Ian Hartley has been putting up a number of live performances over the last week or so, including Tales and some tracks from Wembley 1978.
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Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it’s been. -
As well as in this recording as in the one of The Ancient it's not something one would focus directly on, since Howe and Wakeman are so much to the forefront in the respective songs, but boy that Alan White!! What a freaking amazing drummer he was. I often think that people don't really understand how good he actually was. I think because he was first taught how to play piano, he knew a lot about melody and how to support and bring out the melody in a song even better than most drummers know and understand how to do.Comment
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A slab of prime cutlet Yes magic. The Remembering is one of my top ten Yes songs of any era and this live version sounds great. Tales and Relayer kinda go together for me for some reason, almost like they were from the same lineup in spots. But on this you totally hear the Wakeman in there. Love the mellotron and synth washes, depicting the majesty of the sea.Comment
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Interesting. I connect the track Close to the Edge closely with Tales: the ambient intro to Revealing Science, as restored on the deluxe and expanded edition of 2003, echoes the ambient sounds that begin and end Close to the Edge, and then the main theme of that piece is recapitulated in Ritual. Moreover, the ambient intro to Revealing Science, beginning the whole album, is the sound of the ocean, of breaking waves on a shore. Close to the Edge is the river hat eventually reaches that sea.Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it’s been.Comment
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Interesting, to me I connect CTTE album and song as the end of a phase and Tales as the beginning of another one even though the roots of Tales can be heard in the Close To The Edge song. To me, CTTE is closer linked to stuff like Heart Of The Sunrise and The Yes Album. It's the logical conclusion of those first three albums, the place where it was all building towards. Tales sounds like something new and the beginning of something else that has more in common with Relayer or even Going For The One album to me. Maybe it's the change of drummers, or the lack of any gritty hammond organ, I don't know. I don't hear much or any organ on Tales or Relayer. Maybe because CTTE and Yes Album both have green album covers, I just think of Tales as the next block after Yessongs - here is where they get a little more cinematic with their instrumentation.
The ambient intro of Revealing Science on the 2003 version indeed does sound like the gentle sea at dawn, but also may depict a rebirth of sorts - a hazy metamorphosis from idyllic nothingness eventually giving way into clarity with the opening vocals of "Dawn of the light...". I do like how Steve Howe sneaks the Close To The Edge theme into Ritual. But to me that's the only nod to Yes past - Topographic Oceans being so unlike anything else they had done up to that point that you would miss it if you weren't paying attention. I think I went some while before listening to Ritual one day and thinking, "Hey... isn't that...?"Comment
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My first encounter with Yesmusic was Close to the Edge when I bought the album on a whim in the summer of 1973 with birthday money (2.14 GBP). I thought the inner gatefold painting was wonderful and it reminded me of the choices of the mouse Reepicheep at the end of C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I had not heard anything by them before that. Roundabout was not a single over here. My first hearing of Tales in its entirety was live on Nov 26, 1973, so about six months later. I didn't get the album till Xmas that year. The set list for that tour, at least until they started dropping parts of Tales, was the Close to the Edge album in reverse order, so the title track came directly before the interval, and then Takes in full in the second half of the concert. I suppose it could be said it was their first complete albums tour, with Roundabout as the encore. Consequently, my reading of the connection between Close to the Edge and Tales probably arises from that, and my subsequent consolidation of that interpretation, of those pieces being thematically, structurally, musically and lyrically linked, has followed on from that. It wasn't until sometime in 1974 that I bought Yessongs.
If the sequencing of the Close to the Edge album had been the same as how they played it on that tour, leading off with Siberian Khatru and then And You And I, it becomes a little more obvious I think that they are closely linked. It don't think it necessarily has anything to do with different drummers or variations and developments in instrumentation.
If you listen to the ambient intro to Revealing Science on headphones, and I've been doing so over the last few days while out walking several times, one can clearly hear the sound of waves breaking. It's not just ambient mush. I don't think the attempt to evoke the sound of an actual ocean, a primal ocean perhaps, is accidental at all: 'and we danced from the ocean'.Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it’s been.Comment
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