46. 90125 by Yes

 46. 90125 by Yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVOuYquXuuc&list=OLAK5uy_nZL3S4dYY2pab61tWxvAou9ZTY2edmGb0

If you're a fan of the brand of progressive rock produced by Yes in the 70s, then you probably don't like 90125--an album named after its catalog number with the record company, which is either a really creative idea or really uncreative idea (I can't decide which). It's much more pop oriented than their previous prog-rock albums. According to the Wikipedia, that's because this album was nearly put out as a Cinema album instead of a Yes album. See, after the band broke up in 1981, Cinema was formed as another band with a different sound that was made up some former members of Yes--including musicians that toured with the group. So Cinema was its own thing, and not really Yes. But when they got to mixing all of the music, they decided to offer Yes's former lead singer, Jon Anderson, the job of being lead singer on this new Cinema album. He took them up on the offer, and shortly thereafter they got together with the marketing folks and began thinking about how they could sell more copies of the album, and that's when the former members of Yes in Cinema decided to stop being Cinema and become Yes again.

Even though I liked their 1972 hit song "Roundabout" well enough, I really wasn't a Yes fan until "Owner of a Lonely Heart" started to chart. I played this song during school dances right after I experienced a major heart-breaking rejection by the red-haired beauty of my dreams. That's when the lyric that being an owner of a lonely heart is much better than being an owner of a broken heart really hit home with me. And that lesson got reinforced a few months later when, after I thought I had recovered from the red-head's rejection, I experienced another major rejection by the black-haired beauty of my dreams, after which I did not recover and stopped dating entirely and renewed my vows to the He-Men-Women-Hater's Club. I may have also thought about trying to get a renewed membership in the Virgin Lips club, but my backstage kiss with Kim Hawes during my junior year had been too mind-blowing to ever want my lips' virginity to be restored. (I did get forced into going on one date during my freshman year of college, but as I explained in my last album write-up, I regretted every second of it.)

There were several other songs on this album that I rate as top-notch, including "Hold On," "It Can Happen," "Leave It," and "Our Song." However, the other songs are quite good and not the usual crappy filler songs found on so many '80s albums. So I really like the entire album, including the instrumental song "Cinema," which won the 1985 Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, which turned out to be the band's only Grammy, which is just plain stupid because they are a very influential prog-rock band. And don't get me started with how a song released on a 1983 album qualifies for a Grammy in 1985. (It has to do with the Grammy rules being formulated by ego-maniacal thickheads too high on cocaine to realize their awesome rule-change or new category idea is a steaming pile of horseshit, not apple butter.)

The band came out with a 2004 CD Deluxe Edition of 90125 with five extra tracks, including two new songs "Make It Easy" and "It's Over"--two hold-overs from Cinema recordings that were sung by Trevor Rabin, not John Anderson, so they don't really have the same sound as the other songs on 90125. While they're okay songs, I don't consider them to really be worth listening to more than once. The 7-minute extended remix of "Owner of a Lonely Heart" sounds like it's just the intro to the song being played over and over by the David S. Pumpkin's band, but David S. Pumpkin isn't singing the actual lyrics along to the music because he's too busy stuffing your ears with overcooked Brussels sprouts. The Cinema version of "It Could Happen" should have never happened. And the A Capella version of "Leave It" sounds just like the original, only without all of that good music that makes it a song worth listening to. This is one of those times I wish I had been exposed to massive amounts of gamma radiation in my youth so that I could have grown three enormous angry thumbs and then turned them all down on these extra tracks. 

However, the original album is definitely worth listening to many times over and over, preferably without miniature cabbages lodged in your ear canals. When I returned home from Sweden in 1987, that's exactly what I did. I got a 90125 tape, and I played it over and over until I felt I had recovered from my previous high-school era rejections and went back to college, where I soon got rejected by the blonde-haired beauty of my dreams. Then I consoled myself by repeatedly playing "Owner of a Lonely Heart" while driving around in that black step-side Chevy pickup, convinced that I was not going to date any more in college until I graduated. 

But then my old mission companion forced me to ask someone out so that we could haul his motorcycles on my pickup out to the St. Anthony sand dunes where we would all enjoy a double date in which everyone could inexplicably get sand in every crevice of their bodies. That's when I started dating the brown-haired beauty of my dreams and stopped being an owner of a lonely heart because, as the last line of the album goes, "two hearts are better than one." Fortunately, when I said to Julie that we were going to have to either get married or break up, she said, "Yes." At least, I took it as a positive response to my kind-of-proposal. It didn't occur to me until now that she may have just been asking me to pop 90125 into the tape deck so that I could hear "Owner of a Lonely Heart" as her answer. Now THAT would have been a rejection that would have been much more difficult to recover from, because that would have left a white-haired woman as my only remaining option for finding true love, and while two hearts may be better than one, that can't really be the case if the second heart has a pace-maker.