North American syndicated rock radio show, InTheStudio With Redbeard: The Stories Behind History’s Greatest Rock Bands, employs “affirmative” action for the 45th anniversary of the durable YES album Fragile, released this day in 1972, with upcoming 2017 Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame inductees, co-founder Jon Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman.  

As the ‘70s began, the British music scene was in transition with the pop, psychedelic sound of the late sixties colliding with a heavier straight forward sound demonstrated by bands like Cream. Ultimately, it was a new progressive rock sound, almost classical in nature, that caught the attention of the British youth and soon the FM airways in the US.

For YES, their fourth album Fragile and it’s unlikely hit “Roundabout” would be the breakthrough to catapult the progressive rock Londoners into arena superstars.

Drafted as their new keyboard player then, Rick Wakeman shares with show host Redbeard how YES found its mark when making Fragile. “I was always convinced… and it sounds a bit egotistical, but I don’t mean it to, that when we did Fragile, all the time we were recording it, writing it and putting it together, that it was something very, very special.”

Jon Anderson remembers, “Probably around Fragile was the time that I started to become a little bit more like a director. They use to call me ‘Napoleon’. They never told me to my face (chuckles). It didn’t matter, I didn’t care, as long as it was happening. Later I learned the word ‘catalyst’.”

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