How in god’s name is it that I don’t hate Yes’s 1973 album Tales from Topographic Oceans? I can’t possibly not despise it! It represents everything I in hate in music, in life, and in capes (keyboard player Rick Wakeman wore a golden one, and it was even more tacky than your average cape). Yet here I am, in the awkward position of having positive things to say about a four-song double album by one of progressive rock’s most pretentious and overblown groups. Could it be that I have rabies? Am I frothing at the mouth? Or did someone crown me with a rock? Yeah, that’s it. A big fat rock made out of rock.
And it had to be a big rock because I actually listened to the damn album in its entirety, this despite the fact that the shortest song on Tales from Topographic Oceans clocks in at just less than nineteen minutes. No one—and I’m including inanimate objects—can listen to a song that long. It’s been proven with caged ping pong balls.
Before we get started, a word or two about the album’s “backstory.” On the album’s sleeve, Yes vocalist and professional spiritual seeker Jon Anderson writes, “Leafing through Paramhansa Yoganda’s Autobiography of a Yogi I got caught up in the lengthy footnote on page 83.” I’m willing to bet this makes Tales from Topographic Oceans the only LP ever inspired by a footnote. Show me another one and I will shatter my vinyl copy of the LP and eat the jagged shards.
Not surprisingly, Anderson had a high opinion of the work. As did producer Eddy Offord, who when asked why it took so long to complete Tales from Topographic Oceans replied, “No one would have asked Picasso to start work at two o’clock and paint a masterpiece by five.” Why his interviewer didn’t laugh in his face eludes me.
But not everyone involved in the record’s making had as elevated an opinion of the work. He of the golden cape, Rick Wakeman told an interviewer, “Tales from Topographic Oceans is like a woman’s padded bra. The cover looks good, but when you peel off the padding there’s nothing there.” As for the subsequent tour, during which Yes played the album in its entirety, Wakeman said, “Half the audience were in a narcotic rapture on some far-off planet, and the other half were asleep, bored shitless.” (You’ve got to love Rick; he officially went on record calling the later “pop” Yes “total and utter shit.”)
I’ve lodged my complaint against progressive rock before (several times actually) so please allow me to state my case in the form of a succinct equation. Technical virtuosity + long, multi-part songs + esoteric subject matter +hubris + contempt for the three-minute rock song = music designed for fellow wonky musicians and/or people who listen to said music because they think it makes them appear smart. Yes meets all of these criteria, and throws in a footnote to boot. Someday I’ll get around to reading that footnote. I’m betting it’s a recipe for General Tso chicken.
And yet, as I said at the beginning, I can’t find it within myself to hate Tales from Topographic Oceans. In fact I’ve grown rather fond of parts of it. It certainly beats the work of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who made a career of exclusively producing songs I hate from beginning to end. Still, Tales requires you to wade through pools of prog vomit to get from tasty bit to tasty bit. It’s prog’s MO and there’s no escaping it. If you’re lucky you get the parts for an Aston Martin DBS most of which are defective, along with a blueprint that puts them all in the wrong places.
The best one can hope for on a progressive rock album is a sustained passage of high quality, and “The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn)” opens with one. Trouble is, come the song’s middle, things get gooey and slow and I nod off. There must be eight songs at least in this one, and the only way to get to the good ones are by stretcher. There’s something to be said about the high speed race towards the end, as well as the slower passage that follows, but I’m inclined to agree with Anderson when he sings “What happened to this song?” I could tell him, but he’d probably plonk me with a sack full of time signatures.
“The Remembering (High in the Memory)” opens on a slow note, with Anderson proving he’s the father of Perry Farrell. Then the band takes a turn towards Genesis. None of this much impresses me, although there is this fascinating moment that evokes images of really skinny guys trying on slacks at a plus-size men’s store. And another where they sound like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. That one scares the shit out of me.
“The Ancient (Giants Under the Sun)” opens with a gong to the face, then all kinds of percussion hit you like Jujubes until you scream. Yes then takes a moment to demonstrate how sensitive they are, while Anderson proves what I’ve always suspected, namely that he’s the father of Geddy Lee, the mother being a bird of prey Jon had a one-night stand with at a Soft Machine concert in Toronto.
After that you get some herky-jerky stop and start followed by this really pompous synthesizer passage by Wakeman. The song does end on a truly transcendent note, but I can only liken listening to the song in its entirety to watching every film at a 12-theater multiplex at the same time. You’ll catch snippets of each one, but you’ll leave with your head spinning and wanting your popcorn money back.
The LP’s highlight is “Ritual (Nous Sommes du Soleil),” in part because Yes demonstrates that it has cojones and its music needn’t have the complexity of a cloverleaf interchange. Which is to say even I can negotiate the song without ending up at a progressive rock fantasy camp in Peoria, Illinois. The song has real muscle, Anderson proves he passed high school French (I didn’t), there’s a great crescendo and some exotic percussion, and for once Yes doesn’t adhere to the Albert Speer Fallacy, which states that making things bigger automatically makes them better.
I tend to agree with rock critic Robert Christgau’s assessment of Tales from Topographic Oceans: “Nice ‘passages’ here, as they say, but what flatulent quasisymphonies–the whole is definitely less than the sum of its parts, and some of the parts are pretty negligible.” And yet. For the first time in my life I hear the nice passages, and I’ll even take a few of them home with me. I’ll despise myself for it, of course, and be forced to question my entire value system, But what’s a guy to do when Yes no longer means No? Say Yes to Yes? No fucking way.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
C-
