The album that introduced the world to the guitar greatness of Steve Howe.

Chris Squire wields his bass like a weapon, a sonic weapon that just kills me every time.

This whole album is a masterpiece. Try "Starship Trooper" :)

It was different back then Sifa, most bands from that era started in night clubs and bars, they played original music and got noticed. Record companies were looking for talent then. Once signed, if there was at least a cult following, they would let the artist experiment even if the first few albums weren't terribly successful. And long songs were just a thing of the era. FM radio was more underground back then and they would play all the long arty songs on college radio stations which were big back then...

“One thing that did happen in the 60s,” he says, “was some music of an unusual and experimental nature did get recorded, did get released.” The executives of the day were “cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, alright!’” “We were better off with those guys,” says Zappa, “than we are with the hip, young executives,” making decisions about what people should hear. The hippies are more conservative than the conservative “old guys” ever were. This Zappa of 1987 recommends getting back to the “who knows?” approach, “that entrepreneurial spirit” of the grand old industry barons of the 60s. ....

How about that dirty Rickenbacker bass? If there's one bass player that's considered one of the best, it's Chris Squire (RIP) Anyway, thanks for a great eaction.

Chris Squire taking that Rickenbacker bass for a walk around the block, a trip up the mountain, a dip into the valley, and a blast into outer space.

July 24, 1971. I'm in the Yale Bowl waiting for Grand Funk Railroad to come on. The opening act comes on with no announcement, by the middle of the first song we were straining to see the name on the drum kit. It was yes I went out the next day looking for that album. Great reaction, there are plenty more songs just as amazing. Prog rock at it's best.✌️❤️😃

Yes! 🙂❤

Perpetual Change (live) off Yessongs it's incredible.

What a SUPER group....some times we forget................

Acts in the 60's and 70's used to get signed by A and R men who used to go and see the bands live. The music press and more underground radio stations used to create a bit of a buzz over up and coming bands, and if the record company reps liked them live they got signed. Great choice of track tonight, I thought you'd like Yes a bit better with something from this album!!

You guys are on a roll, what a great week of music. Another great album. You have the best patrons.

That bass though.... RIP Chris Squire. Thank you.

Classic Yes! I have tickets to see Rick Wakeman in concert... can't wait!!

The Yes Album, their third and the next album by Yes, Fragile, pretty much define the term Prog Rock.

I was 13 when this album came out and the entire album is a masterpiece as are the following 2 albums after that, Fragile and Close to the Edge, the holy trinity of Yes and they released those 3 albums in less than a 2 year period, Chris Squire turned that bass into an other worldly instrument, he played it like a lead guitar and the band itself had 100 lineup changes and you'll not see a band go through so many people but Chris Squire is the only constant through out it's history right up to his death. I've seen them 3 times, 1979, 1984 and 2004 and they are true musicians because live they're even better, gotta tell you it was a glorious time to be alive the 70's and as I am sure you realize why my generation laments today's music because there's nothing, NOTHING today that can touch this, nothing.

"The Yes Album" was truly the album that introduced the whole world to "The Yes Album."

It was Chris Squire's bass on Roundabout that hooked me on Yes. Grab that Rick, turn the treble all the way up and use a pick - unforgettable!

Yeah Close to the Edge is interesting music, but this particular song has always been my Yes favorite. So many musical treats built into this song. Very much ignored the conventional structure of songs at the time, and yet so well composed it holds together with perfect coherence. Every musician shines through in this song. The bass play is outstanding , and Steve Howe's guitar work on this is so fluid and organic and sublime.

"Battleships confide in me and tell me where you are".

Glad you liked this one better. Yes was one of the best bands ever to grace the planet. Try “South Side Of The Sky” next.

From their genius period (albums 1-5 plus the live one). Bassist Squire (RIP) used to tell the story that no one in London wanted anything to do with his playing until auditioning for Yes. Go figure. Thanks!

Have always loved Chris Squire's chunky bass, which, like John Entwistle, he played like a lead instrument. Bill Bruford's complex, jazz inspired, drumming and Steve Howe's fluid guitar playing and the ethereal harmonies. Nice

This is a great example of Yes entering their prime. A loaded lineup that really put it all together here.

I love your laugh dear...This is right up there with the best of the YES material...That bass ties it all together...

Every musician at their finest ability, spells Yes.

The organ at 2:09 is the most unique and original part of this song, really makes you think about life when you hear it

Great album to start the Yes Journey with. A classic.

Back in the day labels had people going out to the clubs where bands played. If the club was crowded night after night and people were into the music, the band would be signed for a one record deal. Back in the 60's and 70's... people went out to night clubs to dance and drink. I guess the equivalent to it these days is people swiping right on their phones.

Yes was one of favorites when i was ~16, my high school music teacher who loved classical music and jazz used to play Yes for us but most of us students was already fans. I now rediscover YES through a lot of reactions and I have realized that in back then I was not really aware of the power of the bass guitar and the drums that made all songs of YES great.

Trust Me, the Live Yessongs version of this song is JAW DROPPING. It takes the pristine recording, and blows up everything. Yessongs is My desert island compilation.

Ladies and gentlemen Chris Squire and Yes the greatest show on earth. Been listening to this album for 50yrs, gets better with each listen.

Check out Starship Trooper by Yes from the Yes album. I've seen Yes Live from 1976 to 2015 Chis Squire's passing!

Love it!!! YES is FIRE🔥🔥🔥

The drum and the bass in the beginning !

Greetings to my favorite reactors because you guys don't talk over the song I so appreciate that. Yes is a great band Starship Trooper yours is no disgrace off there yes songs album as a pair as the greatest side of an album almost ever. I'm glad you got to hear it. Now I have to tell you I just watched your reaction to Wishbone Ash it excites me that you know nothing of this band which I consider myself well-versed this ban was The Originators of the twin guitar sound even before the Allman Brothers copied by many bands after in the 70s they have over 35 albums to their credit inner still touring today putting out an album just last year called coat of arms they still Rock it will probably take me too long to tell you about all their different albums and songs but I will leave you with a couple try F u b b off the Same album you just listen to. They're biggest album being Argus. They literally have so many songs it's hard to pick one but my favorite for you would be to tales of the wise live from Ducker 1A and Almighty Blues live and lastly live way of the world. Who the f*** is Wishbone Ash you say welcome to finding out as you hit on a very well-known band had lined in front of Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen

Great groove provided by Mr. Bill Bruford.

Heart of the Sunrise

I like all of the Yes albums but this one is my all time favorite one! 👍

One of the great bands.

so good

I love the fact that Sight After Dark takes the time to read through listener's comments. The band Yes was one of the great '70's band and as a teen, I owned and listened to all of their albums.

This was from their 3rd album, release in 1971....their first hit single "I've Seen All Good People" came from it.

Yes are genius..... hope you look into them further.... Yes are personalised and meant to experience in your own space..... BTW YES were massive n the 70's

College 73, Marantz stereo and we’re all tuned up laying on the apartment floor, only light was the lava lamp and this album of course!

Yes

To answer your question regarding how music of a more experimental nature was signed, here's a quote from Uncle Frank: “One thing that did happen in the 60s was some music of an unusual and experimental nature did get recorded, did get released. The executives of the day were cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, alright!’” “We were better off with those guys than we are with the hip, young executives making decisions about what people should hear. The hippies are more conservative than the conservative “old guys” ever were." Frank Zappa 1987

To me this song is all about positivity. The tune just fills space with an optimistic bent and its hard not to get sucked in, overlooking its 'weirdness' (for ex Squire rarely plays a traditional bass line). And it holds up over time. Its been close to 50 yrs since I first heard it and still holds my interest. Loved it!

The thing to remember about "back then", is that the rock culture was all about albums. Sure, there were singles that hit the radio, but us college kids bought ALBUMS, and the record execs knew that and tried to fill that need.

It was so different in the 70s. You didn’t send parts of a song. Record companies saw you play, signed you. Today’s music is not anything like it was back then. YES is #1 period! ☮️💜

Within seconds it's huge and an explosive polyrhythmic psychedelic whirlwind. This is their first album with Steve Howe on guitar that had YES blowing the lid off the Prog scene. Coolest guitar, bass, vocal, harmonies, drumming, atmospheres and changes who pull you inside a hypnotic vortex of sounds. LOVE 70s YES. The most imaginative, versatile, intricate, uplifting virtuosic Progband ever! On the next LP, ROUNDABOUT became YES's first huge Hit bc the company edited the song for airplay but YES and many other Prog bands were not concerned with radio singles. Albums were the big thing in early 70s.

My first YES vinyl...........awesome.......................................not a bad cut on the entire album

Great choice.

The " Yessongs" version is awesome. Actually the whole album is impressive. Prog lyrics are like Impressionist paintings in many cases?🗿🌴

Nice I like video o& you guys rocking out in the begging. Love yes too

You can find the audio of their whole set on. KZfaq. Just ask for Yes at the Yale Bowl. It was a great show 👍😃😃

Chris Squire and Geddy Lee must have benn brothers in another life... Geez these guys knew how to lay down bass lines!

My husband said find a review with this song. Listening to it is the same painstaking vibes I got from it 30 years ago, no its renewed

I believe it was a message to the soldiers returning from Vietnam. As you may know, the MI Lya massacre was in the news and soldiers were spit on as they returned to the States. Most, of course, were just draftees who were doing a dirty job. Sad. Also, Anderson's Dad may have been what we now call a disabled vet.

Perhaps unusually, my favourite Yes album is Relayer. Closely followed by this one.

The record industry was still trying to label the music (which killed it by narrowing the ability to express the sense of exploration just so they could market it), so they listened to established groups recommending who to sign. For example Richie Blackmore (Deep Purple) recommended Wishbone Ash, after a sound check that Andy Powell was matching note for note what Richie was playing then adding lines that Richie matched then added more lines in the classic call & response. Richie was impressed and called his label and told them they should sign them. There are many stories of this kind of endorsement in rock at that time. Chas Chandler (bassist for The Animals) asked Brian Auger (Trinity) to let Jimi Hendrix sit in with them so he would get exposure in England. Led Zepplin's (Peter Grant) agent procured amazing unheard of deals through his intimidating size, weight and confrontational manner. He is credited with rock musicians getting better deals from record companies and venues.

This song and Starship Trooper are excellent from that album. Amazingly, the live versions on Yessongs are even better!

Back in the 1960's, record executives were throwing spaghetti at the walls, just to see what sticks. In the 1970's the artists started making demands, and by the 1980's, the execs decided they were smarter than everybody else, and music became the same bland everybody doing the same thing we know and loath today.

To me, "Close to the Edge" is an intermediate level Yes song. You need the shorter, "A" side stuff on Fragile to begin to appreciate Yes. Advanced Yes is arguably an album like Tales from Topographic Oceans. For that album, put on the headphones, break out the good weed, and prepare to go on a mind-bending journey.

I feel sorry for all the stoners who didn't get to experience this album as their first entry into getting high and listening to music. Starship Trooper is THE song though. But if you're into rock history, Roundabout is the song. We're talking fairly heavy airplay on mainstream radio in 1971 and on a lot of the compilation albums for 70's hits. It's the song that brought progressive rock into the mainstream.

The Symphonic live version of the Ritual: Nous sommes du soleil, by Yes, may be the greatest live performance by anybody at anytime. Yes is one group that is infinitely better live than they are in the studio, and the version I mentioned above, they are backed by a symphony orchestra.

As a Huge YES fan I do not understand why people suggest reactioners dive in deep for their first listen to Yes!? How about their most classic radio plays: Roundabout, Starship Trooper, I’ve Seen All good people, Yours is No Disgrace etc.. not Close to the Edge, Awaken, the Tales Album, or Relayer. Don’t forget Yes’ first albums were not the longer songs they grew into experiencing with more progressive epics!❤️ you want shorter listen to earlier Yes😉 after establishing themselves record companies just sent these types of bands(70’s) off to do an album…come back and there it is! As fans we loved whatever 70’s bands were putting out! Great era to grow up in!🤘❤️🎸🎼

You should understand that YES built _a hell of a lot of complexity_ into their music. A first listen will almost never do justice to their longer pieces. The audience they sought to satisfy, 1st & foremost, was _other musicians._ Indeed, most of their biggest fans were/are other musicians who were amazed at what they were able to pack into a song. But their 2nd target audience was the mainstream pop music audience, thus their emphasis on melody and vocal harmonies. They arrived at a time that was receptive to their experimental approach to music. Their early sound was dominated by Chris Squire's Industrial-Melodic bass playing, which when combined with jazz drummer Bill Bruford's experimental approach created The Best "Rhythm Section" if you can call it that within the Progressive Rock genre. Later, they added a virtuoso guitarist and a virtuoso keyboard player and it led to unbelievably creative and majestic musical creations. By the way, friends, if you listen to Close To The Edge a second and then a third time, you'll be far more impressed with what they put together than you were on the first listen... ;)

Yes recorded for Warner/ Atlantic, a few years earlier another Warner label, Atco had a massive selling album, one of their most successful during the late 60's, Iron Butterfly's Inna Godda Da Vida that had a sidelong track so indeed they figured at that time that long rock songs = financial success.

They would get you on Round About or And You And I And sneak this one in afterward? They were one of the earliest Progressive rock bands that certain executives understood the long term possibilities and followers who would buy albums back in the day!

In 1971, record execs. did not know what the kids wanted to groove to, so they signed up many artists for few bucks and hoped one would hit.

Good stuff right here. They also did a live version of this on Yessongs live three album set in which Steve Howe plays one fantastic guitar solo 😎🎸🎶 take a listen.

There’s info out in the googles that answers your questions about how the “music business” was run. It’s a fascinating story. I recommend studying it.

Chris Squire(RIP)is prog's best bassist... the number one reason I enjoy Yes... The question about how bands/artists were signed to recording contracts in those days: record companies would send talent scouts out to hear artists performing live, and would sometimes sign them immediately upon hearing them. Artists would also send demo tapes to the record companies too.

It was a relatively short period of time (from about the mid-60s to mid-70s) when more experimental acts could actually manage to get records made without proving they would make money. But it wasn't always easy - a 16 year old Kate Bush sent a tape of "40 to 50" songs to EMI and they just sat on it - didn't know what to do with them. It wasn't until the tape got passed to Pink Floyd's David Gilmour that she got recognized for what she was: a prodigy. Gilmour became producer and set up the initial recording of, I think, 4 songs that he liked best. But without an artist recognizing another artist's talents, nothing would likely have happened for a couple of years at least. The history of the music business going back to the 1920s was all about commercialism and getting artists to stick with accepted norms of what a song should sound like and how they could acceptably be performed. The only thing approximating an 'underground' music scene in the 1920s and 30s would be the 'race records' being made by the jazz and blues communities. And jazz and blues were not appreciated by the White establishment for a long while.

Chris Squire was the first to make the Bass a lead, listen sweet dreams from the Album time and word 1970.

From the same album Starship Trooper.

My 8 track player ate my beloved copy of The Yes Album.......I drove straight to the local head shop (yes, I'm that old!) and immediately bought another one! No small feat for a poor hippie kid barely able to drive! That's how important that album was/is to me!

Yes, yes, yes! I'll be shocked if you don't love it.

On vinyl, we did skip around. A good turntable would have a lever at the base of the tone arm, so you could just lift it up, nudge that arm a tad, and set it back down. I had friends who had favorite parts they'd skip to. It was a bit of trial and error. But besides that, to learn a song, that lever got a lot of use, too.

First time I saw them was 67 at the Marque Club when they supported Jimi Hendrix. Peter Banks was the guitarist then.

Stoned to the gill, the '70s, listen to YES!!

Space Shuttle take off, Sci Fi like main theme....Gives me a ''To the Stars and Beyond!' kinda vibe.

Close to the Edge, while it's a masterpiece, I wouldn't choose it as an introductory piece to a new listener--- I could see it being overwhelming, and too dissonant initially. Glad this song was redeeming for you, Yes has a truly amazing catalogue of sonic gems. They're kinda like the Indian food of music---- many layers of complexities and flavors, both subtle, and brazen...

Good Song 😄 Steve Howe guitar is very good 😊

Record executives use to go to the clubs and find these bands.

my head is still off from 71

"I've Seen All Good People" on this album is a good one. It has two references to two John Lennon songs in there. And of course, "Starship Trooper" is awesome too. ✌️😎

When you're more musically experienced you'll LOVE Close to the Edge.. but I admit.. it takes quite a few listens :) Cheers, love the content.

Although I have loved Yes since 1970, I didn't think you HAD to love Close To The Edge like I did on first listen... I just thought you needed to lay down in a darkened room while tripping, and listen to it again; ha! Maybe someday you will?

Sifa is right. In the late sixties, record execs didn’t decide off a sound bite, and there wasn’t so much trepidation about what the higher-ups would think. Interesting to follow Zappa’s trajectory taking control of A&R because you can see the difference over time as the bean counters take more power. If you read his autobiography you see the fights he had to get into and how he loses respect for the business. He was able to take over the entire supply chain eventually.

CTTE is a masterpiece that needs to be listened to many times to absorb the genius of the music. Don't give up on it, you'll see.

I believe you've begun by the end of the road. Yes fans of my age,(63) heard rhis album, one year later we were blessed with Fragile and one year more we had another dawn with Close..Each album had nothing to do with the other. Put in perspective there's a clear evolution in a few years between this song till Awaken. Enjoy the way!!!

PROG ON

Definitely a better entry point than Close to the Edge

btw If you like solo acoustic guitar instrumentals, listen to Clap from this same LP, it is a work of art.

I’m pretty sure Yes started out making singles and demos of potential single and I think they got signed based on that and then they started with the long psychedelic songs and it sold so Yes got to do what they wanted.

Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records signed Yes. He saw them live and he could see the amazing talent. He told Yes to make as good music as they could, and he would sell it. No pressure about radiofriendly or single hits og anything. He trusted musical talent. They don't come like this any more in the music business.

" The hook" for this album is "I've seen all good people" Everything else is a bonus. And if I'm a record executive, Chris Squire's bass playing would suck me in. He's the only guy I've ever heard who plays it like a lead instrument. Great album 👍