There is a moment about four minutes into “Close to the Edge” where everything drops out except Jon Anderson’s voice and a single sustained organ note, and if you are not sitting down already, you will want to be.
Yes recorded this album at Advision Studios in London across the spring and summer of 1972, and the sessions nearly destroyed the band before they produced one of the most ambitious records in the rock canon. Bill Bruford quit before the mixing was finished — handed his notice, walked out, and went straight to King Crimson. He plays on every track here, and you would never know from the performances that he was done with the whole thing.
The Weight of the Title Track
The album is functionally three pieces. The eighteen-minute title track takes up all of side one, and it is structured in four named sections that bleed into each other like movements in a symphony. Steve Howe plays acoustic twelve-string, electric, and steel guitar across the piece with a fluency that still stops me cold. His tone on that descending figure in “I Get Up, I Get Down” — the quiet, almost hymnal third section — is one of the most beautiful guitar sounds I know.
Rick Wakeman is everywhere, and for once that is not a complaint. He plays a cathedral organ sequence in the same section that, honestly, should not work this hard and somehow works completely. Eddie Offord co-produced and co-engineered alongside the band, and his role cannot be overstated — he was the sixth member in the control room, helping translate what Chris Squire heard in his head into something tape could actually hold.
Chris Squire’s Bass as Lead Instrument
Squire’s Rickenbacker through Marshall stacks is the structural center of this record. He is not playing bass the way bass usually functions. He is playing a second lead voice that argues with the guitars while simultaneously holding the bottom end in place.
“And You and I” opens side two with an acoustic guitar intro from Howe that sounds like it was recorded in a chapel, which given the album’s spiritual preoccupations is probably not accidental. The track builds from that quiet start into a full orchestral swell before collapsing back into something almost folk-like. Anderson’s lyrics read like the back of a Sufi paperback, but the music earns them.
The album closes with “Siberian Khatru,” which at nine minutes is the shortest piece here and the most purely exhilarating. Bruford’s drums lock into Squire’s bass in the opening measures and the two of them essentially drag the rest of the band into a run. By the time Howe’s guitar solo arrives it feels like being pulled along by something with its own momentum.
Alan White replaced Bruford for the subsequent tour. He learned the parts in four days. That is its own kind of story.
What Offord and the band captured at Advision was not prog as a genre exercise. It was five musicians genuinely believing that rock music could hold the same structural ambition as the classical tradition they were drawing on — and for thirty-seven minutes, they were right.