Yes, it's been a month, but here's the next installment! My musical "education" in the early seventies was advanced greatly by two fantastic keyboard players - Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson. Oh my God, how great were these two guys?
(And please note this double billing is one of my cheats to get round the top 10 limitation. Ha - I make the rules round here, so get used to it.)
I first picked up on Emerson Lake and Palmer in the early seventies when their first album was released. I saw them at Newcastle City Hall live during the Tarkus tour, with the giant tank/armadillo and everything. Tarkus is still an amazing album, with the seven piece Tarkus suite probably the best stuff they ever did. Much like Wishbone Ash's Throw Down the Sword, Battlefield speaks to the futility of war.
Clear the battlefield and let me see
All the profit from our victory.
You talk of freedom, starving children fall.
Are you deaf when you hear the season’s call?Were you there to watch the earth be scorched?
Did you stand beside the spectral torch?
Know the leaves of sorrow turned their face,
Scattered on the ashes of disgrace.Every blade is sharp; the arrows fly
We’re the victims of your army’s lie,
Where the blades of grass and arrows reign
Then there'll be no sorrow,
Be no pain.
My teenage years seem to have been permeated with this theme, even though there was no threat of a military draft in the UK or anything like it (unlike the US, where Vietnam still loomed large). I guess it was all that cold war potential nuclear destruction vibe. Ah, the seventies...
It was at couple of years later that a friend at British Aerospace (where I worked before college) introduced me to Yes. One concert in Manchester at Salford University and the triple album Yessongs and I was hooked. To this day I can crank up Starship Trooper (live version from Yessongs, of course) and feel 18 again. It's on my iPod and consequently available 24/7, pretty much.
While ELP split up and never really hooked up properly again, Yes have been through a myriad lineup changes, eventually ending up back at classic Yes. I caught them on tour last year and, apart from the fact they didn't play Starship Trooper, were just as good as ever. Rick Wakeman even became a Christian sometime in there. Not only that, when the organ at my wife's family's home parish (where we were married) was restored a few years ago, the church organist actually got Wakeman to come and play for the inaugural service. Had there been time I would have paid the money to fly back home for that. Wakeman's other work is generally pretty good - from Six Wives of Henry VIII, Journey to the Center of the Earth (should have had better vocalists, though), Myths and Legends of King Arthur through 1984 and on.
Both bands were heavy on instrumentals and light on lyrics. Vocals, i.e. Jon Anderson, are featured prominently in Yes, but they're more sound poems, or just another instrument, than anything else... Witness the chorus to Roundabout:
In and around the lake
Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there
One mile over we’ll be there and we’ll see you
Ten true summers we’ll be there and laughing too
Twenty four before my love you’ll see I’ll be there with you
Um, yeah, and trust me, the rest doesn't make any more sense. But in many ways Anderson's voice was as critical a part of Yes's sound as Wakeman's keyboards and Steve Howe's guitar. He did some great stuff later collabaorating with another keyboard virtuoso - Vangelis.
Stay tuned for the next exciting installment! (before March, I promise.)
