Yes built Close to the Edge by committee, and nearly lost a take to the cleaners
Yes's 1972 album Close to the Edge holds only three tracks, one of them an 18-minute suite inspired by Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Every short passage was debated and voted on, the drummer compared the sessions to climbing Mount Everest, and one chosen take was rescued from the studio's bins.
After their album Fragile became a transatlantic hit on the back of Roundabout, the band returned to Advision Studios in London in June 1972. Jon Anderson and Steve Howe had collected fragments in hotel rooms on tour, but nothing was fully written. The group pieced the sections together in the studio and learned to play them afterwards, and the arrangements grew so intricate they sometimes forgot them overnight, so they began taping every rehearsal.
The engineer and co-producer Eddy Offord wanted the energy of their best concerts, so he had the road crew build a wooden stage inside the studio, which made the drums ring out. When the cleaners threw away the tape of a take the band had picked, everyone dug through the dustbins outside until it was found and spliced back in. A visiting Melody Maker writer once heard a thud and found Offord asleep on the mixing desk, with the music blaring. After one all-night session Anderson walked home at dawn, wept, and finally wrote musician in the blank occupation box of his passport.
The drummer Bill Bruford hated it. He wanted jazzier, improvised music, and described every instrument being put up for democratic election as horrible and unbelievably hard work. He once fell asleep while Chris Squire adjusted two dials on the desk and woke hours later to find the bassist still pondering the same two knobs. The title itself was Bruford's nod to how precarious the band felt, and he left to join King Crimson before the album came out.
The gamble paid off. The record reached No. 4 in the UK and No. 3 in the US, spent over thirty weeks on the Billboard chart and eventually went platinum. Roger Dean's green cover introduced the band's famous bubble logo, inspired by the tarns of Haystacks in the Lake District, and the album regularly appears on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums.
Source: Close to the Edge
