Close To The Edge (Early Assembly/Rough Mix)

Here we have Close To The Edge (Early Assembly/Rough Mix) from the freshly re-mastered Close to the Edge, one of my all time favourite Yes albums. 

1972 stands out as one of the key years of Yes' long history. In a little over 9 months the band consolidated its growing popularity and commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic, created one of it's most revered and enduring pieces and, in the process, said farewell to a founding member. Even in the face of this setback, the undeniable momentum which had begun gathering with The Yes Album (1970) and Fragile (1971) enabled yes to embrace change with relish. Following January's short series of European warm-up gigs, in February Yes embarked upon a 38-date tour across America, taking the music to bigger and more enthusiastic audiences than before. This influx of interest was undeniably helped by the presence of Roundabout on FM radio. Bill Bruford recalls relaxing by a hotel pool and hearing the song roughly every 45 minutes. Returning to London at the end of March, the band reconvened in the basement of the Una Billings School of Dance, Sheperd;s Bush, London piecing together the ideas and sketches that had accrued from writing sessions between Jon Anderson and Steve Howe in the hotels, soundchecks, and dressing rooms across America. "We knew we were going to do a long-form piece, something that would take up the sode of an album," recalls Squire. "Heart of the Sunrise had really been the germination of that idea where you had different sections, with contrasting flavours all working together."

There was never any doubt in Jon Anderson's mind as to the shape this new composition would take. Despite lacking the technical skills to reproduce precisely what he was seeing and hearing in his head, Anderson's abilities as an animateur, which had been honed out of necessity as he guided Yes, were second to none. "I was always aware of where we were heading structurally" he explains. "I was listening to a lot of classical music while touring and Sibelius' 5th Symphony I liked. It's got a very wild first movement, a gentle second and the third movement is very majestic. I thought the band could get into performing with that sort of musical positioning." Having heard the recently released Sonic Seasonings. a couble album by Wendy Carlos consisting of four wide-long suites, brimming with evocative Moog-enhanced ambient environments, Anderson discussed with Eddie Offord how they might come up with something similar. "I wanted to create this sense of energy or force field before the band started, and then have the group climb out of it with a wild and crazy solo section, raving away as though we didn't know where we were going. You'd get to a certain point and you're going to stop dead and a very straight choral thing would come in and then the band would carry on again. The idea was very simple."

As Offord and Anderson looked on from the control room, Howe turned in an octave-jumping daredevil of a solo that owes little to the rock guitar conventions of the day. "I wouldn't say we were influenced by the Mahavishnu Orchestra directly but we were all full of admiration and respect for them. It was that way-out jazz side of things we were drawing on. Bill's got jazz roots and so have I. We didn't want to play jazz standards but rather our own version of rock and jazz."

The Solid Time of Change was in part seeded from Howe's past. "You tend to have plenty of ideas and sketches which don't necessarily have a home, wo you pitch them in. Jon and I worked like that all the time like with one of my songs which had the line "close to the edge, down by a river" which actually referred to where I was living at the time, next to River Thames." When Anderson heard the phrase, the symbolism of the river immediately connected to metaphors within Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. which he'd been reading at the time. "The river leads you to the ocean, all the paths lead you to the divine. So the idea was that as human beings we are close to the edge - the edge of realisation, whatever anybody else might wnat to think," laughs Anderson.

Another Howe song pre-dating the rehearsal and recording sessions was thrown into the mix. As the guitarist sang "In her white lace" Anderson countered with his own melody. "I started singing 'Two million people barely satisfy'. I had my head to the ground about what was happening around the world, starvation in African countries, where so many people lived so well and so many people didn;t. I get high and low on the whole concept of life. I get up, I get down. So it worked out that Steve and Chris sang that while I sang my melody over these exact same chords. It was magical more that anything because it...well, it just happened." Not so spontaneous, though just as crucial, to I Get Up I Get Down is the cathartic appearance of the church organ. Recorded in the Londaon church. St. Giles-without-Cripplegate, Wakeman recalls there were huge challenges. "Back then technology couldn't do what I wanted to do. So it was a matter of recording the church organ separately and then 'floating' it into the track from quarter-inch tape, a long and very fiddly process but absolutely worth it/"

The build in the finale of Seasons of Man is a glorious example of Yes at its most cinematic and remains a favourite 'goosebump' moment in the piece for most members of the band. "That big end section, climbing the mountain. That's that place where it's like we're climbing the mountain, you get there and you sit back and take in the view...my head was spun every time I listened to it or sang it," says Anderson. "When we started touring it we had to drop that end section a full tone below F," comments Howe. "To this day I think how Jon sung originally in the studio in G minor is just amazing."

-Excerpted from the liner notes