Yes Album Listening Guides – Tales From Topographic Oceans Part 4 – Sid Smith talks about the context – 597

(Corrected version)

So Mark hates half of Topographic Oceans? Everyone has their favorites from Topographic, but my favorites are “The Ancient” (as soon as I heard it) and “The Remembering” (after I got into meditation). But I like the entire album just as it is.

When I first heard TALES in June 1975 I didn’t think it was that strange at all. I had spent the previous two years listening to Todd Rundgren’s Utopia’s “The Ikon” (a 30 minute track) and Todd’s 36 minute solo instrumental electronic composition “A Treatise on Cosmic Fire,” as well as Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, the entirety of Genesis’ catalogue, and even stranger music like Urszula Dudziak and Adam Makowicz’s free jazz duet between a scat singer and electronic pianist. After all that, Tales’ first two sides seemed like easy listening to me. But it was “The Ancient” that made me sit up straight and think the band were spilling brilliance, probably before the ears of swine who would never understand it.
The reaction to it was like what happened to Stravinsky and Nijinsky when they debuted “The Rite of Spring,” or when Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey hit the movie theaters: utter astonishment that artists could be so pretentious to think such topics are appropriate for mainstream listeners.

But let’s not be so ahistorical as to think that only progressive art received such accusations from the pop music press. Just look at the Wikipedia page for The Yardbirds single “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” and you’ll see the same word, namely “pretentious,” employed in a review– and that was in 1966 for something that was just a psychedelic single!

Topographic Oceans was enjoyed and influential to people like Roine Stolt and Steve Hackett who truly embraced progressive music, while other highly musical people were simply in awe of it– in awe that a band could get away with releasing it AND see it near or at the top of the charts! Yes had the respect from other musicians like almost no other band at the time. But hardly no one could possibly aspire to make music as good because how many people could juggle that much complexity and have the pull within a band to inspire others to follow their lead? Zappa would be such an exception, but Steve Howe and Jon Anderson were following their spiritual muse and the album went Gold in the US as did Relayer, won acclaim in Melody Maker’s readers polls, and then the band spent three years playing to their biggest audiences from early 1974 until the end of 1976 based on those two albums.

Wakeman rejoins (after his No Earthly Connection flopped in the US) and the result was that Going for the One merely went gold like Tales and Relayer, despite having Wakeman back in the band, a record industry-approved album cover (Hipgnosis), and more commercial songs like “Wondrous Stories” and “Going for the One”. That more than anything should prove that neither TALES nor RELAYER were considered a drag on Yes’ popularity. And those albums have continued to enjoy acclaim from within the prog community.

To add insult to injury, Mark then declares The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway “another terrible album.” Yes, so terrible that a tribute band has spent two decades playing the entire album to fan acclaim all over the world. What next… attacks on Sgt Pepper and SMiLE?

And why hasn’t Topographic Oceans received the same honor as an artwork performed around the world for decades? It’s just too damn difficult, that’s why. You would need at least seven or eight people on stage to do it accurately, which is the approach of what the acclaimed Beatles tribute band The Analogues does to perform their later albums (see for yourself on youtube) along with orchestral accompaniment.

So here we sit with 1973 and 1974– being the 50th anniversary of Tales from Topographic Oceans album and tours– and all we get is insults and giggles all-around as if you assembled a gaggle of punk rockers to opine about it.