Four songs. Eighty-three minutes. Inspired by a footnote. That's the
essential biography of Tales from Topographic Oceans, and honestly, it
tells you everything you need to know.
Yes released their sixth studio album in December 1973, riding what should
have been an unassailable streak. The Yes Album, Fragile, Close to the
Edge — three records in three years, each one more ambitious than the last,
each one brilliant. The band had earned the right to swing for the fences.
What they hadn't earned was the right to bore us for an hour and twenty
minutes while pretending a footnote from Paramahansa Yogananda's
Autobiography of a Yogi constituted sufficient conceptual scaffolding for
a double album.
Jon Anderson read that footnote — something about four bodies of Hindu
knowledge called the Shastric scriptures — and decided each one deserved
its own side of vinyl. Not its own song, mind you. Its own side. Four
movements, four walls of sound, four opportunities to test the structural
integrity of the listener's patience. "The Revealing Science of God (Dance
of the Dawn)" alone runs to nearly twenty-two minutes, and I'd estimate
about nine of those minutes contain music that justifies its own existence.
The problem isn't ambition. Close to the Edge was ambitious. It had a
single eighteen-minute piece that never lost its way, that built and
released tension with the discipline of a classical composer who happened
to own a Mellotron. The problem with Tales is that the band had enough
material for one very good album and chose instead to make two mediocre
ones. Rick Wakeman understood this better than anyone in the room. His
assessment remains the single most devastating thing a band member has ever
said about their own record: "It's like a woman's padded bra. The cover
looks good, the outside looks good; it's got all the right ingredients,
but when you peel off the padding, there's not a lot there."
He wasn't being glib. Wakeman later
explained
the fundamental structural failure in practical terms — they had too much
material for a single album but not enough for a double, so they padded
it out, and the padding is awful. If the CD format had existed in 1973,
this would have been a tight fifty-minute record and we'd probably be
calling it a masterpiece. Instead, we got passages where five supremely
talented musicians appear to be busking their way through free-form
sections that needed another month of rehearsal and got about another
afternoon.
The Manchester Free Trade Hall show captures the absurdity perfectly. Yes
had sold out the venue to perform the album in its entirety. Wakeman — the
lone meat-eater in a band of vegetarians, which feels symbolically
appropriate somehow — found himself with so little to play during certain
movements that his keyboard tech asked what he wanted for dinner. Chicken
vindaloo, rice pilau, six papadums, bhindi bhaji, Bombay aloo, and a
stuffed paratha. The foil trays arrived mid-performance and Wakeman
ate curry off the top of his keyboards
while the rest of the band noodled their way through "The Ancient." His
own keyboard tech feeding him dinner during a live show because the music
didn't require his presence. That's not a rock and roll anecdote. That's
an indictment.
I should say that I own this album. I own it on vinyl — the original
Atlantic gatefold with Roger Dean's sleeve art, which is gorgeous and
nearly justifies the purchase on its own. I've listened to it probably
eight or nine times over the years, each time thinking I might have been
too harsh, that maybe the ambient passages would click on this listen, that
the fourth track would finally reveal itself as the hidden masterwork
apologists keep insisting it is.
It hasn't.
"Ritual (Nous Sommes du Soleil)" is the closest thing to a success on
the record, the one place where the extended format works because the band
actually develops ideas rather than circling them. Steve Howe's guitar work
throughout the album is frequently brilliant in isolation — his playing on
"The Revealing Science of God" is extraordinary — but brilliance in
isolation is precisely the problem. These are not compositions. They're
situations. Five musicians placed in a room and asked to fill twenty
minutes per side, sometimes finding each other, more often drifting through
what Melody Maker diplomatically described as music "brilliant in
patches, but often taking far too long to make its various points."
Robert Christgau was less diplomatic: "Nice 'passages' here, as they say,
but what flatulent quasisymphonies." I keep coming back to the word
flatulent. It's mean, but it's precise.
There's a certain kind of progressive rock fan who will tell you that
Tales is misunderstood, that it requires surrender, that you have to
meet it on its own terms. I've heard this argument applied to everything
from late-period Grateful Dead to Tarkovsky films, and it's almost never
true. Good art doesn't require you to abandon your critical faculties at
the door. Close to the Edge didn't need apologists. Fragile didn't
need you to read a footnote first. The best Yes material grabs you by the
collar even when it's being structurally complex. Tales asks you to
sit still and be reverent, which is a fundamentally different — and
fundamentally less interesting — demand.
Yes themselves seemed to recognise the problem on tour. As the concert
dates progressed, they
actually dropped portions of the album
from the setlist, which is an extraordinary admission for a band touring
a new record. Half the audience were in what Wakeman described as "a
narcotic rapture" and the other half were asleep. Those are his words,
not mine.
The album went to number one in the UK. It shipped gold. And it was the
first Yes record since 1971 that failed to reach platinum in America,
suggesting that word of mouth caught up with the hype fairly quickly.
Wakeman left the band shortly after. You could argue he was pushed. You
could argue he jumped. Either way, the curry told you everything about
where his head was.
They've just announced a fifteen-disc super deluxe edition. Fifteen discs
for four songs. I genuinely don't know whether that's commitment to the
archive or a kind of cosmic joke that proves Wakeman's point more
thoroughly than he ever could himself. Somewhere, a foil tray of chicken
vindaloo sits on a Moog synthesiser, and the universe makes perfect sense.
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