{"id":16487,"date":"2012-08-17T00:04:03","date_gmt":"2012-08-17T05:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16487"},"modified":"2013-06-15T08:56:32","modified_gmt":"2013-06-15T13:56:32","slug":"weigels-prog-rock-series-the-excess-goes-critical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/17\/weigels-prog-rock-series-the-excess-goes-critical\/","title":{"rendered":"Weigel’s prog rock series: the excess goes critical"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part four of Dave Weigel’s look at the rise and fall of progressive rock<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The order, Rick Wakeman remembers, was for chicken vindaloo, rice pilau, six papadums, bhindi bhaji, Bombay aloo, and a stuffed paratha. This was November 1973 and Yes had sold out the Manchester Free Trade Hall for a performance of Tales From Topographic Oceans<\/em>. The album consisted of four songs that rolled gently together, over four sides of vinyl, for 83 minutes. \u201cThere were a couple of pieces where I hadn\u2019t got much to do,\u201d Wakeman would recall, \u201cand it was all a bit dull.<\/p>\n

During every show, a keyboard tech reclined underneath Wakeman\u2019s Hammond organ, ready to fix broken hammers or ribbons and to \u201ccontinually hand me my alcoholic beverages.\u201d That night in Manchester, the tech asked the bored Wakeman what he wanted to eat after the show. Wakeman, the lone carnivore in Yes, ordered the curry. \u201cHalf the audience were in narcotic rapture on some far-off planet,\u201d Wakeman wrote in his 2007 memoir, \u201cand the other half were asleep, bored shitless.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wakeman kept on at the keyboards, adding gossamer organ melodies and ambient passages to the songs. And then, around 30 minutes later, his tech started handing up \u201clittle foil trays\u201d of curry, and Wakeman began placing them on top of his keyboards. \u201cI still didn\u2019t have a lot to do,\u201d he wrote, \u201cso I thought I might as well tuck in.\u201d The food was obscured by the instrument stacks, further obscured by Wakeman\u2019s cape, but the aroma danced over to Yes\u2019s lead singer, Jon Anderson. He took a good look at the culinary insult. Shrug<\/em>. Papadum in hand, he returned to his microphone to sing his next part.<\/p>\n

Tales From Topographic Oceans<\/em> just might be the recorded ur-text of prog rock excess. No band had ever tried to fill each side of two LPs with long, multisection suites. Yes did it, and voila<\/em> \u2014 a No. 1 album. They went on tour with a sci-fi lullaby backdrop, designed by their three-time album cover artist Roger Dean. He had seen the sort of enormous venues they\u2019d booked, realized how hard it now was for faraway audiences to see the band, and so voila \u2014 phantasmagoric eye candy. Their set began with 82 minutes of new music before they played an old familiar tune. They played in their biggest-ever concert halls, and they sold them out.<\/p>\n

But as the tour went on, Yes dropped the third section of the album from the show, then the second. Soon, Wakeman vented to reporters about the band\u2019s screw-up. \u201cTales From Topographic Oceans<\/em> is like a woman\u2019s padded bra,\u201d he told one interviewer. \u201cThe cover looks good but when you peel off the padding there\u2019s not a lot there.\u201d Yes had gotten too damn silly. The music had collapsed in on itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part four of Dave Weigel’s look at the rise and fall of progressive rock: The order, Rick Wakeman remembers, was for chicken vindaloo, rice pilau, six papadums, bhindi bhaji, Bombay aloo, and a stuffed paratha. This was November 1973 and Yes had sold out the Manchester Free Trade Hall for a performance of Tales From […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,28],"tags":[263,200,915],"class_list":["post-16487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","category-media","tag-1970s","tag-music","tag-progrock"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4hV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16487"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20679,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16487\/revisions\/20679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}