“A great piece”: the story of Yes’ first masterpiece in 1971
Progressive rock was, in many ways, the natural evolution of the psychedelic expression that dominated the counterculture age, but even the greatest titans of the prog age took a few years before they truly hit their stride; Yes being perhaps the principal example of that fact.
It was in 1969, with the echoes of flower power still ruminating around London’s music scene, that Yes issued their debut album. Despite the cult status that their inaugural LP has since amassed, for its innovative brand of far-out psychedelia, it failed to make much of an impact in its day.
Even the band themselves seemed to know that they hadn’t yet struck upon the kind of sound they were stretching for, and it took another few albums before the likes of Jon Anderson felt as though Yes were achieving their full potential.
According to the lead singer, that era of Yes’ prog mastery didn’t begin until 1971, first hinted at on The Yes Album before being fully realised on its seminal follow-up, Fragile. Not only was the record a landmark for Yes, being the LP in which they truly hit their stride, but it also marked the beginning of the prog age in a much more widespread sense.
Of course, there were earlier prog albums on the airwaves, but there seemed to be a definitive, nationwide shift towards the sound after that 1971 record.
Highlighting the record’s stand-out, ‘Heart of the Sunrise’, as a notable favourite from the early days of Yes, Anderson explained in an interview with Songfacts, “One of the things that was always important for Yes was to create music for the stage to perform, not to make a record.”
“We were very lucky to go in the studio and make records, but our main game was to put on a show and entertain the audience, and in doing so we put that into the record.”
Jon Anderson
In essence, that was the manifesto for the entirety of the prog scene, which transformed albums from being mere collections of disparate songs into expansive performances in their own right. ‘Heart of the Sunrise’, for instance, had an 11-minute runtime, which was virtually unheard of in the single-centric airwaves of the early 1970s. As time went on, though, those tracks only seemed to grow longer.
“I got into this whole thing about doing a 20-minute piece,” the songwriter reflected. “Because in those days, you could only have 20 minutes on each side of an album. If it had been 30 minutes, it would have been a 30-minute piece.” Either way, it was on Fragile that these experiments and ever-expanding compositions came into their own, predicting the later prog masterpiece that was its follow-up, Close to the Edge.
“Close to the Edge was the first inkling that we were really jumping into a different world that hadn’t really been tried out by very many people,” Anderson said, but it is fair to say that the content of that 1972 record would never have come to fruition were it not for the progenitive experimentation of its predecessor, Fragile – the first of multiple prog masterpieces struck upon by Yes during their illustrious tenure.
