How chaos led to Yes’ greatest album in 1972: “Outbursts of anarchy”
How do you follow up a successful album? Whether you’re looking into the world of prog rock, rap, folk, or anywhere else, this is a question which has plagued creatives for decades now.
It’s a question that Yes faced in 1972, as the album that they had released the year prior, Fragile, had proven to be a commercial and critical success. The prog rock band simply weren’t holding back, as they enjoyed the freedom that came with the open-ended genre, so much so that they essentially backed themselves into a corner by removing so many corners.
Prog rock doesn’t really have a set definition, but it’s essentially just rock music with extra bits added. Those extra bits can be the music from different genres or cultures, the utilisation of strange time signatures, or even the willingness to add storylines to your songs. So many prog rock songs are over ten minutes in length because creative artists want to make use of this freedom, and do so by giving themselves more time to play with.
When you listen to Yes’ discography, it’s pretty easy to hear just how well they make use of all of this freedom. There isn’t really a style or sound that the band haven’t used, and it makes for one hell of a listen, but it also made for a nightmare in the studio – there are no limits on the kind of music that the band wants to make, and that means that there is creative tension, as ideas clash and mindsets rub against one another.
Chris Welch, the band’s biographer, went to visit the studio when they were recording the follow-up to Fragile, and what he saw was Yes at their most heated – when he was later talking about the atmosphere in the room, he said that there were “outbursts of anarchy”, and it led him to believe that the band weren’t a cohesive unit.
After a barrage of arguments and late nights, though, Yes managed to finish their next record, and it may well have been their best album ever – naturally, this is all subjective, but their 1972 record, Close to the Edge, is certainly one of their most ambitious offerings, and the A side in particular sees the band at their most experimental, as they create an 18-minute epic based on the novel Siddhartha.
Jon Anderson wrote the lyrics to the song, and he said his approach to writing means that often the meaning of a track doesn’t reveal itself to him until after it’s finished. “The lyrics, ‘Season witch could call you from the depths of your disgrace’,” he referenced.
“I realised what I was singing was all about the idea that your higher self will always save you if you keep your heart in the right place.”
Jon Anderson
There was also a massive relief that came to Anderson when he listened back to the song, as he felt as though it allowed him to come to terms with the idea of death. Some of the words within the epic track were influenced by a dream he had that made him feel more comfortable with passing. Maybe it was anarchy in the studio, but the end product of Close to the Edge brought a lot of comfort to Jon Anderson.
“The end verse is a dream that I had a long time ago about passing on from this world to another world, yet feeling so fantastic about it that death never frightened me ever since,” he noted.
Concluding, “That’s what seemed to come out in this song, that it was a very pastoral kind of experience rather than a very frightening one.”
