TALES FROM TOPOGRAPHIC OCEANS

This is Chapter Two of MY BIGGEST PROGROCK DISILLUSIONS. Halfway the Seventies I started to discover Yes and was especially carried away by their masterpiece "Close to the edge". In my soccer team there were a lot of progheads and we had heavy, black and white 'coloured' discussions about this 2-LP from Yes. I was impressed by the fact that our captain could sing the whole spoken intro from side 1, so I decided to buy this album. The first session was a hugh disappointment, I couldn't believe my ears that Yes had delivered such a boring 2-LP! My conclusion was that Jon 'Napoleon' Anderson had been too dominant in pushing Yes to accept his over-pretentious Far-Eastern philosophical ideas. If you read the books from Yes about that period it's incredible that Jon got away with his weird ideas about creating pleasant atmospheres with hardboard cows! Side one has a fine moment with Wakeman solo in the end, side three features an inspired Howe but side two and four are so boring, too fragmentic and without any direction. Wakeman was fed up with the whole situation and could hardly inspire himself to contribute anything. So during the tour he started to eat Indian food (delivered by a roadie) because he was almost without work! TALES from Yes? NO!!!