197 words about Close to the Edge
In the scattered, shimmering shrapnel of a neophyte’s ecstatically awakened consciousness, I get up. With the begrooved thunder of gravity’s terminal onslaught from below, I get down. I am the music of the sun, come quickly from afar. A 20-minute-long long-player (LP) side that lacks nothing and gives everything. Are there truly those who will flee aghast from my wide-eyed, lysergic embrace, citing various personal ailments and unscratched rashes? Those whose faces will fall sour at the mere mention of what this essentially and quintessentially is, namely, let’s not be embarrassed to say it, progressive rock, prog, and that of the highest order? If the entirety of 70s stadium rock had to be sacrificed for me to exist, it would not be an unjust exchange — all the tepid Clapton solos and lukewarm Page riffs in the world for Steve Howe’s typhoon of an opening solo, all the “Bohemian Rhapsodys” for this one magisterial, nonsensical suite. And what is prog except rock music becoming autonomous from the blues through an injection of baroque complexity? Could this be, as is rumored, the music that played as the first humans awoke by the river? I get up. I get down.