Background and Content
Steve Howe appeared with the band for the first time and played a prominent role throughout. The band explored longer songs with "Yours Is No Disgrace", "Starship Trooper", and "Perpetual Change", foreshadowing the many side-length tracks that followed on Close to the Edge, Tales from Topographic Oceans and Relayer.
The spacey, electronic-sounding guitar effect in "Starship Trooper" was achieved via a flanger, a device that was relatively new at the time of the recording.
Tony Kaye preferred Hammond B-3 and piano over the "new" (at the time) Moog synthesizers that Anderson was interested in using. This became a cause of contention within the band and had an influence on the line-up change, bringing in Rick Wakeman and his array of electronic keyboards from Strawbs. (On the album cover's inside gatefold, however, Kaye is pictured playing a Hammond spinet organ, probably an L-100 or M-100.)
In 2000 Q magazine placed the album at number 86 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever.
Howe's solo acoustic tune, "Clap", was heavily influenced by the Davy Graham track 'Fingerbuster'. The piece was written to celebrate the birth of Howe's son Dylan and the baby's attempts to clap in his pram.
According to Alice Cooper on his radio show Nights with Alice Cooper, Anderson claimed to have written the first two movements of "Starship Trooper" alone, though the "Disillusion" movement (which evolved from an earlier song "For Everyone", heard on Something's Coming: The BBC Recordings 1969–1970 and The Word Is Live) is credited to Chris Squire.
The Würm part of "Starship Trooper" is a continuous cadenza of chords (G-Eb-C) played by ensemble and repeated adlib: first accompaniment: electric guitar on the right stereo channel, then acoustic guitar, bass pedals, and drums from middle channel, then organ and bass guitar with tremolo and distortion from left channel, then starts the guitar solo, that swaps from side to side. The whole piece lasts about three and a half minutes. "Würm" originally evolved from a song called "Nether Street" by Howe's earlier group, Bodast. While "Wurm" (without the umlaut over the "u") is an Old English word for "dragon" (worm, wurm, wyrm), the Würm is a river in Germany which gave its name to an ice age in geology.
Read more about this topic: The Yes Album
Famous quotes containing the words background and, background and/or content:
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome about A.D. 100] hoped that teachers would be sensitive to individual differences of temperament and ability. . . . Beating, he thought, was usually unnecessary. A teacher who had made the effort to understand his pupil’s individual needs and character could probably dispense with it: “I will content myself with saying that children are helpless and easily victimized, and that therefore no one should be given unlimited power over them.””
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)