From this vantage point (a terraced house in South East London, 2009), it seems clear that the performances on this live album from 1977 and 1978 — the ones featuring Rick Wakeman — are just filler. Some smart person spotted that the recordings of The Gates of Delirium and Ritual — both from the same 1976 show in the home of Motown with Patrick Moraz on keyboards — were among Yes's finest ever moments, blowing the socks off the original studio versions, and demanded to heard by a wider public. Obviously, since the two songs were over 22 and 28 minutes respectively, a single album was ruled out, and we got the extra shorter songs to pad it out.
When I bought the album in 1981, it was the first time I'd heard The Gates of Delirium. I got to love its density, and frequently lost myself in it. One particular afternoon, when I was more than usually miserable at school, I played it on headphones and saw myself as a pillar of sand on a beach (this beach, to be specific) running through my own fingers and dissolving. This was around the same time as my Sound of Silence moment.
Some wag on Wikipedia reckons the song is "loosely" based on Tolstoy's War and Peace. Citation needed, etc. When Moraz's keyboard solo emerges out of the guitar-and-percussion cacophony about half way through, I always think of the line "A terrible beauty is born", but that's just me.
To puncture all this gibberish, here's an admirably wry excerpt from an interview with Jon Anderson by Allan Jones in 1980, starting with Jon,
"But I remember some people got the point. I remember when we released Relayer, someone sent me an article from New Zealand. This guy had reviewed Gates of Delirium, and it was great because he'd recognised everything in the music that I wanted people to hear in it. He'd seen it exactly the way I saw it.
Which was what? Gates of Delirium had struck me as being utterly incomprehensible.
"It was about war," Anderson explained patiently, as if I was some kind of especially obtuse child.
I knew that much; it was just that the language he used obscured whatever point he was trying to make.
"When I wrote it," he continued, maybe wishing he was already in bed, "we were getting into the last throes of the Vietnam war. And in a way it was a statement about that. It said that war is, like, this kind of thing that happens that everybody gets sucked into… 'you're slaying our people, we'll slay yours… and we will burn the children's laughter.' And the theme of war, that was the driving force and there was a lot of hot metal flying about. And the music got very crazy, it's like a void and out of this void rises this form which controls war, and it's like a demonic form. The devil, if you like. And this form has been watching the war, glad that it's happening… and the music crashed at the end and out of that rises a very gentle stream of sound and goes into a very delicate kind of lyric. It's the kind of lyric people might cringe at, but I thought some people might see what I mean
"It starts off — 'Soon, oh soon the light/Pass within and soothe this endless night…' Like, at the end of a long tunnel, there will be light and things will become clearer at the end. Everything will return to peaceful ways. It's an optimistic view, but you have to go through this violent tangle to get there."
The sentiments seemed admirable; but it seemed overwhelmingly long-winded.
Couldn't he have written a three minute song that conveyed the same message.
"No," he said, inevitably. "A great deal of it was said through the music, through the images the music conveyed."
Could I see that?
I couldn't: as I told him, Gates of Delirium had struck me as a damned unpleasant noise; when I'd listened to it the day before, I felt like someone was tying a knot in my brain.
The intro to Ritual, meanwhile, shows Yes letting their hair down as they noodle along soulfully under Jon's long list of credits and acknowledgements for the roadcrew. "Don't put that funk in my face," he improvises. Quite.
MusicBrainz entry for disc 1
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