The 1973 album that turned Billy Joel against prog: “They lost me”
For years, UK prog was less a genre and more a punchline. Outside of its cult fanbase, it was a maligned and reviled chapter in pop where bloated conceptual narratives and theatrical excess became lost in their own self-satisfied fug of grandiose pretension.
It’s hard not to lapse into musical clichés when exploring prog’s overnight snuffing once punk lit its insurrectionary fire underneath ten-minute drum solos and multi-rack synth wizards. As Colin Meloy of the Decemberists recalled at the time, “Prog-rock and concept records and some ambitious projects were kind of anathema post-punk.”
He added, “They were destroyed with the advent of punk rock. You don’t necessarily need to have a degree in music composition to play in a rock band anymore, which is a great thing.”
It can’t be overstated how utterly fatigued a generation of kids were of Emerson, Lake & Palmer or Yes’ pompous unmooring away from what made rock ‘n’ roll exciting in the first place, despite glam’s glitter trying its best to keep the charts fun. Simply put, the themes of prog didn’t exactly cater to the angst of many a 14-year-old.
Evolving as a successor to the psychedelic movement of the 1960s, prog’s true torchbearers would be found in West Germany, burnished amid the 1968 student protests kicking against the residual Nazism baked into the judiciary and civil service at the time. Their outlook was one of justly considered revolut.
Seeking a new Germanic musical language away from America’s rock and R&B, groups like Amon Düül II, Neu!, Can, Faust and an early Kraftwerk scored the revolutionary passions schemed and organised across the country’s communes and college campuses.
They combined avant-garde arrangements, heady electronically coated improvisation, and innovative explorations into tape and collage pieces. It was risky business, too. Sometimes tapes had to be smuggled over the Berlin Wall for fanatics on the other side. That felt vital, but when this style was adopted en masse in the West, a few folks grew weary.
Even British prog’s early admirers were left cold by the ever-swelling productions and compositional silliness. Largely considered Yes’ defining record, 1972’s Close to the Edge boasted Billy Joel as a fan, having followed them since their 1969 eponymous debut. “I opened up for them in ’73 or ’74. I’d never heard of these guys, and then I hung around to see them play, and I was blown away,” he told Vulture in 2018. “I was with Yes up to Tales from Topographic Oceans. Then they lost me.”
It’s a mark in their discography often insisted upon by Yes fans, considering whatever pearls of fantastical evocation were held in their mage hands, ebbing for a truly giant leap forward in total pointy hat twattery. Deciding to cut a double album, Tales from Topographic Oceans‘ galumph into 18-minute minimum suites of furrowed-browed immersions into ancient Hindu texts proved so witheringly indulgent that even future Arthurian legends on ice composer Rick Wakeman distanced himself from the group.
“I think there was a psychological effect of, ‘Oh, we’re doing a double album’,” producer Eddy Offord revealed in 1996. “Now we can make things twice as long, twice as boring, and twice as drawn out!”
Such bloated bombast makes a support slot from Joel even more surprising. No stranger to prog himself, dipping his toe with the prior hard rock group Attila, he later derided as “psychedelic bullshit”. He even said that being in Attila made him mentally unwell, so at least it says something that he was a fan of their early days given how harrowing his experiences with the genre had been.
However, Joel’s opening slot for Yes’ arena tours during their pomp was around the time of his Piano Man LP, an exploration of adult contemporary soft pop ballads and folk pieces far removed from Yes’ cosmic noodles. He was no stranger to expansiveness, but just as they swelled, he was looking to focus on rather more earnest tales. He began to question the intentions of prog in general from there.
While Joel’s career flew for the rest of the decade and Yes’ reputation plummeted, both entered the 1980s with a renewed pop vigour. 1983 saw Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl‘ storm the charts, and Yes enlisted Trevor Horn’s studio assistance for ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’, with the 90215 album bringing them to the MTV generation.
