Whether or not their self-imposed break did them any good, Yes was back after a nearly three-year gap in a musical climate that had little patience for prog. They did some kickstarting, first booting Patrick Moraz in order to get Rick Wakeman back in, and ran off to Switzerland like good tax exiles to record there without Eddy Offord. Once Going For The One appeared in stores, fans would likely have been shocked to find that Roger Dean didn’t do the elaborate triptych cover, his sci-fi landscapes replaced by skyscrapers courtesy of Hipgnosis. (Their Gill Sans typeface contrasts with his logo.) The music was a little different, too. After an audible count-in, the title track just plain rocks, with lots of slide guitar but enough Jon Anderson and keyboards to keep it sounding like Yes. His words go by too fast to discern at times, but listen closely and you’ll hear a sense of humor about himself in the third verse. All the while, Steve Howe goes nuts on the slide. “Turn Of The Century” is more like what people would expect, Jon singing wistful mystical lyrics over layered acoustic guitars. A piano solo threatens to drive the whole band into gear, but that doesn’t happen, and it just fades away. Then “Parallels” rocks almost as hard as the title track, even with the prominent church organ, and we can hear Chris Squire letting loose on his while singing (this being a leftover from his own solo album). Most of it drives in four-four, but by the end everybody’s accents—especially Steve’s constant soloing—are competing with Alan White’s busy meter.
We hear Beatlesque touches in the verse of “Wonderous Stories”, a happy hymn along the lines of “And You And I” and “Your Move”. It’s even short enough to be a hit single. But just in case you thought they’d forgotten their roots, “Awaken” runs for 15 minutes, almost as if to prove they could still do complex epics. It begins with a grandiose Wakeman piano part, then Jon wafts in before the rest of the band appears at another brisk (for them) tempo. If anything, the band sounds a little bit like recent Zeppelin. That church organ returns in the mid-section, not as grandiose as on “Parallels” but augmented by Jon’s new harp and even two real choirs (as opposed to voices from a Mellotron) as the band fills in the space. And just when you think it’s all ending on a grand major chord, Jon comes back for a coda that we think resembles post-Gabriel Genesis.
So while it had every reason to be awful, Going For The One isn’t, seeing as it contributes two standbys of Classic Rock radio and uses everyone’s strengths without being a retread. In fact, the only thing really wrong with the album is Alan White’s mustache. (The eventual expanded CD was packed to the gills, with three interesting albeit previously released outtakes, plus extended rehearsals of four of the album’s tracks, including an electric take of “Turn Of The Century”.)
Yes Going For The One (1977)—3
2003 remastered CD: same as 1977, plus 7 extra tracks
Having hit the wall with their two prior releases, Yes retreated. Perhaps after seeing what happened to King Crimson, they decided not to risk going into even more inaccessible territory. At this point, “progressive rock” became “prog rock,” although the latter phrase would not come into usage for a long time yet. What that meant was that Yes – and other bands around this time – would no longer take the term “progressive” literally. No longer would they try to push boundaries. Instead, the music became “prog,” a label that would define a style of music.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing here that Yes hadn’t done before. There’s the lush, folky, “Your Move” sort of ballad (“Wonderous Stories”). There’s a “Yes Album” style rocker driven by an organ hook (“Parallels,” in which Squire tried to out-cosmic Anderson with those lyrics. By the way, that hook consists of surprisingly simple major chords. If I can bang it out on an acoustic, you could, Wardo). Howe had played a raucous steel guitar before, but never on an upbeat pop-rocker written by Anderson (title track, in which Jon sings his highest lead vocal ever). “Awaken” is the sweeping epic, somewhere in between “And You and I” and the tracks from “TFTO”. Speaking of which, “Turn of the Century” sound like it could have been pulled from one of those tracks and turned into its own song.
Nonetheless, Yes made enough changes to make sure they weren’t accused of just blatantly doing retreads. Touches like Jon’s harp, Rick’s church organ, Polymoog, and choir arrangements, as well as Alan’s tuned percussion, kept things interesting. “Turn of the Century” took a while to grow on me. The middle section of “Awaken” could have been a bit shorter. Overall, however, it’s a very solid album. Too bad it wouldn’t take them long to shoot themselves in their collective foot.
Although these songs are all good, I don’t think that these are the best versions. You say “Relayer” is cold, but this sounds colder (is it a coincidence that it was recorded in the middle of winter in Switzerland? I think not!). The album lacks the warmth and the spaciousness that Eddie Offord provided on their earlier records. This is one of the few albums in which all the songs were performed live before the 21st century nostalgia tours (although “Turn of the Century” just made it in under the wire, in 1996). They all came across better in concert, especially “Parallels.”
I think that, difficult as he could be, Patrick Moraz got screwed in the process of making this album. Manager Brian Lane also managed Wakeman. In the UK, he had become a major solo star. He even got top billing on posters for the “Yessongs” movie! So, I suspect Lane engineered such manipulations not so much because of Moraz’s musicianship and attitude, but because he wasn’t Rick. It was the first time, but hardly the last, that Lane would engage in shenanigans involving members of Yes.