, an avocado-shaped,
medieval-looking little instrument whose tone is sort of a cross between a
mandolin and a conventional 12-string acoustic guitar. Augmenting the
uncharacteristically simple arrangement was one Colin Goldring on
recorder--which for some reason must have been a popular instrument in 1971
since it also played such a notable role that year on "Stairway to Heaven,"
by that other up-and-coming British band!
Of course, Howe's famous acoustic guitar rag is first heard on The Yes
Album. And it is NOT called "The Clap," thank you very much! In a classic
Spinal Tap moment, some dimwit at Atlantic Records inserted the definite
article, and the unfortunate gaffe stuck. It took Rhino Records to finally
fix the title with its 2003 reissue of the album. Anyway, the idea is that
you're supposed to "Clap" along with this bouncy acoustic number--it was
written in celebration of the birth of Howe's son Dylan. The loose,
down-home feel is very reminiscent of Chet Atkins’ style, and it wasn't the
only time Howe would surprisingly inject a country mood into a Yes song. In
fact, Howe's brilliant solo on Yes's cover of Paul Simon's "America" (my
favorite Howe moment ever) evokes such joyous, laid-back, easygoing images
of the wide-open spaces of the American countryside that all of the Eagles'
later attempts at "country-rock" pale in comparison. The band had played
its radically reworked version of "America" back in the early days, but
they never got around to recording it until 1972, when it was then placed
on an Atlantic sampler album called Age of Atlantic. A 10-minute version of
this recording finally surfaced on a Yes album in 1975--Yesterdays, which
also consisted of six reissues from the first two albums and an early
b-side called "Dear Father." I mention "America" here because it's worth
checking out for its wealth of emotion and plain old lighthearted fun.
But back to The Yes Album. I've mentioned that there are stronger ties
between this and the first two albums than the music would have you think,
and it's true. In fact, would you believe that part of "Starship Trooper"
was actually born during the original lineup? Part 2, "Disillusion," is
reworked from part of an older Yes piece called "For Everyone," which the
band played live but never recorded. The entire version can be heard on the
1997 release Something's Coming (alternatively called Beyond and Before in
America), which collects several previously unheard live recordings and BBC
sessions by the original lineup. And part 3 of "Starship Trooper" didn't
even originate with Yes at all--"Wurm" was based on a song called "Nether
Street" that Howe had performed with Bodast, one of his pre-Yes bands.
That leaves just part 1, called "Life Seeker," as the only new section of
"Starship Trooper." And it does indeed have a stamp of newness about it,
for here we get one of the first tastes of Anderson's developing obscure
lyric-writing style. It's one of those cases in which he sings about
something just concretely enough that you get a vague idea of what's going
on, but not so much that only one meaning can be ascribed to it.
The piece opens up without a break from "Clap," with Howe playing a fluid
rhythm line on an electric guitar processed to have a thick, watery sound
to it. Squire has a wonderfully wobbly vibrato coming out of his extended
bass lines, while Kaye provides some airy, sleek organ lines with an
occasional choppy burst in the background. And Bruford holds it all down
with crisp, syncopated rhythms and unexpected fills that, as only Bruford's
drumming could do, add immense color to the overall composition without
ever losing sight of the backbeat.
And then come the lyrics. They sound beautiful, but what do they mean? The
overriding themes seem to be of nature, knowledge, and the comfort of
familiarity. "Sister bluebird," a possible metaphor for nature, holds the
"mysteries of life," which our narrator asks the bluebird to hide away.
That same idea, of knowing there is a wellspring of knowledge out there
somewhere but not wanting to know about it, keeps repeating itself
throughout this first part: "Though you've seen there, please don't tell a
soul/What I can't feel can't be very whole." But closer to the beginning of
the song we're introduced to what seems to be a contradiction to that last
line: "What I don't know, I have never heard." So on one hand we have
someone seeming to say that if something can't be felt, or seen, or somehow
tangible, it can't be real, meaning in a sense that his capacity for
acquiring knowledge is limited, while later on the message seems to be that
this person has a capacity to know everything there is to know, and that if
there's something he doesn't yet know, it's only because he hasn't heard it yet.
By the end of this section, we're left with the impression that our
storyteller goes from being reluctant to confront the "mysteries of life,"
whose answers he thinks are found in nature, to an understanding that he
not only can learn these mysteries but that his knowledge is limited only
by his willingness to have it limited. And at the end of the section, when
he sings "What I don't know, I have never shared," he appears to be so open
to acquiring this knowledge that the only reason he may not know something
is that he hasn't shared it yet--with himself. With the advantage of later
Anderson lyrics to offer clarity in hindsight, it seems that Anderson here
may be talking about the human capacity to acquire vast knowledge, and more
importantly to know oneself, once one understands that knowledge is neither
frightening nor external but rather is fulfilling and--at least in terms of
spiritual knowledge--comes from within. I don't know whether Anderson was
studying Eastern concepts yet, but it certainly sounds as if "Life Seeker"
is a rough draft for the notions of inner enlightenment and complete
self-realization, embraced in Eastern religious/philosophical traditions,
that he would explore at great length on Tales from Topographic Oceans.
This approach seems to be reinforced on part 2, "Disillusion," where some
more fast-and-furious country-inflected acoustic picking from Howe sets the
scene for another three-part harmony: "Loneliness is a power that we
possess to give or take away forever/All I know can be shown by your
acceptance of the facts there shown before you/Take what I say in a
different way and it's easy to say that this is all confusion/As I see a
new day in me, I can also show if you and you may follow." Tying this in
with part 1, it's possible to interpret that (1) being detached from true
inner knowledge entails a sense of loneliness, at least on a spiritual
plane, and we have the power to alter that state of loneliness; (2) we too
can learn these greater truths if we just allow ourselves to see them; and
(3) like a spiritual guru asking us to follow in his path, our narrator
here promises us that he can help us find this "new day" if we follow the
path he shows us.
But then there's that second line: "Take what I say in a different way and
it's easy to say that this is all confusion." In keeping with the context,
this could mean that it's easy to be misled or sidetracked on the path to
truth and knowledge. But given the abstract direction in which Anderson's
lyrics were beginning to go, I can't help wondering if there's a double
meaning here--namely, that it would become easy to misinterpret lyrics such
as these, and even easier to see them as just being a mass of confused
words. And sometimes that's really all they are. But it almost seems, again
in hindsight, that Anderson was telling us what to expect from his
lyric-writing in the years to come. After all, if the rest of the band was
trying hard to avoid predictable rock 'n' roll cliches, why shouldn't he be
doing the same through his lyrics? Ironically, though, these were the words
that came from the older song "For Everyone," and these lines in particular
weren't even sung by Anderson on the original--Squire originally had taken
the mike for this part, and its reappearance here as "Disillusion" is
credited to Squire, not Anderson. So, it may be that the lyrics had a
different context in their original setting and were recycled here because
they tied in so well with what Anderson had put forth in the first part of "Starship Trooper."
The sweet strains of three voices harmonizing in rounds soon takes over,
followed by a brief return to one of the "Life Seeker" vocal/musical themes
to give some semblance of an interconnectedness among these three distinct
pieces. (They'd cheat the same way on Tales from Topographic Oceans a few
years later, cobbling together pieces of music that didn't always flow
smoothly and in some cases just had no business being glued together. Here
it's not so bad; on Tales it's tedious, overdone, and just plain annoying.)
And finally, a fugue-like organ line, joined by the rest of the band,
upshifts us at last into part 3. And at least there aren't any words to
confuse us in "Wurm," which is yet another Howe showcase. That same watery
electric-guitar tone is back as Howe strums solo in a midtempo, snaky 4/4
in one channel to open things up. Slowly the rest of the band fades in to
accompany him--Squire with more of his long, vibrato-laden lines; Kaye
contributing small fills and more long chords in the background; and
Bruford playing in an uncharacteristically straightforward rock beat on
kick drum, snare, and ride cymbal. And that's pretty much it--this one idea
builds and builds, as slowly the intensity level increases, the volume goes
up, Squire reaches the upper registers of his bass, and Bruford begins
slamming his snare and crash cymbal with every beat. From there, Howe takes
over with his tour-de-force, duetting with himself in alternating channels,
two hard-rocking measures at a time, with the rhythm section holding down a
basic beat and Kaye's organ growling and swirling underneath the
pyrotechnics. This was proof that Yes could really rock, when it wanted to.
All this talk of alternating channels may make you wonder what was going on
in the producer's chair. Eddie Offord, who had begun working with the band
as an engineer on Time and a Word, apparently had a lot of fun tweaking the
stereo controls on this album, since there are a lot of these moments of
panning and isolated-channel sections. (It's a very good headphone album.)
This was also the first album Offord co-produced with Yes, marking the
start of a working relationship that would last throughout Yes's glory days to come.
"Yours Is No Disgrace" has another one of those bouncing-from-ear-to-ear
moments during Howe's two brief but memorable wah-wahing electric-guitar
cadenzas. Overall, this song is a bright, expansive-sounding rocker in its
own right, with most of its lyrics so odd ("shining flying purple wolfhound
show me where you are") there's no doubt that this song is lyrically more
of an impressionist tone poem than a concrete statement of anything. But
for nonsense lyrics, they sound absolutely gorgeous in three-part harmony.
There is one critical line, though, amidst the abstraction, which comes
right after the big instrumental jam in the middle. Kaye slows things down
with a funeral-like organ passage to set the stage for a pair of lines that
make us sit up and pay attention, only to be thrown back into marvelous
obscurity directly afterwards: "Death-defying, mutilated armies gather
near/Crawling out of dirty holes, their morals, their morals disappear."
Keep in mind that this was written during the Vietnam conflict, albeit a
few years late to be jumping on the war-protest bandwagon. Combine this
with the otherwise contextless repeated line "yours is no disgrace" and we
see Anderson building a picture out of the nothingness that previously
existed--he seems to be saying that war makes animals out of men, but that
it is understandable and forgivable under the inhuman circumstances,
especially in Vietnam, where young men were just doing what their country
asked them to do, even if the war was unjust and uncalled for. So, what
they are doing, what they are being made to do, does not degrade
them--their service, their sense and understanding of duty, is no disgrace.
In this way, Anderson imparts a sense of understanding and empathy and
forgiveness that the thoughtless people who spat on the soldiers when they
returned home wouldn't discover for a couple of decades. As we've seen
before, Anderson doesn't excel in literal protest, so it's good that there
are only two concrete lines here out of all the surrounding abstractions.
They give the abstractions something to hang their hat on and so serve a
useful purpose without being overbearing or goofy.
Over on side 2 (remember album sides?) is a little ditty called "A Venture"
that has the unfortunate fate of being stuck in the middle of two Yes
classics on and, as such, may be the most obscure song on all of the albums
from the "classic" period. With its heaviness on piano and jazzy guitar
lines, it would sound more at home on one of the first two albums than
here, and although it has a certain understated British sense of whimsy
about it that has led to (quite accurate) comparisons to the Beatles'
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer," it's largely forgettable and leaves no lasting impression.
"Perpetual Change," on the other hand, is anything but forgettable. The
album's closing track is notable in that it simultaneously shows both where
Yes had been and where it was going. At times, the piece looks back to the
naive musical ambition of "Survival" and even lulls into the soft-jazz
groove that was so prevalent on that song and others from the first two
albums. But before you think this is just another pretty but
inconsequential little jazz-rock tune, wait until the middle instrumental
section kicks in! We get a taste of what's to come in a few minutes through
some impressive counterpoint playing right in the intro to the song, with
Howe and Kaye in a lockstep riff playing up against Squire and Bruford's
separate interlocking groove. There's quite a bit of soft-jazzy ebb and
flow once we get into the meat of the song, as well as some more lovely
vocal harmonizing, with Anderson in a kind of call-and-response with
himself, Squire, and Howe in the background on the refrains.
But now, hold on, for out of an unassuming, bluesy 3/4 bit of laid-back
jazzing, we're going to be taking a sharp turn, with no warning, to what
will become a pair of melodies in 14 (yes, 14) beats. The first one is a
frantic unison riff from all four instruments in what seems to be 14/2
time, repeated over and over as it slowly slides off to one channel. (There
goes Eddie Offord again!) But this time the stereo trickery serves a
purpose, for out of the silence of the opposing channel comes, right in
mid-phrase, another unison riff played by all four instruments, in 14/4, at
a tempo exactly half the speed of the first riff. The faster riff plays
twice against the slower one, and then the pattern repeats. Howe eventually
rises above the cacophony to solo over both of them, followed by Kaye, who
chimes in with a short but emphatic Moog line before Bruford's pounding
snare signals that we've come to the end. And out of the following
sustained chord, Kaye swoops downward with a descending Moog line that sort
of melts us right back into the call-and-response vocal section, as if
nothing breathtakingly brilliant has just occurred!
Now they had the idea--this was the orchestral sound they were seeking on
Time and a Word. Sure, the effect was achieved here with overdubs, but
somehow the guys even managed to pull the section off impressively in
concert (check out the 1973 live triple album Yessongs), and subsequent
albums after The Yes Album would find the overdubs lessening to a role of
occasional ornamentation as the band honed its craft even further, to the
point at which, when they were on, they could make five guys sound like 50.
That's one of the fun things about the best Yes music: Everybody has such a
strong individual part that there are, in essence, five songs in one, and
you can return to the music and focus on one member at a time and hear
enough material each time to hold up a song on its own. Each member gave
himself full expression, yet somehow it all contributed to the larger
tapestry of the song, rather than becoming a bunch of self-indulgent
bombast with one person getting in another's way. It's an amazing balancing
act that I haven't heard any other rock band achievethe players stretch
out freely, yet they complement each other beautifully at the same time.
This is the essence of the democratic Yes, with everyone holding an equal
musical footing, that would become their strongest asset through their "classic" years.
It all began in earnest with The Yes Album, but the band's creative juices
were just starting to flow. They would rise to even greater heights, and on
the way they'd have to lose another original member to insert the last
piece of the puzzle. Thus, Kaye was on the way out, Rick Wakeman was on the
way in, and Yes was on its way up.
"You'll see perpetual change," indeed.
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