Close to the Edge is the fifth studio album by English progressive rock band Yes, released on 13 September 1972 by Atlantic Records. It is their last album of the 1970s to feature original drummer Bill Bruford before he left to join King Crimson. After touring their previous album, Fragile, the group assembled at Advision Studios in London to record a follow-up, ideas for which had been put down since February 1972. The album marked a development in the band’s songwriting, with Jon Anderson and Steve Howe writing the 18-minute title track. It was the band’s longest song at the time. Side Two has two tracks, “And You and I” and “Siberian Khatru”. Bill Bruford found the album particularly laborious to make, and this may have influenced his decision to leave the band after it was recorded.

Close to the Edge became the band’s greatest commercial success, peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in the United States and No. 4 on the UK Albums Chart. A two-part edit of “And You and I” was released in the US which reached No. 42 on the Billboard Hot 100. Yes supported the album with their 1972–1973 world tour which comprised over 90 dates and marked the debut of drummer Alan White. Close to the Edge was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America in 1998 for selling one million copies. It was reissued in 1994, 2003, and 2013; the latter included previously unreleased tracks and new stereo and 5.1 surround sound mixes by Steven Wilson. Critical reception was mixed at the time of the original release, though the album is retrospectively regarded as one of the band’s best works and a landmark recording in progressive rock.

By 1972, Yes was established with a line-up of lead vocalist Jon Anderson, bassist Chris Squire, drummer Bill Bruford, guitarist Steve Howe, and keyboardist Rick Wakeman. In March 1972, they wrapped up their six-month 1971–72 tour of the UK and North America to support their album Fragile which was released towards the end of 1971. On 1 and 2 February 1972, during one of the tour’s rest periods, the band booked time at Advision Studios in London to put down some tracks for a follow-up record. When the tour was over, they took another break before they entered rehearsals at the Una Billings School of Dance in Shepherd’s Bush in May. Although some arrangements were worked out and put onto tape during this time, none of the tracks were fully written at this stage, leaving the group to devise the rest of the songs in the studio and learn to play them through afterwards. On several occasions the arrangements that Yes had started to assemble were so complex that they were forgotten by the time the next day’s session began. This caused the band to record each rehearsal for future reference. Bruford devised the album’s title to reflect the state of the band at the time.

By June 1972, Yes had worked out songs for the album and returned to Advision to record it. Eddy Offord, who had worked with Yes since Time and a Word (1970) and had mixed their live sound on the Fragile tour, assumed his role as audio engineer and producer, sharing his production duties with each member of the band. Having worked on the band’s sound on tour, Offord wished to recreate, in the studio, the high feeling the band had on nights when they performed well in concert. To attempt this, he got their road crew to construct a large stage in the recording studio for the band to perform on; he noted that Bruford’s drums resonated with the wooden platform and made the band sound “more live”. The studio also housed a booth-like structure constructed of wooden boards which Howe performed in to further enhance his sound. During the recording, the band decided to use a particular take for a track, but realised the studio’s cleaner had put the tape in the rubbish. A scramble in the bins outside the studio ensued, and the missing piece was found and inserted into the master.

During their month of recording, Melody Maker reporter and band biographer Chris Welch visited the studio to observe the recording progress. Welch described a stressful atmosphere, coupled with “outbursts of anarchy” from Bruford, Howe and Wakeman and disagreement from each member after one mix of a song section was complete. Welch sensed the band were not a cohesive unit, with Anderson and Howe the only ones who knew what direction the album was to take, leaving the rest adding bits and pieces “to a vast jigsaw of sound”, to which Squire and Offord were the two who helped put their idea into shape. Wakeman and Bruford, to Welch, remained “innocent bystanders” in the matter. In one instance, Welch arrived at the studio to hear a preview of a completed passage that took several days of round-the-clock work to produce. He heard a dull thud, to find Offord had fallen asleep on top of the mixing console from exhaustion, “leaving music from the spinning tape deck blaring at an intolerable level”.

Bruford found Close to the Edge particularly difficult to write and record with the rest of the band, calling the process torturous and like “climbing Mount Everest”. He became frustrated with the band’s happy, diatonic music and favoured more jazz-oriented and improvisational compositions. This became an issue with the group’s way of composing and recording, as each section of a track was played through and discussed section by section. Bruford said: “Every instrument was up for democratic election, and everybody had to run an election campaign on every issue. It was horrible, it was incredibly unpleasant, and unbelievably hard work”. Squire became a growing source of discontent for Bruford, citing his frequent lateness for rehearsals and his way of working. In one instance, Bruford fell asleep on a sofa in the studio control room while Squire was “pouring over a couple of knobs on the [mixing] desk” to determine how much equalisation should be applied to his bass tracks, only to wake up several hours later, finding Squire “in the same place, still considering the relative position of the two knobs”. Bruford was constantly encouraged by Anderson to write, something he felt grateful for years later, but by the time recording was complete, he felt he had done his best on Close to the Edge and could not offer better arrangements. “So then I knew I needed a breath of fresh air”, and left the group

Side One

“Close to the Edge” was written by Anderson and Howe, both of whom also share lyrical credits. Its 18-minute length marked the longest track Yes had recorded at the time. Anderson gained initial inspiration from a moment in his hotel room during the Fragile Tour when he was reading The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien while listening to Symphony Nos. 6 and 7 by Jean Sibelius, one of his favourite composers. The seventh struck Anderson the most as he noticed that its main theme was introduced some time in the composition which influenced how “Close to the Edge” was shaped. He studied No. 7 for the remainder of the tour; roughly halfway, he discussed his initial ideas with Howe. During a break the two resumed writing at Howe’s home in Hampstead, at which point Howe devised lyric “Close to the edge, round by the corner”, itself inspired when he had lived in Battersea, close to the River Thames. Anderson was inspired to base its theme and lyrics on Siddhartha (1922) by German novelist Hermann Hesse, and revised the song’s lyrics “three or four” times, saying “it’s all metaphors”. The lyrics for the concluding verse were based on a dream he once had about the “passing on from this world to another… yet feeling so fantastic about it that death never frightened me ever since.”

The song’s tape loop introduction, a combination of keyboard and nature sounds, including flowing water and bird chirps recorded on location, measured approximately 40 feet in length and took two days to record. Anderson was inspired to include the bird sounds, and the instrumental section in “I Get Up, I Get Down”, from hearing Sonic Seasonings (1972), an electronic ambient album by Wendy Carlos. Anderson suggested to start with an improvised group jam, which the group saw as adventurous and is one of the reasons why the band comes in out of nowhere on the final take. The track was assembled in pieces throughout, as Bruford described, “in ten, twelve, sixteen-bar sections”. Its introduction came about after the band had toured with fusion group Mahavishnu Orchestra; someone in the band suggested to have the piece open with improvisation with pre-arranged pauses.

The music played during the “Close to the edge, round by the corner” section was originally a same-titled song that Howe had put together several years prior, in part based on the longest day of the year. Anderson and Howe agreed this section fitted best with an Anderson composition titled “Total Mass Retain”, thus joining the two ideas together. Howe had prepared another song, of which its middle eight was adapted into the “In her white lace” section of “I Get Up, I Get Down”. Wakeman’s organ solo was written by Howe for the guitar originally, but he thought the arrangement sounded better on the organ. It is played on the pipe organ at St Giles-without-Cripplegate church in Barbican. The band produced a take of the section after the church organ solo that they were satisfied with, but when it came to inserting it into the final mix, Offord had inserted the take he thought was the right one and placed the good take in the bin of scrapped tape. The result caused a noticeable tape edit that had to stay in the mix as the task of reproducing the sound exactly would have been a near impossibility.

Side Two

“And You and I” originated as a more folk-oriented song that Anderson developed with Howe. Its style and themes were worked on by Howe, Bruford, and Squire, the only track on the album that credits Bruford and Squire as writers. Anderson pitched his ideas for the track while strumming chords on a guitar, singing the section where the first lyric comes in. It was a theme that Howe particularly enjoyed and was keen to build on it. While introducing the song on tour, Anderson said its working title was “The Protest Song”. In its original form, the song had an extended ending that Welch called “a shattering climax”, but its popularity amongst the band decreased over time, leading to their decision to cut it from the final version. Anderson described the track similar to that of a hymn, in the sense of feeling “secure in the knowledge of knowing there is somebody… God maybe”. “The Preacher, the Teacher” was developed in a single afternoon. Anderson suggested the idea of it having a more country feel, to which Howe and Squire came up with respective guitar and bass arrangements that Anderson thought “sat together so sweet”.

“Siberian Khatru” developed from an idea that Anderson had on an acoustic guitar. He did not have the entire track worked out, so the rest of the group took the sections he needed help with and discussed what riffs best suited it as it lacked one strong enough to carry the song. It is the only track on the album that has Wakeman credited as a writer. In terms of its lyrics, Anderson noted the song is a collection of “interesting words, though it does relate to the dreams of clear summer days”. He claimed “khatru” translates to “as you wish” in the Yemeni dialect of Arabic, but had no idea what the word meant at the time until he asked someone to look up its meaning. When it came to recording Howe’s ending guitar solo, one experiment involved Offord placing one microphone by the amplifier and having his assistant swing a second microphone around the room to create a Doppler effect.

Close to the Edge was packaged with a gatefold sleeve designed and illustrated by Roger Dean, who had also designed the cover for Fragile (1971). It marked the first appearance of the band’s iconic logotype, placed on top a simple front cover design of a linear colour gradient from black to green. Dean came up with its design without the band’s knowledge and before they had started work on Close to the Edge. He sketched it during a train journey from London to Brighton with the idea that the three letters could be put together “in an interesting way”. Upon Dean’s arrival in Brighton, he had finished it. Dean pitched the idea of having the title lettering silver-blocked like a traditional book but it never materialised.

In his original design, Dean wanted the album to resemble the quality of a gold embossed book and have a leather texture as he had owned many sketchbooks with leather bounds to them. Dean gained inspiration for the artwork during a visit to Haystacks, a tall hill in the Lake District. He took a photograph at its summit and observing the many tarns surrounding it. “I was imagining this lake as something grander […] How could it sustain itself on the tippy top of a mountain?” The sleeve includes pictures of the group and Offord that were photographed by Dean and Martyn Adelman, who had played with Squire in the late 1960s as a member of The Syn. Dean wrote the sleeve’s text and lyric sheet by hand. On reflection on the album’s design, Dean said: “There were a couple of ideas that merged there. It was of a waterfall constantly refreshing itself, pouring from all sides of the lake, but where was the water coming from? I was looking for an image to portray that”.

Once recording for the album was complete, Bruford left the band on 19 July 1972 to join King Crimson. He offered to tour with the band for the remainder of the year, yet Howe wished for him to leave sooner as he no longer had the commitment. Howe later regretted his decision as he would have enjoyed playing the album live with Bruford at the time. His replacement was Alan White of the Plastic Ono Band and Terry Reid’s group. As he played on Close to the Edge but left before the subsequent tour, Bruford was obliged by management to share his album royalties with White and claims that Lane enforced a compensation payment of $10,000 from him for leaving. Years later, White agreed to return his share of the royalties upon Bruford’s request. White had one full rehearsal with the band prior to the tour’s start on 30 July 1972 which saw the band play a total of 95 concerts in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan and Australia. The tour ended in April 1973.

A lot of Progressive Rock fans have said that Close To The Edge is the best Prog album ever released but as far as I am concerned the jury is still out on that one.

Here is the whole album for you to enjoy.

Keith.

Yes – Close To The Edge

Close To The Edge (Starts at 0:00)

And You and I (Starts at 18:42)

Siberian Khatru (Starts at 28:51)

https://youtu.be/GNkWac-Nm0A