Do you think the Prog fans all became punks? I suspect not. Actually I don't like TOTO any more now then I did then, ie not much. But I think Prog fans just looked forward to the next Camel album or whatever.

but I remember thinking it was a record of the 'pants' variety when I listened to Yes all the time.

They were at their best on The Yes Album when their music was still noticably rooted in a pop framework, despite all the twiddly bits. A song like Starship Trooper was quite catchy really, with a strong melody and plenty of hooks. The same could most definitely not be said for Tales From Topographic Oceans as I recall.

and as you've alluded, if anyone's been "always reading what a prog landmark it is" with regards to Tales From Topographic Oceans I fear they've just been reading rather badly informed accounts of the unfolding of popular music trends through the 70s.

The early Yes years were my era of scribbled backs of exercise books, felt-tipped logos on rucksacks and early fumblings on guitar too and what I recall of TFTO is disappointment and a feeling that they were cruising on autopilot after the outlandish invention of the previous three studio albums.

Not only that, they were asking me to save up for a full priced double-album of lesser material, the heartless bastards. It took me months to save up for one of them, and I was still yet to find the cash for Close To The Edge.

Once I'd acquired that I subsequently bought The Snow Goose instead, and it was bloody ace. Still is.

Didn't stop me from buying the very Rhino edition you mention though, so the first time I owned my own copy of TFTO was as a CD re-issue. Which says a lot about the album!

It was pretty much the death knell, although Relayer was marginally better. I remember Rick Wakeman doing interviews around that time saying what a pile of crap it was! As has been said they lost contact with actual tunes and Anderson's lyrics became more and more ridiculous. I still play the earlier stuff though. Yes Album and CTTE particularly stand the test of time.

you can't hear any tunes in - paricularly - the first two pieces? Think we must be listening to different albums!!

I remember looking forward to the release of this album, almost drooling at the thought of the fantastic "Close To The Edge" being followed up by TWICE as much of the same. I remember thinking that Side 1 was, well, OK. Then the interminable dreariness of Side 2. Followed by the awful mish-mash of Side 3. Finally, on Side 4, the album came to life, but far too late (perhaps significantly, Side 4 was the only part they retained by the time of the "Relayer" tour). My overriding impression of the whole thing was a chronic lack of ENERGY, the same energy which had poured from almost every moment of "The Yes Album", "Fragile" and "Close To The Edge". It may not have been the death-knell of prog rock (in fact it certainly wasn't), but it certainly seemed to mark the end of Yes as a band possessed of any thrill. Clearly Rick Wakeman concurred. Mercifully, they reinvigorated themselves on "Relayer" with the brief addition of Patrick Moraz, replaced in short order by the returning Rick Wakeman with whom they produced the superb "Going For The One", before abandoning prog for big-hair stadium rock. In all, I'd still rate the sequence from "The Yes Album" to "Going For The One" as uniformly essential, with the glaring exception of the turgid TFTO, which I'd advise anyone to avoid at all costs.

..from Mr Howe..and contrary to some opinions it does have some good melodies ("Soon.." for one) but it WAS a little disappointing after "Close.."

Another genre I know absolutely nothing about, although in fairness over the years I've picked up a few Prog and the like albums! I love fans teasing out the good stuff for me to go careering in afterwards!

I like a bit of TFTO now and again. And sometimes I'm in the mood for Hip Hop

I became the owner of Selling England by the Pound a few weeks ago. For two weeks solid I listened to NOTHING else. Then I got Foxtrot - and I wasn't disappointed either. I've come to prog nigh on 40 years after the fact and I love it! The detail, the musicianship and yes, even the up their own arse lyrics.

Anyone wanna recommend my next purchase?

Caravan. An "up" for the Gentle Giant recommendation as well.

Will investigate all and report back.

I only ever saw Yes once. Unfortunately it was when they were promoting TFTO and we had to hear it in its entirety before they played Roundabout and Yours is no disgrace as encores. Regrettably by then the audience were in a deep coma. It was crap then and it is crap now. I stopped listening to them after this album. Caravan and gentle Giant however still sound great today.

although Greg Lake's lyrics are so generally awful I squirm through them.

But the composition and musicianship are still things of wonder. YOU try playing Tarkus on the piano!

However it took me about 30 years to get round to buying the CDs, but only the first 3 or 4.

I really had to rev myself up to do it, felt like a backwards stepping nostalgia binge. And my son just laughs. "This sounds like real crap seventies music Dad - did you really like it?"

Then he puts on some uber-cool jazz and my daughter goes back to Grizzly Bear.

I write this in some haste before I dash over to Victoria Pk to stroke my chin and watch some prog bands at the High Voltage festival with 30,000 other people (today its Tull, Mostly Autumn, Pallas, Spock's Beard and a few others)

Like so many other rock sub-genres from the late 60s and early 70s Prog gets a bad press and I agree with Mr Mojo that its partly the fault of mid-70s self indulgent waffle like T of T Oceans. As far as Yes goes I have heard enough to conclude that their early 70s stuff was their best, Fragile being a particular favourite prog album for me.

But did Tales of T Oceans single he death of prog? No, it merely signalled the release of a rather self indulgent album from Yes that has enjoyed a rather mixed critique ever since.

Prog suffered a lot from the 80s post punk new wave and the MTV generation as well as the descent of blues based classic rock into poodle hair rock, goth metal etc. But it has been enjoying a renaissance over the past 15 years or so with bands like Porcupine Tree, Opeth, Dream Theater and the aforementioned Spock's Beard taking music in interesting new directions. And those 70s high priests of prog metal, Rush, have reinvented themselves in ways that other pseudo proggers - e.g the likes of Muse and Radiohead - can only guess at.

It merely sounds like a whole bunch of technically obsessed, and not particularly musical session musicians, all jammed together to show off their abstract technique. Not that far from a kind of 70's Level 42. The effect of the music itself? well I just don't get it. Pretty unsatisfying, devoid of any meaning, feeling, or atmosphere. It's fair to say that I could be missing something of course, but I would love to understand this.

The labels that have been applied Prog, Rhythm & Blues, Punk, Folk don't mean anything of substance really. They are more "characteristics" than genres really. To my mind a more musically successful type of "prog" came from the likes of Led Zeppelin and Queen. Doesn't sound forced, and coming from a much more musical place, than a purely abstract and intellectual one.

..ELP were much more concerned with classical structures and technique than Yes were.
Yes took relatively tuneful and simple song structures and elaborated them to sometimes stunning effect.
The results of their efforts often made people (mainly rock critics) suspicious, but you can't really listen the something like CTTE and not hear real emotion and adventure at work.

It didn't get good reviews at the time and most people including me thought it a big let down after the magnificent Close To The Edge (generally considered to be one of the best progressive albums of all time). But these days it doesn't sound so bad - possibly because I wouldn't play it all the way through these days. Sides 1 and 4 are fine, but it never quite gets going. It never rocks. Side 2 is particularly slow and turgid. The cover's great though isn't it!

even at the most open-minded phase of musical absorption, this was just bloody torture. No wonder Wakeman was having a curry onstage during the tour.

Tales certainly split the Yes fraternity and provided gripe-fodder for those who did not like Yes, or prog. Looking at the Amazon reviews of the album illustrates the divergence of opinion. But the bottom line is, love it or hate it, we're still listening to it and are still talking about it 37 years after it was released (Dec 1973 in UK; Jan 1974 in North America). It went straight to No.1 in the UK album charts (No. 6 on US Billboard) so lots of folk bought it. I loved it because it took Yes in a different direction, paving the way for 'Relayer' (to me, a better album than Tales). Tales was a different album and groundbreaking in its way, but Yes have never bettered the fruitful period when they released 'The Yes Album', 'Fragile' and 'Close To The Edge'. Their live album 'Yessongs' captured that era nicely and also includes some of Wakeman's excellent 'Six Wives of Henry VIII'.

......yet we are all still talking about it 40+ years later and amazingly it seems more relevant in todays musical landscape than at any time since the 70's . Yes we all know Radiohead are touted as the current band who fly the prog flag but you also hear traces in artists like Sufjan Stevens.
I absolutely loved prog back then and the swell of a mellotron string section will always bring a wistful smile to my face. However much of it just doesn't stack up today - odd tracks here and there and linking back to the original thread then Siberian Khatru and Yours is No Disgrace by Yes are in that category. Some things are still staggeringly original and relevant - much of the often maligned Islands by King Crimson still sounds fantastic (if you can avoid some cringeworthy lyrics)as does For Girls Who Grow Plump by Caravan - which at times swings like a Gil Evans big band. The one album which I think still stands up and is the only one I would play all the way through in 2011 is Selling England by The Pound. Maybe its the combination of Gabriel's poetic but down to earth lyrics coupled with supremely subtle and inventive playing by the rest of the band (Phil Collins most talented rock drummer of all time anyone ?)

Especially the comment at around 0.53:

My older brothers had acres of prog, metre-long double and triple LPs, their gatefold sleeves all lovingly preserved in clear plastic covers.

In 1975 I was a serious and bookish sort of 8 year old, dimly aware that while my playmates at school might be able to make do with Abba and the Rubettes, I should aspire to higher and finer things. So I dutifully asked my brother to put Tales From Topographic Oceans on the turntable (I wasn't allowed to do this myself), in the hope that I would be able to share his rapture.

For however long it was, I sat patiently, gradually getting more and more distracted, a sinking feeling in my stomach that if this was what being grown-up involved, it was not worth the candle.

A year later, punk arrived, and even as a nine-year-old, I was frightened, but simultaneously I thought, "Thank God I don't have to pretend to like that turgid crap my brothers listen to." It's an opinion I haven't deviated from in the past 35 years.

..and more about punk.
I don't think I would have understood prog at eight either, and I was as much a genius as you.

I was and remain a lover of Yes's music up until the disintegration in the 90s. I never bought TFTO when it came out as I couldn't afford a double. Finally grabbed it on midprice CD. I have to differ with the Massive in loving side one, "The Revealing Science of G*d". If you can't hear the song structure and very real pleasure in making music, I don't know what we're going to do with you, as Radcliffe often says. And who can resist the Beatles references, the pastoral folky bits and the wig out Howe bits? Try again, say I.

I remember buying TFTO with all the predictable joy of a spotty long-haired teenager and played it so often that I still remember most of the words. This is despite the fact that these days I often can't remember the name of the person I've just been introduced to at a party. Wife hates it and demands it only be played when she is out of the house while the kids just laugh at 'dad's music'. Yet they love Muse! Go figure. So in review, side 1 good, side 2 so-so, side 3 excruciatingly bad and side 4 finally gets going after tedious mish-mash of noodling and noise. It may have heralded the death of prog but it is as much a part of my youth as were Embassy Regal, underage drinking and listening to Alan Freeman do the Top 40 on radio every Sunday.

I've always been fascinated by the particular scorn poured on Prog since the late 1970's, and thought it always said more about English society than anyone cared to admit.

I love Prog, always have. It was the music that, when I was growing up, gave me a glimpse of a world other than working class Glasgow. With it's peripheral housing estates the size of Perth with no pubs,metal framed windows where ice formed on the inside during winter, and ever present sectarianism. A very grey and restricting world.

I grew to believe, cos I'd read "Lord of the Rings", "The Lion witch and woadrobe" and lots of 19th Century poetry and literature (yes, I was that geek) that Prog could only have come from a particularly English cultural sensibility. It seemed to speak of the pastoral, a classicism and romanticism of place, a longing for the past, that reflected the view of literate English youth in the 70's - caught between the Imperial world with its certainties that was just ending and the new, uncertain future. There was absolutely nothing American about it.

In some ways Heavy Metal - which I think can also only have come from England - was a close cousin.

Nevertheless, unlike HM, Prog aspired to and revelled in intellectual cleverness. It assumed from its audience a level of literacy and education(small "e") that no other youthful musical genre would dare. It was more like Jazz or classical. In short it was seen by the Hoi Polloi as a bit elitist. HM was a bit proletarian, whereas Prog was a bit middle class.

Being Scottish this didn't really bother me. I hade no axe to grind with polite English musical cleverness, and could just enjoy the music and imagery it evoked. As did most of my fellow Jock Prog fans. At the height of punk and new wave, Pallas always used to far outsell anyone else at pub gigs in Glasgow.

Indeed, I believe that Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks always thought Genesis were far more unconditionally loved in Glasgow than anywhere else in the UK. On the face of it a strange paradox: an English Public School Prog band who were immensely popular in Scotlands biggest, and most left wing, working class city. Thing is, we didn't really care.

But for England, who Genesis and their ilk where (a generalisation i know, but Prog musicians have a fairly high Grammar/public school quotient) mattered far more.

Prog and its practitioners weren't just some musicians, they represented a class and culture that the stroppy, barely muscially competent and proud of it, English punk musicians loathed for far more than their music.

For me, punk and it's hatred for Prog was down to far more than musical differences. It was class and politics, the rejection of Englishness and the grasping of a more American nihilistic materialism, deference for "fuck you". Punk and Thatcher were one and the same.

I'll go now.

I reckon you're about the same age as me, and you'll surely remember that "progressive" was a much broader church than it later came to be.
Traffic and The Strawbs may not be anyone's idea of "prog" but at the time they would have been happily bunched into the progressive area (as would Roy Harper, The Incredibles and White Noise)
Progressive was just the music "hairy" people listened to.

Yes started having UK chart hits at the height of punk. After a fashion, they are still active. Clearly punk did not kill them off at all.

..made by and for public schoolboys is simply not true.
If you went back in time and dissected the audience at a typical prog gig, especially outside of London, you would have found a massive working class contingent.
As for the musicians, there was no greater representation of ex public school/grammar school people than there was in punk.

After having my curiosity re-aroused by this discussion, back in July/August, I bought the Rhino remaster/reissue of TFTO, but only today got around to listening to it - with no small measure of trepidation, I might add. And, you know what? I thought the whole thing was terrific! To be sure, there are a few passages of what the classical-review mags would doubtless describe as "longueurs", but they form a very small portion of the whole 80-minute playing length. So what did I hear? Achingly beautiful melodies, gorgeous harmonies, lots of absolutely killer guitar playing from Steve Howe, some excitingly dissonant, jarring sequences, and, generally, just a hell of a lot of very exciting stuff going on.

So why such a changed reaction, compared to the last time I heard it, giving up in disgust, over 30 years ago? Perhaps because back then I hadn't acquired my interest in jazz, so the dissonant stuff was wasted on me then. Second, I'd had no exposure to classical music, so I didn't appreciate all the stuff going on with recurrent motifs, alternating and then developing two or more contrasting subjects, and so forth. Finally, I hadn't acquired my love of doodling techno/electro and ambient music, so the more "aimless" and drifting sections made me switch off. Now it almost seems to encapsulate all the types of music I've picked up over the intervening decades. And I love it. Who'da thought, eh?