why late at night in the u.s. does ilm get all yessed out

Howe's fave was Chet Atkins, right? Obv Beatles and Zappa; you can hear CSNY in "Your Move".

Seems like he knew his classical and jazz better than Hackett too, which makes sense: https://web.archive.org/web/20040309154903/http://www.gibson.com/Whatsnew/pressrelease/2000/nov15a.html

a few years after starting guitar when I was twelve in 1959, I heard Chet Atkins and that was it. I heard who I consider the most well-rounded and most individual guitar player. Great style, great technique, but the inspiration he passed on to me was that if you want to do something, try it. If you want to step over here, try it. He gave me the idea that one guitarist could play any kind of guitar style. I never had that idea until I heard Chet. Also, jazz guitarists and classical guitarists.

mm: Any particular ones?

SH: It started with John Williams and Julian Bream, but then I realized Segovia. All three of them are brilliant. And Paco Pena and Pepe Romero play beautifully now. With jazz, as with rock, my roots were formulated by those guitarists of the post Charlie Christian era...

... mm: The ES-175 was obviously a fateful encounter, what attracted you to it?

SH: I didn't see any other guitar. That was the guitar I wanted. I loved all of the Gibsons, but when I saw the ES-175 I loved the inlays, the f-holes, and the beautiful, sharp cutaway with great access. I think mainly it was that I saw Wes (Montgomery), Joe Pass, even Kenny Burell with one. So, it was my destiny because it was a jazz guitar. What I didn't realize was that my life in music was not going to be about jazz. That was the transition period when I could have gone with the Les Paul and joined a flock of people, but the utter beauty of the 175 is what brought me around. No one was playing archtop, hollowbody guitars in a rock band. People laughed at me and thought I was really snooty. To me, it was an object of art, it wasn't just a guitar.

The comparison to Hackett was based on this quote wrt the writing of "Horizons", m/l variations on one of Bach's most famous pieces, the Prelude from the first Cello Suite in G (usu played in D on gtr-Hackett did it in G, so his comment about transposing it is a bit lol). Obv he knows his Bach now.

: I had been influenced by a piece that Julian Bream played, in fact, and I didn’t know who wrote it, and I found out years later that it was a piece by Bach and I transposed it to another key and... Bach tends to figure highly on my list of all-time favourite composers.

http://www.twronline.net/issues/twr36/twr36_sh01.htm

^source

For me, Jon Anderson + a bunch of high schoolers is more interesting than the remaining members of Yes + an Jon Anderson impersonator... https://www.phillymag.com/news/2021/08/04/jon-anderson-tour-paul-green-rock-academy/

now on Time and a Word. the thing I always thing of with this album is how the first track, "No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Required" sounds like the Sonic 2 bonus level music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MFZhzyY1ZE

I dunno if anyone else has made that connection, but it wouldn't be the first time a VGM composer ripped off classic prog...

I heard the first two Yes records years after I heard the later ones, and when I finally got to Time and a Word, two things about it struck me: that the orchestral arrangements that everyone seems to dislike are actually used pretty infrequently, and that Tony Kaye filled up the sound a lot more than I expected from his playing on The Yes Album (where I guess he is crowded out by Howe, who is of course a much more aggressive player than Peter Banks, and also used more overdubbing).

yeah the orchestra is actually kinda neat, think the bigger problem is the songs aren't very good

I remember one song has an absolute killer first half and great drums but drops off a bit.

so uh Howe's playing on "South Side of the Sky" is some real world-destroying shit

Yeah I don't usually think of that as a guitar-dominated track but I love his riffing and little fills throughout the verses. Dark and heavy while keeping an almost funky groove.

I’ve seen that this thread exists forever and just now realized (before clicking it to confirm) that it’s a Yes thread

I figured it was some weird joke or a thing where after hours posters were giving one word “yes” responses

It's the thread where it's safe to post tracks from the Alan White solo album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c9x78hY_iE

Yes solo albums S/D

Join me in my excitement

will never be more yessed out than these yessongs (alas)

heart of the sunrise (greensboro)
perpetual change (msg)
and you and i (greensboro)
starship trooper (london)

aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh

thank you, good night

one childhood memory I have is hearing "Siberian Khatru" playing on the radio and really loving it but not knowing who it was. based on the information I had I thought maybe it was Led Zeppelin? I also had the same reaction to "Tempus Fugit", I even remember describing it to the guy at the record store like "it's something something something...yes! Deedodododo wahwahahaahah". must've done a poor job because the guy was a real Yeshead!!!

i had 'classic yes' and while it was cool, i felt, as a teenager, that it did not rock enough

during my college visits in like 1988, however, i was staying at the house of a cornell professor who had gone to my high school 30 years previously. couldn't sleep -- of course -- but i had a radio-only walkman. and whatever classic rock station within walkman range of ithaca, ny that night rolled out some fuckin ~yessongs~

suddenly these songs had edges and cliffs that i wanted more of. this, suddenly, rocked?

'and you and i' was the first one that really hit me -- it had more eclipses and more apocolypses

My first* album was Yessongs, and 15 year old me couldn't have been happier playing it on my brand new Admiral 8-track/radio/turntable stereo.

* Technically, I had asked for a Dino, Desi, & Billy LP on a years-earlier birthday, and bought a used Outsiders ("Time Won't Let Me," not the UK one) LP that one of my brother's friends was selling at age 11. But this was the first new one I bought with my own money.

Yes, 1974: "Hey, we heard that you found our previous record pretentious, esoteric and self-indulgent. To make it up to you, here's Relayer".

got excited about a Starcastle LP in the local shop and the guy was like "cool, what do they sound like?" and all I could think to say was "well have you ever listened to Yes and wished they were less good?"

xp i mean, relayer was almost an exact return to the structure of their most acclaimed album (except with the second and third track switched)

theres more in Gates of Delirium than all 80 minutes of Tales combined

pretentious, esoteric and self-indulgent

Do you mean that these were the complaints of Close to the Edge fans or of rock critics?

Critics were obviously more hostile than Yes fans, though I'm sure some listeners were put off as well. I prefer Relayer to Close to the Edge, but each of the later songs is denser and more difficult than its analog on the earlier record. Of course, certain Yes fans would have welcomed a triple studio album in 1974!
It just amused me while listening to Relayer yesterday that THIS monster was their "retrenchment", "fan-service" record.

One presumable fan put off by the Tales record and tour was Mark Perry, later of Alternative TV: "Then another pivotal thing was Yes at Redding for the 'Tales of Topographic Oceans' (tour). It was a nightmare, sitting in the pouring rain. You're thinking 'what the fuck is this about?'" He probably was not alone.

I almost never listen to Tales but more just because it's comparatively lacking in energy and less memorable melodically, both of which are addressed on Relayer, not because of pretension, esotericism, or self-indulgence.

Maybe I should revisit it. I remember it as sort of an ambient fusion record?

it kind of just drifts along. I'm not completely convinced it's bad, although it is clearly unfocused, but I rarely have much interest in spending a lot of time with it

right, there are some parts on Tales I absolutely love and I feel like a 40 minute edited version of the album would rule (didn't some ilxor actually make that?), even if it still would be nowhere near the surrounding albums. I always go into it thinking I'll discover something but I never do

actually what it reminds me most of is Mike Oldfield, just the way everything tweedles along forever until getting to "the good part". though there's much more structure in what Oldfield does. learning that Tales was basically a Anderson/Howe solo project that was mostly written in one marathon session made it make a lot more sense.

I've got the complete Yes songbook, which probably helped me understand the structure of Tales. Also I'm a huge fan of the first four Oldfield records, so obviously someone with the patience to wait for "the good parts".

I like Oldfield quite a bit. I usually find his compositions really tightly structured. I can appreciate looseness and jamming too, though!

I sometimes try to imagine the actual humans who hear music and need to turn it off because the sound is affecting too much pretension of unearned significance or because they can just hear the artists indulging their own base inclinations.

I don't mean that as a dig on Oldfield, I like a bunch of his stuff too. the big climactic parts don't hit as hard without everything leading up to them. but I'm not sure if that approach really works for Yes.

sund4r, you mean the listeners/critics actually envy the artists for "getting away" with the self-indulgence?

frogbs, I would say the payoff at the end of "The Remembering" is worth the build-up, though Yes definitely take an indirect approach over those 20 minutes.

yeah that bit on "The Remembering" is honestly some of my favorite Yes music ever but every time I hear it all I can think is how amazing it would be if they'd just built a solid 8-minute tune around it

I definitely appreciated the edit of Tales (was it Matt?), it helped me appreciate the album more. I think it has some of their finest moments, a real shame it wasn't better executed

I mean that "pretentiousness" and "self-indulgence" are moral judgments of intentions and processes listeners are often not even privy to as opposed to audible phenomena and when they appear in musical critique, they seem like projections that say little about the work itself. It's not how any non-critic I know hears music and I'm unconvinced it was actually what 70s critics were even hearing and responding to. I can understand disliking something bc you hate the singer's voice or it's too loud or too simple or you get bored by long solos or the composition seems unstructured or the lyrics are overly sentimental or the I-IV-V progression is trite ... - those are all things you can hear.

I assumed that Close To The Edge and the earlier albums were all well received critically?

Yeah, they got decent reviews at the time in RS/MM. Christgau was condescending 'but' gave them B- to C-range 'grades' (including Tales). I feel like the reviews in the 1983 RS guide were worse than in the 1979 guide but can't find it? Maybe my beef is more with 80s and 90s critics idk; more of a general bugbear about those critical crutches, which were v common at one time.

when I hear "pretentious" I usually think of ELP, which I think may have earned it due to their frequent "adapting" of classical pieces and the perhaps implicit statement that they were "improving" on those pieces, or they were worthy of covering those composers? tbf I thought that was total bullshit too, ELP were rock as fuck. but I do think that Tales is pretentious in the sense of "we're so good that even our aimless noodling is interesting and worthy of putting on a record", which I guess some of the band didn't agree with

ELP went fucking hard, like fucking "Knife-Edge"?

I really didn't like Relayer on a recent listening, something about the production struck me as tinny? Too many effects or something dulling the overall sound gestalt.

Going for the One, however... holy shit what a record

Based on the Youtube stream, it seems like the Steven Wilson mix of Relayer would be clearer and more pleasant than the older CD version I have.

I feel like the reviews in the 1983 RS guide were worse than in the 1979 guide but can't find it?

Yep, CTTE and The Yes Album got five stars in the 1979 (red) edition, and no Yes album was awarded less than three stars. The entry was written by one Charley Walters who praises their “varied virtuosity,” calls CTTE “technically brilliant, many-hued and free…most importantly, it rocks,” and says of GFTO, “No new ground is broken…Nonetheless, it’s a more than adequate display.”

In the 1983 (blue) edition, no Yes record got more than three stars, and Tales, GFTO, Tormato, Drama, and Yesshows all got one star. Wayne King (whom I know little about, other than that he was a Who fanatic) wrote the entry, starting off with “Classical rockers with hearts of cold…” moving on to GFTO being “less an effective reduction of valid ideas than an admission of total artistic bankruptcy,” and ending with, “Who cared if the final product was now a bland assembly-line concoction? Apparently no one.”

So it’s a reversal from the red to blue edition similar to the Doors entries. I dunno how those decisions were made, or by whom (Dave Marsh? John Swenson? Both? Neither?). The only instance I can find of a negative-to-positive reappraisal is the Pere Ubu entries (one star in ‘79, four and five stars in ‘83).

Ah, yeah, thanks. Also found this, which is one I remember reading at the time.

Rating: 2.5 Stars
"Pointlessly intricate guitar and bass solos, caterwauling keyboards, quasi-mystical lyrics proclaimed in alien falsetto, acid-dipped album-cover illustrations: this British group wrote the book on art-rock excess...Close to the Edge has its moments, but most of this hotly anticipated follow-up is a monumental snore, a dubious hot-air suite whipped up around a handful of promising song fragments." (Mark Coleman, 1992 RS Album Guide)

Are there bass solos on that album? On "Siberian Khatru" maybe...?

Pointlessly intricate guitar and bass solos, caterwauling keyboards, quasi-mystical lyrics proclaimed in alien falsetto, acid-dipped album-cover illustrations

This makes it sound even better than it actually is!

The Wilson remix of relayer is better than the unpleasant rhino remaster but the original late 80s cd is even better (just turn up the volume)