Yes - Close To The Edge

The decade of the 70’s was quite a strange time with many genres of pop music emerging from the ashes of the now dead 60’s and one of the most reviled, now at least, is “progressive” rock. A guilty pleasure for me is some of the bands from this era which include Genesis and Yes. I guess I have must still have a glow from childhood memories of sitting with headphones on listening to some of those “epic” songs on albums such as Close To The Edge and trying to figure out what Jon Anderson was singing about. It turns out most of the time he wasn’t saying anything but the words sure must have made sense to him at the time I have to assume.

Influenced more by classical music or jazz fusion with many songs long in length and quite often made up of smaller “songs” or sections strung together to form the above mentioned “epic” which must have sounded far out to most of the stoned hippies listening to it in 1972. Close To The Edge is considered by many fans of the band to be their best record with the title song made up of four distinct sections as mentioned above. This band had very good musicians at the time with Steve Howe on guitar who was voted Guitar Player magazine guitarist of the year many times in the 70's while Bill Bruford was a very imaginative drummer who had a jazz feel to his playing and went on to join King Crimson after this album and eventually made jazz records and still does. Rick Wakeman was obviously influenced by classical music and used everything from a grand piano to moogs and other early synthesizers and Chris Squire was just a monster bass player who really drove the band with his great riffs.

Here is the song for you to check out for yourself.

Buy it here.