Fragile Solo Songs Revisited – 683

Surprised no one else has weighed in on the five pieces of music discussed in this episode, which I thought was really excellent, so I am going to risk testing everyone’s patience by going long. Apologies in advance!

Fragile was my first Yes record (Yessongs had been released back in the summer but I couldn’t afford it and Tales wasn’t quite out yet). I had just turned 12, had recently read my first SF novel (Brian Aldiss’ The Interpreter) and was lured in by the band’s coverage in Melody Maker, the logo and, more than anything, the Roger Dean universe. Fragile had the best artwork after Yessongs so that is where my £2 went.

Reason I mention all this is that having bought Fragile and then listened to it over and over for weeks on end, at least three of the five solo pieces were a huge part of my induction into the Yes sound world.
It’s interesting that side one is this line up’s signature song plus a lot of music that sounded quite strange in 73 and is maybe considered by many fans to be far less core than the epic that is side two.

I assume the main reason for this is South Side’s (close to?) non-appearance on 70s set lists and thus non-appearance on Yessongs. Every other major piece from the previous three studio albums are on there except that one.

I knew lots of kids back then who had one or two of the first five albums plus Yessongs. I don’t think I knew anyone who had the Yes Album, Fragile, CTTE and Yessongs or anything close to that. We were kids with little or no disposable income and the redundancy of repertoire would have been unaffordable in an era when albums were nowhere near as cheap in real terms as they are now (my £2 for the then standard music format would equate to £30 today in terms of buying power, double the price of a full price cd). I actually knew a fair few people who sold or traded the earlier studio records once they had their hands on the triple.

Wakeman’s track meanwhile sounded like glorified filler then and sounds even more like that now. Of course aged 12 I didn’t know Brahms from Carmina Burana. I can’t say I loved it but it seemed to speak (like ELP’s Pictures) to a seriousness of intent that was more BBC2 than Radio One. We were a long way from Metal Guru and Blockbuster and it sounded like “grown up” music. It certainly cheered up my mum and dad who were completely appalled by the likes of Roxy Music’s In Every Dream Home A Heartache and Lou Reed’s The Kids.

In a way Cans and Brahms set me up for the next half century of listening to Rick not always taking his prodigious talents to their creative limits.

I have theory that is more about social norms than music. Back then being accused of “showing off” was a common lower middle class parent-to-child put-down and any evidence of pretention or presumption was often frowned upon.

1940s kids like Rick were still partly in the Victorian shadow of being expected to be seen and not heard.

This was also the era when radio broadcasts were pretty limited in scope (the then head of the BBC then didn’t like jazz or anything that sounded like it came from the same place musically or geographically). Many families, even less well-off ones, still had pianos at home and were used to entertaining each other. Ray Davies talks about this too.

Like Elton John, Rick is a born grandstander from a suburban-ish background with one foot in the classics and another on a sticky barroom floor so I suspect there is some of that tension in this solo vignette of having an insane skillset, using it to get heard in the world, but not wanting to be seen to be taking it overly seriously just in case you got a clip around the ear for being too clever by half.

By the time I was at junior school in the mid 60s Elvis, JImmy Dean, Brando, Little Richard, The Stones and Beatles had freed us all and showing off was suddenly a key to social mobility in the UK.

It is also perhaps why being a sideman / session player suited him so well in that he could do amazing things under cover of relative anonymity. Stick him up front and things can quickly head into the world of pastiche. That’s my theory at any rate.

Anyway this is one of those pieces which, to use a snooker analogy, is more like a trick shot than a solidly constructed game-dominating break. Clever but irrelevant in the bigger picture from probably the most skilled player in the band at that point.

Fact remains that something more akin to an excerpt from Rick’s Six Wives instead of this musical doodle would have elevated even this masterpiece of an album.

We Have Heaven and the transition into South Side is what first really sold me on the band. I loved Bolan, Bowie, Roxy and Lou Reed but there was no stopping my musical education after hearing that 10 minutes of music. All I wanted to hear after that was more rock music that would take me to new places. I would stand that section up against TFTO and their entire post 70s output combined. Only Awaken comes close in my book.

Unlike Rick, Jon has never been afraid of trying to push the envelope in the face of accusations of pretention but at the same is also massively playful musically. In many ways he is the most free-minded and uninhibited musician ever to grace the band. Which is true of both his solo track and what immediately follows. Have an idea and worry about the execution later. Such a Punk Rock attitude towards making any kind of art. Would love to have been a fly on the wall at one of those Relayer rehearsals where he taught the band the idea for Gates.

And of course the harmonies are magical. It all still sounds to me akin to what Crosby, Stills and Nash would have sounded like if they had come from Canterbury or Cambridge and had, like Yes, treated the studio as an instrument rather than as a performance space to record things happening in real time.

It has never occurred to me to wonder what the lyrics to We Have Heaven actually mean. I love an Anderson word salad and do wonder if all the “but what is it all about, Jon?” questions are what ultimately drove him towards the more literal and frankly more prosaic lyrics that are more or less his stock in trade today. Let Jon be Jon and the world of Yes is a far better place.

Bruford’s Five Per Cent is a noble effort and is actually a bit of an early insight into how his musical instincts were to soon take him on a different path. I suspect that he would have been listening to Ed Blackwell and Elvin Jones as well as Art Blakey, Tony Williams et al by this time and also percussive pianists like Cecil Taylor.

He could well have been thirsting for a rhythmic freedom not available in 99% of rock. Lifetime and Mahavishnu Orchestra being the trailblazers and Nucleus & Fripp and Co ploughing a similar but more English variation. You can perhaps hear some of that proto Fusion thing in this tune. It’s not something Cozy Powell would have ever done that’s for sure. Stomu Yamashta might have.

Then we have the four tracks that I collectively experienced back then as a 20 minute suite though I don’t think they ever performed those tracks in that order prior to 2014 (?).

Long Distance Runaround is one of the band’s best pop songs (if an odd one) and it makes perfect sense for that to be followed first by the at times brutal but also delicate tour de force that is The Fish and then the charming and decorative, if ultimately undemanding, Steve Howe showpiece that is Mood For A Day. We’re taken on a big journey and then asked to take a breather before the biggest journey on the album.

I agree that The Fish is the most important piece on the album in terms of establishing the band’s arena credentials but it is also a fantastically imaginative use of my favourite instrument. Live it could be, as I say, by turns delicate and brutal but always to the point. I would take it over any Jaco, Pino or Stanley Clarke solo. It’s that good.

Heart Of The Sunrise is obviously a massive tune and the album needs the deep breath that is Howe’s solo spot to set us up for it. Truly symphonic for its time but it needed framing. You couldn’t possibly have it come immediately before or after any of the other Yes “longs”. As an album closer it is one of the great statements of intent in all of rock.

All in all this is a brilliant piece of sequencing where the solo pieces nearly always have distinct roles. In the cd era, and even more so in the iTunes era, when skipping tracks and resequencing got easier and easier, I used to argue that three of the five solo tracks could have been dumped in order to make way for America but I certainly don’t feel like that any more. The various vinyl reissues have forced me to listen to albums as albums again and, Cans and Brahms notwithstanding, I think Fragile is (almost) perfect as it is, partly because of the two minute detours rather than in spite of them.

Very enjoyable episode, as always! As it relates to recreating these solo pieces for the current Fragile album tour, I have NO desire to see other musicians trying to recreate these solo vignettes 50 years later. Besides The Fish and Mood for a Day, I don’t think the band at the time even cared to recreate any of the other pieces live. Jon brought back We Have Heaven in 2002, but I don’t think it was ever played live prior. I understand trying to present the album as it was originally recorded, but does anyone really want to hear Geoff play along to his prerecorded version of Cans and Brahms? Would rather repurpose that time for literally anything else that Yes has done in the past… or hit the bathroom.