ABWH - Close to the Edge (Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA. 1989)

[Blín D'ñero]

Premiered Jul 14, 2023 #kingcrimson #drummer #paistecymbals
What’s left to say about this classic of the genre? Much ink has been spilled trying to get to the essence of why it works so well, compositionally and structurally. Somehow the musicians and engineer / mid-wife Eddie Offord were all wide awake during it’s gestation and birth at Advision Studios in London that June in 1972. We were tuned in. So many small, tiny coincidences had brought we particular people to that studio at that time to make that record. You almost felt that the outcome was beyond one person’s - or indeed the group’s – control. For anyone interested I devoted some pages on the music’s creation, viewed from my perspective, in my 2009 autobiography, so I won’t cover that ground again here.

It took a while to make, though. There was a rumour flying about that Simon and Garfunkel had taken three months to make ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’, a huge slice of time in those days. Naturally, in an age of competitive excess, Yes tried hard to take a bit longer. We probably succeeded, but I’ve been unable to confirm that. Nobody was watching the clock on the expense of all this. The sessions were endless, starting midday and going as long as there was one man – usually Chris Squire – still standing.

During its construction, we had to go and play gigs in various parts of the UK to keep some money coming in. We’d break down the equipment in the studio on a Friday night, go and do a job or two over the weekend and come back Monday morning, having to set up all the gear and recreate the sound of all the instruments exactly as it had been the previous Friday. Particularly draining for the drummer who had a load of sound-checking to do.

I’d left the group by the time the album appeared in the fall of 1972. The first time I played it was with ABWH some 17 years later. Everything had changed: me, the drums, the bass player, two guitarists, two keyboard players, subtle differences in the performance versus the recording that I remembered. It was bound to be different from the original 17 years earlier, but it was a real buzz getting to grips with the beast. I remember loving listening to it as we were playing it. Could I remember it? You betcha. All in all, it was a big night for me.

As they say about drummers, I had the best seat in the house.