Year: 1977
Country: United Kingdom
Running time: 15 mins. 31 secs.
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The album Going for the One by Yes has a special meaning for me. In the late 1977, I heard the title track of the album played in the radio a few times and it immediately caught my attention. The real turning point for me was 23 December of that same year, when I saw the band performing another track from the same album, Wonderous Stories, "live" in Finnish television.The clip is obviously a playback, as you can see right here. But anyway, this is the single moment that, at the age of fourteen, converted me into a progressive rock fanatic, which I still am and always will be.
At the time, it was kind of hard to be a fan of prog, or indeed any kind of rock music, in Finland. There was no internet, and therefore no Spotify or iTunes. There was no CD either. There were LP's, but I had no player, and little money to buy one. There were cassettes, for which we had a radio / cassette player in the house, but only with mono sound. I didn't have too much money to spend on cassettes, either. There was the radio, but most of the time they didn't play any modern music. A couple of times a week there was one half hour show, which is how I came to hear Going for the One in the first place.
In the spring of 1978, I had finally spared enough money from my weekly allowance to buy the original cassette of Going for the One the album, and after that there was no turning back. To this day, I still consider it the greatest album I have ever heard. Its closing track Awaken is the greatest long prog masterpiece ever made. Its title track would definitely be the greatest short prog masterpiece ever made, if I ever bothered to make a separate list for those, which I won't. Going for the One is the only song I have heard hundreds of times during my life that still gives me goosebumps almost every time.
For Yes, Going for the One meant a happy return for keyboardist Rick Wakeman, who had been absent for well over three years, concentrating on his solo career. During that time, Yes had made only one new studio album, Relayer (1974, see #9) with Wakeman's temporary replacement, Swiss keyboardist Patrick Moraz. When Wakeman returned, he did so with a renewed vigour and inspiration, and this can plainly be heard from the end result.
The group came together in late 1976 to start recording their new album, and did so in the unlikeliest of places. For a reason best known to band members themselves, they chose Switzerland. Possibly Moraz had some influence on that. The actual place where recording took place, was Mountain Studios, which at the time was located in Montreux (they have moved away since). Inside the album sleeve, there is even a photograph of the apparently happy prog band in a Swiss lakeside location. Montreux is located on the eastern shore of Lake Geneva.
For the magnificient closing track Awaken, as well as another track called Parallels, a church organ was needed. To be able to record its sound properly, Yes reserved a small church in a neighbouring town of Vevey, also on the lakeside, a short distance towards west by northwest, and transferred Wakeman's organ sequences using telephone wires to the studio in Montreux. This may not sound like much of an accomplishment today, but was quite a technical feat in early 1977.
And it is indeed Wakeman's church organ that gives character to Awaken, although he opens it with a piano solo that is in no way discernible from modern classical music. This kind of opening may already scare off some potential listeners, making the track sound even more challenging than it really turns out to be. Wakeman's performance with both the piano and the Vevey church organ is among the very best he ever performed as a member of Yes.
But in spite of that, Awaken is not solely Wakeman's tour de force. The greatness of the track partly lies in the fact that for once, Steve Howe's electric guitar is an equally strong presence, and no less significant. Howe does some of this best guitar work ever on Awaken. This is a departure from albums like Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) where Wakeman's keyboards completely dominated The Remembering, and following that, Howe was given his own separate standout track The Ancient.
When on top of both Wakeman and Howe's exceptional performances the rest of the band is also working at its peak, and with truly considerable compositional inspiration, it is no wonder that the end result reached a classic status. By that, I naturally don't mean only the career of Yes, but the history of music in general. Awaken is the only completely flawless long prog masterpiece I could think of, and therefore the well deserving number 1 in our top 20.
Once again, commercial success followed, perhaps against the odds. Going for the One the album was hardly an easy listen, yet it made it all the way to #1 on the U.K. album charts and remained in the top 40 for 21 weeks. Wonderous Stories was a top 10 single hit which would have been unheard of only a few years earlier. On the U.S. Billboard Top 200 Chart, the album stayed for exactly the same duration of 21 weeks, and peaked at #8.
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