Nanohedron wrote:
benhall.1 wrote:
Pretty much everyone I knew had it. Shows the sort of company I kept.
Not to make assumptions about about your crowd, but around here, for some reason there was this popular conception of Yes as being aimed at consumers of recreational fungi. Seems a bit overly specific, but whatever.
That does seem a bit specific. At the time that Yes were releasing their seminal albums, I wasn't into magic mushrooms at all, or any sort of drugs, except that, at 13/14 as I was at the time, I was already smoking and drinking. Actually, I only tried magic mushrooms once, years later, when I was at college. I always think that that one experience (which was a deeply distressing experience) saved me from getting into dangerous drugs like acid and speed - I certainly didn't want that experience ever again, and that's a fact. So I never experimented, as a lot of my friends of the time did, with such harder drugs.
Yes were geniuses - absolute virtuosos, in a completely different class from Focus, for instance - and I love listening to their stuff even to this day. But, looking at it rationally, it's seriously overblown stuff. The lyrics are so ludicrously hippy, it's as if they were deliberately caricaturing hippydom ... but they weren't. They meant it. The music is way over the top, too, especially after Wakeman joined - a total genius, but such OTT, overblown, overdramatic stuff. I loved it then, and I still do.