Review: Storm Thorgerson's 'Mind over Matter: The Images of Pink Floyd' Fifth Edition

Storm Thorgerson belongs to a very exclusive club of well-known album cover artists. Honestly, the only other one I can think of is Roger Dean, and just as Dean is closely associated with one band (Yes), Thorgerson is renowned as the photographer behind the light-refracting prism, the flaming handshake, and the field of hospital beds. Although he created covers for groups as varied as Def Leppard and The Cranberries, Thorgerson will always be remembered as Pink Floyd's favorite coverman.

Review: 'A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & the 1970s'

Prog rock was never exactly cool, but you can’t say no one liked it. Contemporary critics tended to mock it and sighed sighs of relief when punk blew in at the end of the seventies, but punk did not sell like prog did. Even my square-as-a-chessboard dad bought a copy of Aqualung because that’s what everyone else was doing in 1971.

Decades removed from questions of “what the hell was with Topographic Oceans?”, its now generally okay to just like what you like, especially if it’s pretty geeky. Though prog was never really all about Tolkien and complex mathematical theorems as the naysayers would have you believe, it was still pretty geeky.

What I’m trying to say in my confused, convoluted, proggy way is that the time is now right for a deep plunge into prog to both determine what it is and celebrate it. That’s what Mike Barnes does with his new book A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & the 1970s. The UK designation in that title is fairly pointless since prog is such a distinctly British phenomenon (Rush being one exception, as well as a band that does not get so much as a single name-drop in this book. The author does cede precisely 1% of his book to a discussion of German prog bands, though).

Review: 'Time and a Word: The Yes Story'

Like the proggy/poppy group it documents, Time and a Word: The Yes Story is a bit schizo. Martin Popoff’s book is part straight-forward timeline, part oral history. Generally dry and purely informational by nature, time lines are almost never interesting to read. Chatty, gossipy, and a bit hard to trust, oral histories are almost always great fun. That means—like Yes’s discography (sorry, I’ll stop comparing the book to the band)—Time and a Word is enjoyable in fits, but it also lacks the authorial insight and details that would truly make it “The Yes Story.”

We readers learn the basic beats of the band’s career: the comings and goings of its multitudinous members, the record releases and the receptions to those records from both critics and band members, the splits and reunions right up to 2015. What we don’t learn is much about the people in the band. Jon Anderson’s spirituality gets discussed quite a bit, but only because it was so relevant to the music he wrote, and this is really a book about music not people. Rick Wakeman, the most flamboyant member of the group by some degree, has no problem exuding his personality regardless of what he’s talking about. Otherwise, a bunch of guys who critics have often criticized as being faceless music-bots do not get humanized in any meaningful way. Because those guys aren’t particularly gossipy, the oral history portions often fail to fill in the gaps, particularly when dealing with inter-band conflicts. That Popoff’s writing can be very lively, which is evident from his personal assessments of the albums the Yes Men made in and outside of the group, makes one wish he’d tapped into that energy more when explaining the history. Time and a Word could have used a lot more of that kind of liveliness and insight. As it stands, it kind of reads like box set liner notes.

Review: 'Yes Is the Answer and Other Prog Tales'

It is long-winded. It is humorless. It is unashamedly grand and robotically impersonal. It is prog, and until hair metal farted onto the scene in the mid-eighties, it was Rock & Roll’s biggest running joke. But time ameliorates shame, and 35 years after punk ostensibly cleared the pomp out of pop, the prog acolytes are finally crawling out of the carpet to reclaim their favorite genre. In a year when Rush has finally been inducted into the cluelessly snobbish Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, anything is possible, including a collection of essays that not only pay tribute to this long-chided form of music but do so in ways that completely contradict its stuffy rep. Long-winded? Humorless? Grand? Impersonal? These are not words anyone would use to describe Yes Is the Answer and Other Prog Tales. Editors Marc Weingarten and Tyson Cornell have gathered twenty writers who discuss how those mathematical soundtracks for D&D all-nighters impacted their lives with humbleness and wit.