The 1972 Yes song that shaped modern rock, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
The biggest song that Yes have ever released was ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’, but its success was a double-edged sword.
The band had originally made a name for themselves as a prog rock outfit, putting together elongated and complicated songs which expanded beyond the realms of standard mainstream rock. However, in a bid to write a hit single, they left behind this usual approach in a bid to try and write a hit that was ready for radio coverage.
The song was a success, there’s no denying that, but that success wound up being a bit of a problem. Suddenly, the band were being pressured to create another track similar to it, but it wasn’t a style of music that they were necessarily comfortable with. It was hard for them to get back on top of their game after the monumental win of ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’.
“By the time we got to Big Generator,” said Jon Anderson, talking about their 1987 album, “I was ready to leave because nobody was happy. We were scrambling to make a hit record, and the record company and management were all they talked about. They’d play records and say, ‘This is a hit record, make something like this’.”
While ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ may well have been one of the band’s biggest singles, they were also capable of writing hit songs in their original style. Sure, they might not have become quite as big as their 1983 classic, but they still reached the right audience and were a lot truer to the sound that Yes were used to making. One of their biggest tracks of this nature came in 1972 with the release of ‘Roundabout’. This was their biggest song before the release of ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’, and it was very true to the kind of sound that Yes had become masters of.
It was layered, complex, catchy, and gave listeners a vast musical soundscape that they could take their time to walk around. This is what prog rock is all about, and Yes managed to carve a hit single out of a massive amount of music. It wasn’t easy to find the hidden gem in the midst of all the music, given it was originally an eight-minute song. It was cut around, and the order was changed so it could be three minutes long and a lot more radio-friendly.
This was a good middle ground for Yes, and showed that they could pretty easily write hits for the radio without giving up their prog rock roots. Albeit, Jon Anderson admitted that it must have been a big job to get it sounding up to scratch. “When we first heard the ‘Roundabout’ single, it was on the radio,” he said, “We didn’t know it was released. We were busy being a band on the road, and then we heard the edit, and we thought, ‘Wow, that must have been a big pair of scissors to edit that song’. I mean, it was just totally wrong musically.”
He continued, “It actually worked and all of a sudden we became famous, we had a hit record and more people came to see us, which was great, because then they would see the progression of music we’d been doing and they’d see us more as a band and not just wait for ‘Roundabout’. Because we didn’t do that ‘Roundabout’ in those days. We did the eight-minute version.”
The song is an example of how prog rock can be enjoyed by the masses, and given that at the beginning of the 1970s the genre was only just finding form, it inspired a lot of people who were keen on making prog rock. It’s considered so influential in the modern age that when putting together a tracklist of all the songs which have shaped modern rock, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame added it, and said it was one of the most important prog songs out there.
