Why now? Why at all? Because Walk-Off-HBP (formerly Alsorans manager) sent in this review:
'The Funniest Prog Rock Album EVER':
I remember when Patrick Moraz was with Yes and they were all so bored they decided to do solo albums. The results were pretty much awful, but Jon Anderson's brand of awful was kaleidoscopically awful. It was the all time stupidest album I ever heard with weird synth boings and gongs, tons of phase shifting effects for the headphone and bong crowd, repeated nursury rhyme licks over and over and over, lyrics like "Chee chee ree ree! Chee chee ree ree!" and the goofiest read along book gatefold record cover I have ever seen before or since. It's as if he took acid and thought "I Am the Walrus" actually meant something profound!
Someone asked me at a party once what the worst album I had was, and I gleefully ran over and pulled out Olias of Sunhillow. We got about five minutes into it before one of the listeners lept to his feet and grabbed the needle off the turntable with a big ZZZZZIPPPP! It's THAT bad! You gotta be on drugs for this one to make any sense whatsoever.
Then Rick Wakeman came back and they continued their downward spiral with wonderful lyrics like "Don't Kill the Whale! Diggit! Diggit!" What happened to Rick Wakeman anyway? When he returned to Yes, it was as if he hadn't an idea in his head any more. His dorky synth sounds on Tormato are laughable. They sound like a children's video game... Blues Clues goes prog rock! Then Wakeman got Jesus and got all John Teshed out and started cranking out profoundly boring "new age records. I have no idea who the target audience for that kind of crap is... people who are half asleep all the time, I guess.
I always thought of Yes whenever I saw Spinal Tap. Jon Anderson definitely is Nigel Tuftnell with the midget dancing around the tiny model of stonehenge!
I have a Yes DVD somewhere, I think it's the one where they've collected all the videoclips and each of them lay a comment. Jon Anderson says words to the effect that during the filming of one thing or another, he and director Steven Soderburgh went to see 'Spinal Tap' together (which was then a freshly minted new film) and that he laughed and squirmed the way through it; after which he made the desicion never to take himself so seriously ever again.
So the reviewer is dead right, but Jon Anderson knows it too so he can rest assured there won't be another album like Olias of Sunhillow.
I actually can't top this review. Of the 5 Yes solo albums that were issued in 1975-76, the ones that I go back to repeatedly with any amount of love are 'Fish Out of Water' by Chris Squire and 'The Story of i' by Patrick Moraz. 'Olias of Sunhillow' is just 'too much', though too much of what exactly, I cannot relate to you properly.
More Astronautical Firsts
An astronaut testified from outer space.
Forgot about that. Yes, the ISS is still under construction and if they don't get the fleet up, again, it likely won't finish. Talk about a bad situation.The star witness before the U.S. House Science Space Subcommittee was just getting warmed up on Tuesday when one question made him float to the ceiling.
U.S. astronaut John Phillips, testifying live on video from the International
Space Station, slowly turned heels-over-head, showing his sock-clad feet to the assembled lawmakers when Rep. Charlie Melancon asked, "Are your feet strapped down so you're not floating?""Yes, sir, we're not strapped down," Phillips said, though he appeared to be standing at attention in the station's U.S. Destiny laboratory module, even though the gravity probably hovered somewhere around zero.
"Right now I'm not wearing any shoes, we only wear shoes pretty much for exercise," Phillips said. "But I've got my stocking-clad feet stuck under a railing on the floor because if I didn't do that I'd kind of just float around." Suiting the action to the word, Phillips freed his feet and drifted up to the ceiling of the station, drawing a laugh from the Louisiana Democrat and the rest of the panel. He then drifted back down and tucked his feet under the rail again.
Phillips' testimony was the first from the space station to a House hearing, though space shuttle and space station astronauts have done interviews and other broadcasts while in flight.
Two other station astronauts also testified, but they were in the hearing room. They faced tougher questions about the station's utility as an orbiting laboratory, while Phillips answered such queries as "What's the view like?"
Perhaps predictably, he said the view was "incredible." The hearing aimed to give lawmakers an idea of what life is like aboard the half-built space station, where construction has been stalled for the last two years with the grounding of the U.S. space shuttle fleet after the 2003 Columbia accident.
- Art Neuro
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