A long-after-the-fact reassessment

My very favorite Roger Dean album cover art.

It’s January 1974. Let’s say you’re a high school kid with Christmas bucks to spend. You have ten bucks, so you can buy two single albums ($4.99 ea.) or a double ($8.99) at your local record store. Do you drop your whole sawbuck on the Yes album?

Maybe I should try to convince you that you should…

But no, I think you need to go with Quadrophenia, to be honest. But maybe you have a friend or a sibling who also has ten bucks. Maybe you try to convince them to buy the Yes, and you’ll trade them back and forth. They’ll likely tell you you’re crazy and buy the new Paul and the new Zeppelin instead. Dang! Sorry, Tales From Topographic Oceans.

And yet… Here we are, just 50 short years later. Have time and cooler heads allowed the transcendent beauty of it to cause Tales From Topographic Oceans to rise to the top of anyone else’s pantheon? I looked on Pitchfork, and they have one Yes article, a single digest review of their first 9 albums, through Tormato. They give Fragile an 8.8 out of 10, Close to the Edge gets a straight 9.0, and then Tales gets 2.2 (don’t bother with that review, it’s ridiculous.) Elsewhere online, I’ve read the claim that Tales From Topographic Oceans is the album that killed prog rock.

Did it? Did it really?

Don’t tell King Crimson, who had a steam of mindblowingly great prog records and released Starless and Bible Black and Red in Tales‘s wake, and then more when a new lineup started playing in 1980, and who toured just last year, or Genesis, who released the four-sided The Lamb Dies Down on Broadway later that year, to much acclaim. Don’t mention Godbluff. Obviously that’s a secret. Van Der Graaf is another band that just recently toured. And let’s not forget that Yes is still touring and releasing new music to this day (though I think there’s one person from the band that recorded TFTO still standing on that stage.)

So maybe Tales only made prog rock say, “ow?”

My own assessment places Yes’s sixth near the top of the ouvre, though it took me a good long while to come to that opinion. But it’s true: I think that record is gorgeous. I think they were trying to both update their sound and stretch themselves in new ways. They opened up their sound, slowed the tempos, added more jazz and folk elements, focused on groove, with long solo sections. On the whole they made a stunning album, though side two, “The Remembering: High the Memory” and side three, “The Ancient: Giants Under the Sun” are somewhat less compelling that sides one and four.

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In 1972, Yes was as close to the top of the music world as they ever got. That year they released Close to the Edge, considered by most to be their magnum opus, as the end of a string of three classic albums (The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close.) In the wake of that last album, they began looking around for their next project.

Steve Howe suggested the then-zeitgeist-y book Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, as a basis for their next material, and he and Jon Anderson began composing based on the book. Howe and Anderson wrote my two favorite movements (first and fourth), Squire gets a writing credit on the third movement, and the whole band gets credit on the second movement.

They began the process of making this piece — which Jon Anderson described at the time as “4 Close to the Edges.” Could they pull it off? Time would tell.

The recording sessions dragged on for 5 months. Their process had always been nitpicky enough that it had alienated original drummer Bill Bruford enough that he left after Close to the Edge, to be replaced by Alan White, who had worked as a session drummer for the Beatles. Rick Wakeman left in the middle of the project to go make a solo record: he was gone for 6 weeks, but came back to finish the project and support it on tour.

And time did tell. They packaged their work as a double album: a single piece of music in 4 album-side-long movements. A whack of music, which they played in its entirety, as a single piece, on the following tour.

People booed the new stuff and screamed for the hits. At a Yes concert, they screamed for the damn hits.

Close to the Edge, has, to date, earned double platinum record sales. TFTO has only earned gold in the fifty years since its release, so essentially, Tales From Topographic Oceans bombed. People hated it. And when Wakeman’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (the album he’d left the Tales sessions to make) went to #1 on the album charts, He called Jon Anderson that very day and quit Yes.

Winter 73/74 was actually replete with highly-regarded classic rock albums. Band on the Run was on the racks that same year, so were Dark Side of the Moon, Houses of the Holy, Quadrophenia, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Alladin Sane, All the Young Dudes, Goat’s Head Soup, and Selling England by the Pound by Genesis and Passion Play by Tull (which was a number one album in the US.) TFTO had some serious competition.

In that field, if an album that didn’t immediately reveal its charms, wear them like rhinestones on its lapels and sleeves, it was doomed, and Tales was built for deep, repeated listening, not for heavy rotation on pop radio.

I’ll take a moment here to grouse about the albums design, which was quite inept. That Roger Dean cover is gorgeous, but the inside of the gatefold is clunky, a series of blurry photos that really don’t meet the standard for Yes’s beautiful cover art, and an unreadable lyric sheet, done in white serif type face on a dark-blue background. That’s a rookie mistake that may be one of the real causes of TFTO‘s poor reception.

I first came into contact with Tales well after the fact, maybe as late as 1980. I knew one guy who’d heard it, and he told me he didn’t like it. I went looking for info about it at the library, and it had a whole raft of bad reviews (indeed, you could have built a raft out of all of the magazines and newspapers who had published negative reviews of the thing,) so I weighed how much I loved that cover art, and how much bad press that I had read about it, and bought something else. I think I did eventually get it for, like, $3 used. At the time, I thought it was boring and, tbh, rough. As most people did.

But here’s the real mystery, and why I’m writing this. I don’t know why I thought that record wasn’t the most polished thing they’d ever done to that point, because it is. The album is laced with references to their previous music, and to my ears at the time, the repeated quotations of other Yes songs suggested a lack of inspiration. Now, though, I hear how those references relate to the theme of the piece, the moments of a life, the highs, the lows, our memories of those peak experiences that become peaks themselves. I decided that I liked “Ritual: Nous Som Du Soleil” best, but it didn’t make its way to my turntable often.

These days, there are times when I think Tales is the best thing Yes ever did. It’s their downtempo album. meant for winter 73/74. It’s a very summery album, ironically… sun soaked and danceable, pastoral in vibe, very Green Man (tell me Yes isn’t a seelie (Summer Fae. Ask me about that sometime…) band… go on, try…) And the album’s virtues are all on display in the first section of the album, “The Revealing Science of God: Dance of the Dawn.” There’s less of the almost atonal angularity of earlier records (and which came back on their next album) and more slow, sensuous groove.

I think it misses the zeitgeist by being a little bit too pagan/hippie/pastoral, when rock was becoming more of an urban thing, generally. That may have been one of the things that made it hard for me to latch an ear to at first, because at the time I discovered it, I was far more motivated as a fan to seek out music played by people in leather jackets and knees-out jeans. And, of course, I was reading a lot of rock music press, and the consensus against it affected how I heard it.

Now, I live in a country farmhouse, wake up in the dawn light, and the pace of my life is slower than it was. Also, this record is so aurally interesting. I love the harmonics of it. The band plays with overtones in performance and then enhances that with their recorded process, especially in their vocals, shading from bright to dark and playing those shades against each other. There’s a sweetness here that prog hardly ever achieves.

Tales From Topographic Oceans is the work of a band trying to grow, to expand their definition even of their own identity. It’s sweet and soulful, trying its best to move your booty along with your mind, and while it didn’t succeed at the time, it’s certainly working for me these days.

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The version of Tales From Topographic Oceans I own is the 2003 Rhino remaster, which includes two extra tracks, live runthroughs of “Dance of the Dawn” and the third (and in my opinion weakest) track, “Giants Under the Sun.” both are nice to have, though neither adds much to the full recordings. The lyric booklet reproduces the terrible original; it’s still hard to read, but following along with it helped me get the shape of each of the four tracks, and appreciate them better as a result.