The Yes Album, released in February 1971, finds Yes on the cusp of all of its looming greatness — though a few key elements are still missing.
Not least of them was album-cover artist Roger Dean, who would echo and bolster Yes’ sound with a series of remarkable images, beginning on the subsequent Fragile project. Instead, The Yes Album appears to feature something far more conventional: a band photo.
Look more closely, though. There was one element of The Yes Album cover that continues to intrigue. Tony Kaye is wearing a cast, the result of a horrifying November 1970 crash on the way home from a performance at Basingstoke, UK. In fact, everyone in Yes was lucky to have not been badly injured.
“We were actually on our way back, in a rainstorm, and [stalwart Yes bassist] Chris [Squire] did a lot of the driving,” Tony Kaye tells us, in an exclusive Something Else! Sitdown. “There were three accidents involved with his driving [laughs], and I think that was the first one. We were driving back, and I was in the front with the rest of the band in the back. We thought we were on a four-lane highway, but the other two lanes were closed down. We were overtaking a tractor trailer, in a driving rain — I mean, you couldn’t really see anything — and we hit a car head on.”
Kaye’s lower leg was crushed in the aftermath, a moment that still sounds terrifying almost 45 years later.
“The engine came back into cab, and snapped my foot,” Tony Kaye remembers. “So there I was in a cast, for about five months. I did a tour, actually, on crutches. It was pretty bad. I went to a local hospital, and it was 1 or 2 in the morning. I’d broken a bone, but it didn’t really become apparent until the next day when I woke up and it was three times its size. Everyone else was OK, though. The guys in the back were fast asleep. Fortunately, it was a pretty big car, so the damage was minimal, and the rest of the guys were OK.”
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the last crash Yes would endure with Squire at the wheel — though, in another instance, a moment of dark humor somehow emerged.
“Of course, Chris did that again — this time falling asleep on the Autobahn in Germany, and we left the road,” Tony Kaye tells us. “Fortunately, there was a ditch on the side full of water, and we just hit this ditch and the water slowed us down. We were on our way to Cologne, I think. The cops came, and in fact they phoned ahead to the hospital — and announced that there were five girls in a car who needed assistance. [Laughs.] We did have pretty long hair.”
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