The 1978 Yes album Rick Wakeman can’t stand listening to: “Appalling”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out most Yes albums, but it certainly helps.
Even though a lot of their records feature some of the greatest progressive music ever created, there are more than a few times during one of their epics where many people would start wondering what the hell they are even listening to half the time. It all held together in some strange way thanks to Rick Wakeman, but there were also more than a few times where the band’s resident wizard thought that they didn’t push themselves as far as they were supposed to behind the scenes.
But it’s hard to think of any project in the 1970s where the band weren’t working hard enough. The entire arrangement of an album like Close to the Edge is still one of the most complicated records of that time, and even if the band had different arrangements of what they wanted to make at the time, it was anyone’s guess as to whether they could even remember everything by the time they got to the studio.
Being able to play extensions of certain ideas would have seemed like the height of pretentiousness, but that wasn’t always the case. Jon Anderson was making the kind of lyrics that he truly believed in every single time they made a new record, and if you want to know where true pretentiousness starts, it usually comes when talking about records like Tales From Topographic Oceans.
Wakeman already had his fair share of things to say about that album for being overly indulgent, but it’s not exactly awful from back to front, either. It’s definitely too long in some places, and having an entire double record composed of only four songs would have been enough for the average rock fan to roll their eyes, but Wakeman was still doing a fantastic job making the entire piece hold together half the time they played.
But Tormato is a much different story. The band was making all the right choices for what they wanted their songs to be, but the entire thing seemed to fall apart during the production stages. It definitely has a unique sound to it, but when looking at the other records they’d made up until that point, it does feel a little bit chaotic trying to latch onto every single thing in the mix at any one time.
It does have its fair share of fans, but Wakeman was happy to claim that he threw a tomato at the record because he hated it so much, saying, “[It was] me. I mean, Tormato is a sad album because there’s some great music on it. Appallingly produced. It needs to be remixed. I’d love to get my hands on it [and] get the opportunity to remix that album. There’s some great playing. There’s some lovely stuff, [but] it should be redone.”
Then again, the problems with that album were already a sad sign of things to come. Wakeman and Anderson would be gone by the time they started working on the next album, and while the idea to replace them with members of the Buggles was definitely a strange choice, the idea of them coming back together for 90125 at least proved to all of them to have a greater care for everyone that they were working with.
While the happy times weren’t going to stick around for that much longer, no matter which lineup you were talking about, Wakeman could at least take the piss out of himself every now and again. He knew that not everything that they made was perfect, and if they could play like madmen whenever they could, it was only fair that they highlight the moments where things didn’t work out.
