Happy 47th anniversary
Tales from Topographic Oceans
(US release January 1974)
Today, or yesterday, depending on which section of which paragraph on wikipedia you believe, is the 47th anniversary of the release of Tales from Topographic Oceans in the United States (February 8 or 9, 1974). I've told this story before, but each year it comes to mind, so here we go again. Feel free to add as short or as long of your own story in the comments section below.
The 1970s was when I really started buying albums. In the 1960s it was mostly 45 singles and Beatles albums with a few greatest hits albums tacked on in the late 1960s. What started the shift was my friend Bruce. When we were in junior high school (middle school), he had a brother in college who I never saw or met. But by constantly feeding albums to Bruce, he shaped our musical tastes dramatically. I remember Bruce even had racks on his basement walls where we hung out, and slipped the LP covers in the racks so it looked like a record store. I remember seeing up there Black Sabbath's Paranoid, King Crimson's Islands, Elton John's Madman Across the Water, Mason Proffit's Wanted, The Moody Blues Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, and a wide range of pop styles. We were turned on to everything from Humble Pie's Performance Rockin' the Fillmore to the Woodstock soundtrack to Janis Joplin's Pearl to Yes' Fragile. Which meant that 1971 to 1972 was the prime time we hung out there. I remember almost exactly where I was standing around the pool table when I first heard Fragile's opening track "Roundabout" pouring out of his round speakers. I was spellbound by the unique production. In 1973 I bought the album on 8-track tape to play in my parent's car when I got my drivers license.
For late 1972's Close to the Edge, I remember a record store clerk pointing out the import copy they had. I was not compelled to buy it and had never even bought an import, and was somewhat perplexed why he was pointing it out. My friend bought Mahavishnu Orchestra's The Inner Mounting Flame, and my more juvenile tastes had me buying Slade Alive! However, I do remember later while tripping on acid walking through the tall corn fields (meaning I probably bought it in October 1972 just before harvest) to the K-Mart and seeing the American release in the random stacks of LPs. I turned it over and started hallucinating on the picture of Rick Wakeman swirling around like a glowing orange being. I bought it, took it home and put it on, and was promptly scared shitless by Steve Howe's opening guitar solo so I took it off! Later the next day under the influence of a less edgy drug made from plants, I played it again and fell in love with the album, especially the keyboard work. Just in the title track alone-- the spacey interlude, the massive church organ, the dull slightly flat synthesizer recapitulation of Steve Howe's central guitar theme, and the ensuing organ solo impressed me incredibly.
But the next year I was visiting my friend Melissa's friend in a college dorm room (we were still in high school), and I asked her to play me the "Close to the Edge" on her copy of Yessongs. Mind you, the stereo was probably poor quality, but I was disappointed by it, especially the mix of the keyboard work and the seeming inability of the band to reproduce the majesty of the studio version in a concert setting. (I never really appreciated the live version until it was remixed for the Progeny boxed set of seven 1972 Close to the Edge tour performances.)
When Topographic Oceans was released in early 1974, I saw it in the stacks of The Stereo Place, a record store I could now visit regularly because I had acquired my drivers license in 1973. Perhaps because of my disappointing experience with Yessongs, I didn't buy it. I have a memory of looking at, then shoving it at my friend and saying "You should buy this." "Me?" she responded, "Why should I buy it?" That's usually the way my record buying habits went. I'd buy Bowie's Man Who Sold the World in 1972 (the RCA re-release with a new cover) and fall in love with it, but then when Ziggy Stardust came out I was so disappointed by it I didn't buy another studio Bowie album for several years (actually, five years until Low because a radio station played the entire experimental side two).
Another memory I had is of going to my friend Terry's hippie den to smoke pot and asking him to play me a side of his copy of Tales from Topographic Oceans. He played "The Remembering." I distinctly remember mumbling in my spaced-out voice at the end, "That would take some time to get to know." But tellingly, I didn't run out and buy it, probably because its more ambient textures were still beyond my listening stills at that time. My guess is if he had played me the crazy, unhinged "The Ancient," I would have run out and bought the album that day. That's what had happened a half year earlier in 1973 when a pot dealer played me Todd Rundgren's A Wizard a True Star as we sat around "testing" his weed. In fact, just after Topographic Oceans was released in the US, Todd's double album TODD came out; I bought it immediately and was transported into the trippy bliss of "I Think You Know," a bluesy pop song about telepathy. Later in October 1974, the mammoth prog album Todd Rundgren's Utopia came out and I was astounded by it, playing it constantly for a week before my first Rundgren concert on October 31, 1974 when he played the entire Utopia debut and some of the TODD album at the beautiful Auditorium Theatre.
Also in 1973 I bought my first Genesis album, Genesis Live, and started working my way backward through their entire catalogue of studio albums. At the culmination, I saw my first Genesis concert in November 1974, just weeks after the Todd concert, a complete performance of the tour opener for the still unreleased The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Fortunately, a late night radio show (Triad Radio) played the entire side 1 of the album. I taped it and played it constantly for a week before the concert, so I at least knew some of the glorious music it contained. But even though Relayer was released around the same time, I didn't buy it. Yes had apparently been left in the dust of my new interests-- Todd, Genesis, and jazz fusion.
However, fate would intervene in May 1975 when I scored a job at a new record store/ticketron/head shop in town, Third Ring Records, named after Tolkien concept. It was the best job a stoner could have scored at the time. (In Tolkien's mythology, the Three Rings are magical artefacts forged by the Elves of Eregion. After the One Ring, they are the most powerful of the twenty Rings of Power. ...The third ring, Vilya, was made of gold and adorned with a "great blue stone", probably a sapphire. The name is derived from the Quenya vilya meaning air. It is also called the Ring of Air, the Ring of Firmament, or the Blue Ring. -- wiki)
After figuring out my musical tastes, the owner of the store gave me a pair of front row tickets to see Yes at the Chicago Stadium, a Fourth of July concert no less. I forgot about my abandonment of the band and walked right over to the stacks and bought Relayer. I fell in love with it immediately, especially "Sound Chaser" which reminded me of the fusion albums I had been enjoying, Birds of Fire and Billy Cobham's Spectrum. Then, just a week before the concert on July 4, I started playing Tales from Topographic Oceans. Unfortunately, I had bitten off more than I could chew as it was way more complex than I could absorb in a week. Even though I was hostile toward religion, I gave the lyrics to "The Revealing Science of God" a pass as they were too vague to understand anyway, and I liked the arrangements. Ditto for "The Remembering." But it was "The Ancient" that really made me sit up and take notice that something special was happening with the band on this album-- almost the entire 17 minute epic was instrumental and as challenging as a pop album could be. Unfortunately, I had only made it through the first three sides in terms of studying the album, and at the concert they only played side four, "Ritual." All I remember about it was sitting wide-eyed as they banged on those metal triangles during the exorcism segment. After the concert, I became obsessed with the band, especially Topographic Oceans. It was only four months later that Steve Howe's Beginnings and Chris Squire's Fish Out of Water would be released. I gobbled them up.
Three months after that, in February 1976, I had my spiritual awakening, creating a whole other dimension to my consciousness and my interest in the band's art and literary influences.
In mid 1976, Anderson's Olias of Sunhillow and Moraz's The Story of I were released, and I was convinced this band was just brilliant across the board.
In August 1976 I saw my second Relayer concert and got a chance to see "Ritual" performed in all its glory as the sun set in full view of the band on an outdoor stage. By that time I had begun my transformation from stoner high school kid to college-bound budding mystic and yogi working in a health food store. A coworker at the health food store had given me a copy of Ram Dass' 6 LP set LOVE SERVE REMEMBER which introduced me to the hippie reinvention of yoga universalism, the idea that mysticism is a meta-theology that explains everything from altered states of consciousness to the practices of all the world's religions. Having begun to meditate and go vegetarian, I was stone cold sober at the outdoor concert (an all-day event which also included Frampton, Skynyrd, and Gary Wright), which aided incredibly in understanding what this music was beginning to mean to me in terms of the spiritualist worldview I was absorbing through books that dominated the counterculture at the time-- Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, and Ram Dass' Be Here Now. The first two had already influenced Yes compositions, the latter would influence (I'm assuming) next year's "Awaken" on Going for the One (1977).
Speaking of Going for the One, Rick Wakeman rejoined the band in late 1976. Their music would be become more commercially accessible and they wouldn't play an entire side of Topographic Oceans for the next twenty years. My general reaction was: "Wat the f*ck? This band has seven epics and they think they can only play two of them?" Fortunately, in 1996 they revived playing "The Revealing Science of God" and a few years later, "Ritual." And in 2016, 2017, and 2018, they played 50 minutes of Topographic Oceans all over America, the UK, and Europe, along with the complete Drama album. Performed in smaller theatres (like the Copernicus Center in Chicago) with great sound and awesome lighting effects, it was my favorite concert the band ever did. It showed the longevity of these great albums and the high capability of a band with many newer members, four out five of whom had never played Topographic Oceans before in concert.
Epilogue: -- My friend Bruce distanced himself from me as my juvenile delinquent tendencies became more and more apparent to everyone (but me) in middle school. He passed into the beyond from ALS in 2018. --Me and Melissa eventually got married and were together for a decade, and are still friends. -- The drug dealer who turned me on to A Wizard A True Star died of a heroin overdose. -- My boss who gave me the Yes tickets was convicted for murdering an employee and was suspected of killing two other girlfriends. He escaped the country before the trial and has never been heard from since. --I continued my metaphysical studies and practiced yoga, but as the guru (and televangelist) scandals of the 1980s unfolded, I decided to spend as much of my time studying world religions in college as I was through practicing meditation and listening to mystics from many religions tell us their wondrous stories. I figured with this approach they couldn't pull the wool over my eyes and I wouldn't waste my life kowtowing to someone or some intolerant religious dogma. Spirituality and enlightenment has to be beyond that psychological trap. (This is basically what Herman Hesse's Siddhartha is about.) In all honesty, the most cosmic talk I ever heard was three average American women describing their near death experiences on Oprah Winfrey's talk show in 1986. So there you have it-- everyday people as mystics.
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