Never Getting Over Tales

A story from a long ago I had started and never completed. From two periods in my life, it focuses on my love of music, especially the band Yes.

Never Getting Over Tales

 

            In a cool October drizzle on a black-sheen sidewalk, the two of us spent forty-five minutes in what seemed like an endless queue. In due course, we gladly shuffled hand in hand into the warm Millard Fillmore Auditorium to mix with the buzzing concert-attending crowd. This was 1974, and we came to witness the progressive rock group Yes on their Tales of Topographic Oceans tour. Yes, then and now, remains my favorite band over the many years of their playing and my listening.

We made our way to the medium-priced seats above and just left of stage center�"almost perfect seats. I remember taking in the crowd, which filled all the seats for the band who had reached their musical peak, bolstered by the top-selling success of their previous album, Close to the Edge. It was my favorite album with three extended, perfectly composed, and wonderful epical symphonic-rock masterpieces. The crowd knew that even though this was their Tales tour, typically the five men from Yes would play, perfectly I might add, cuts from all their earlier, current, and forthcoming albums.

            We anticipated the concert taking in the surrounding crowd’s soft roar of background conversations, yells, and playful shouts. All about, lighters flashed everywhere to touch off glowing reefers like fireflies across a glen on a warm summer’s night. We barely got comfortable with a little cuddling when we noticed the thickening haze of grass smoked in profusion. Fans of Yes were not a rowdy bunch or potheads like the crowds at hard rock concerts. We tended to think of ourselves as cerebral with a deeper intellectual appreciative of the finer points of progressive rock’s art and marijuana facilitated that appreciation and experience. It may have been the thrill of anticipation, but we swore we experienced a high without a single drag.

             The stage set included a pair of huge fluorescent sea creatures, a clam and lobster, but the closed curtain concealed what was to become a great show. I pointed out the three huge mirror balls hanging from the ceiling, each the size of a small car, and the huge, dark searchlights pointed at them. Soon enough, the quiet strains of what sounded like a flock of birds descended on the auditorium and in response, the crowd noise faded away. The searchlights flipped blazing beams blinding our agog eyes and illuminating the mirror balls. Millions of whirling light flashes rippled across the thousands of faces turned upward from row one to fifty-five.

 The intensity of the flashes grew with the seemingly approach of songbirds. Everyone knew where this beginning led: the opening of the song “Close to the Edge”. For minutes, the sounds and lights intensified until a single spotlight lit the gap in the curtain for lead guitarist, Steve Howe playing the song’s acoustic opening. The crowd’s recognition greeted the guitarist deafeningly, but the appreciation quickly fell to a whisper to take in the virtuoso’s talent. After a few bars, the curtain whipped open to reveal the remaining members that made up Yes. The concert had begun, and it was glorious! Accompanying the Tales songs, the huge sea creatures moved including the huge clam devouring Patrick Moraz on keyboards. Chris Squire’s extraordinary bass rumbled throughout the auditorium, and Alan White’s drumming kept us bouncing along. One extended composition “Revealing Science of God” Jon Anderson’s lyrics had a wonderful reprise, “getting over, over hanging trees, let them rape the forest…” that filled me with awe and emotion. A line, a song, and a scene I will remember all my life.

 

            Picture me thirty years later as a DJ on Northern Michigan University’s WUPX Radio X, and the solitude spinner of my beloved Yes and other progressive rock music. My Vinyl Reflections show was heavy on Yes for they had 15 albums in their career, and just in 2003 they had finished their thirty-fifth anniversary tour. My DJ career of sorts was on its third year, and I enjoyed it immensely. I endured a few negative comments from callers, but I maintained my focus on my personal musical genre hoping to bring this mostly unaired genre back to the college crowd. The Radio X vinyl library had quite the progressive rock album collection from the era, 1969-1977, and surprisingly well used indicating that the music was very popular with the college crowd. I confirmed what I known all along, back then being cerebral happened to be cool.

In my repertoire of music, I always considered playing Yes and their Tales at Radio X and at home, but in both cases, I don’t overplay their compositions. My last semester at Northern came too quick, and so with that, my stint as a DJ ended. I never fit in with the other DJs due to my age and genre, but nonetheless was respected or perhaps left alone to do my own show, my own way. It may have been one of the most stressful things to done in my life at first, that is to speak on the air, to cue music correctly at the right moment; but I loved the experience as a privilege, one that will not come again. I place these two experiences, the Yes Tales concert of the seventies with the DJ stint in the oughts side by side and always, and when I do, I remember the riff, the line, “getting over, over hanging trees…”        

Reviews

[wondering]

hmmm not much in it for me. I challege you to come up with another made up tale, like the christmas story, " moonchild". It is easy to relay true life stories, but spining a tale from your imagination shows us what kind of writer you are.