Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes

Tales from Topographic Oceans, Yes's sixth studio album, arrived on Atlantic in December 1973: a double album of four sides and four songs, each one running somewhere between 18 and 21 minutes. Jon Anderson dreamed it up on the Close to the Edge tour after a footnote in Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi sent him down a rabbit hole of Hindu scripture, and he and Steve Howe spent the rest of the road mapping out one piece for each of four branches of those texts. It was Alan White's first studio outing on drums, with Chris Squire's bass rumbling beside him, while Rick Wakeman sat at the keyboards feeling like a spare part. They cut it at Morgan Studios in London to get their hands on Britain's first 24-track machine, and dressed the place up like a farm.

Detractors held it up as prog at its most bloated; the fans made it the first British album to go gold on pre-orders alone and sent it to the top of the UK chart. Wakeman quit when the tour was done.

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