On Yes’ 1977’s Going for the One, the title track serves as what your espionage types call a honeypot; its insidious purpose is to seduce you into buying the album, only to learn you’ve been had. In short it’s bait, carefully adorned in bright red lipstick and pushup bra to make you think you’re getting a new and better Yes (they almost sound like Led Zep!) when in fact what you’re getting is the same old pompous progrock Yes of yore. And not even the same old pompous progrock Yes of yore at their best.
And talking about honeypots, Going for the One even comes complete with a Hipgnosis front cover (out were Roger Dean’s fantasy scenarios; in was a sort of futuristic realism) featuring a pair of naked male buttocks in all their glory. Are they there to seduce? Or is Yes subliminally inviting us to kiss its collective ass? Nah. That would be funny, and one thing I would never accuse Yes of is a sense of humor.
Many welcomed Going for the One as a return to form, insofar as it eschewed the very long Yessongs of 1972’s Close to the Edge, 1973’s Tales from Topographic Oceans and 1974’s Relayer in favor of the (and I’m speaking relatively; brevity is hardly the soul of Jon Anderson’s wit) shorter and punchier material on 1971’s The Yes Album and 1972’s Fragile. And it’s true. The double LP, four-song Tales from Topographic Oceans in particular is a classic example of progressive rock song bloat, and anywhere who can swim the length of its turgid seas has stronger ears than I.
But repeated listens to Going for the One reveal its myriad shortcomings. Jon Anderson’s lyrical conceits are as muddleheaded as ever; the only concrete lines to be found are on the title track, where the mystical one comes face to face with his own limitations, to wit, “Now the verses I’ve sang/Don’t add much weight/To the story in my head/So I’m thinking I should go and write a punchline/But they’re so hard to find/In my cosmic mind/So I think I’ll take/A look out the window.” Never has the cosmic mind taken such a nakedly honest look at itself.
But that’s a caveat if you’re like me and have never taken much of what Anderson has to say seriously and don’t spend much time trying to parse the nonsense from the rare grains of oracular wisdom. Far more important is the fact that two of the LP’s five tracks are mindbendingly dull, and they’re the album’s longest tracks by far. The almost 8-minute “Turn of the Century” comes on with some wafty classical guitar and is too precious by far; the story of a sculptor (Roan, not Rodin) who brings his dead wife back to life by means of his art, its music is every bit a cliché as the story being told. Bells tinkle, Rick Wakeman goes classical on the piano and weaves swooping Moog lines around himself while he’s at it, and I generally turn this one off before it’s semi-rousing climax. It’s not bad, this climax, but by the time it rolls around I’m generally too enervated by boredom to care.
Meanwhile, “Awaken” (which goes on for 15 minutes–and more!) it’s Yes at their amorphous worst. Rick Wakeman opens it with some big organ blast, then follows up with some very overblown piano, before the band settles down to its business of stacking brief section atop brief section, as if in hopes of finding one that will turn us all to stone forever. Steve Howe plays some very complex twaddle here while Anderson soars on vocals, like an Icarus whose honeyed wings the sun perversely refuses to melt, over there.
This sort of technically accomplished “complexity for complexity’s sake” has its admirers, most of them the kinds of people who find mere rock a shabby and rather lowbrow musical form and in dire need of some class. Me, I like my rock just the way it is. Jerry Lee Lewis has never resorted to playing classical passages on the church organ at St. Martyn’s Church in Vevey, and I like the way Jerry Lee Lewis thinks. Robert Christgau made fun of Yes’ knack for creating “flatulent quasisymphonies”; me, I’ll take Brian Wilson’s “teenage symphonies to God” (or Jerry Lee’s very adult symphonies to the Devil for that matter) any day.
But let’s move on to the righteous stuff. “Going for the One” is easily the rawest chunk of red meat the very ethereal Yes ever served up. Steve Howe opens it with some wailing rock’n’roll steel guitar and never, ever lets up; Chris Squire and Alan White kick up a storm on bass and drums, respectively; why, even Wakeman has the decency to stay in the background–no classical excesses or church organs on this one, just a lot of swooping synth with nary a phrase from some long-dead classical composer to be heard. And even poor delicate Jon Anderson delivers the hard rock goods; instead of sounding all fey and delicate (as he does, for example, on “Turn of the Century”), he practically spits out the words, putting some muscle into his work for a change. And like I said earlier, he even possesses the wisdom to acknowledge that sometimes even he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The “cosmic mind” looks itself in the mirror and then looks out the window. Sometimes your backyard makes for better viewing than the cosmos.
If the title cut’s the one that makes Going for the One worth owning, “Parallels” is the song that just may keep you from selling it again. I’m tempted to call it an example of Shakespeare’s “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” but I’ll be damned if I don’t find mildly myself captivated by it. “Parallels” doesn’t march, it stomps, and it doesn’t stop stomping, and once again the band that comes to mind is Led Zeppelin. The sound is that big, and even Wakeman contributes; you’ll find none of his fussy classical figures here; the guy who gave us the unspeakable “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” uses that oversized St. Martyn’s church organ blare as an instrument of blunt force to push the song along, as well as to put more flesh on the song’s bones. And Howe tosses in some furious guitar which sounds just dandy in front of Alan White’s drum pummel.
Which leaves us with the humble (it crosses the finish line at less than 4 minutes!) “Wonderous Stories” (sic), which is quite pretty and succeeds by not setting its sights too high. Modesty and concision are words one rarely attaches to these English pomp merchants, but on this baby they rein themselves in and deserve the credit for doing so. Anderson sings along with himself; Wakeman keeps things relatively simple; and the song reaches for the stars instead of sinking into the murky depths like the spectacularly long-winded numbers on Tales from Topographic Oceans.
When it comes to Yes, my philosophy is to Just Say No. But I mock them at my peril. Sure, they did almost as much as Emerson, Lake & Palmer to foment the dreaded progressive rock peril, and yes, they were responsible for creating some of the most outsized Frankenstein’s monsters of their dark era. But they also gave us the likes of “Starship Trooper,” “Yours Is No Disgrace,” and “Roundabout,” and I’d be lying if I said I don’t love hearing all three.
On Going for the One Yes shows signs of life; they even manage to kick out the jams. But the terminal muddleheadedness that exemplified their post-Fragile work ultimately overwhelms the proceedings. That said, I can’t accuse them of not trying. And honeypot or not, “Going for the One” is a real barnstormer.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B-
