There are two types of bands, ADHD bands and autism bands. You can tell at their practice which is which. 

ADHD bands have their cables snaked haphazardly across the floor, and their equipment stacked in piles. When something breaks, they buy it again. Their members talk over each other, about anything: concerts they saw, people they screwed, pedals they purchased, politics and religion. Between songs, their drummers beat on their kits and their guitarists noodle. 

ADHD bands practice full sets because they get bored working on the same tune over and over. If you shout, “one two three four,” they all lock in, but until the count-off, they might as well be cats heading in different directions. 

Autism bands have their cables bound and labeled. They have their equipment mounted in racks. When something breaks, they fix it. When their members talk between songs, they typically discuss the songs: dynamics, effects, maybe “modulate up a step on the bridge.” At an autism band’s practice you might even hear, gasp, silence. 

Autism bands will work a song until it’s perfect. Sometimes it won’t even be the whole song, it’ll be a section, it’ll be a transition. It’ll be exacting, and if you’re in any way ADHD, it’ll be exhausting.  

As you’ve probably guessed, I’m pretty ADHD. 

But I once tried out for an autism band. 

“So,” the guitarist said, “we’re going to play this on a loop until you can figure your part out.” And then he played an overwhelmingly gnarled riff for which I was to compose a counter melody.  

As I tried to parse the key and time signature, he added, not quite helpfully, “The one is on the harmonic.” 

After muddling through by playing a bunch of slop, I popped my parachute. “Guys, I like what you’re doing, but I don’t think I can find my way into your band like this.”

We shook hands and parted ways. 

In the summer of 1972, drummer Bill Buford left the band that he had helped found, Yes, because he found the recording of their fifth album, the prog masterpiece Close to the Edge, so tortuous. 

“Every instrument was up for democratic election, and everybody had to run an election campaign on every issue,” he said years later. “It was horrible, it was incredibly unpleasant, and unbelievably hard work.”

In autobiography, Buford described falling asleep on a studio couch while bassist Chris Squire EQ’ed his parts on the mixing board. When Bufford awoke hours later, Squire was still at it, “still considering the relative position of the two knobs.” 

To the jazz-schooled Bufford, this was too much autism. After Yes recorded the album, he fucked off and joined the UK’s other big prog band King Crimson, who embraced his improvisational chops, and didn’t make him defend everything he played. 

The thing is though, you don’t get Close to the Edge without its excruciatingly autistic writing process. Across its three super-length tracks, Yes fuse rock, folk, jazz, modern classical, the highest male vocals that aren’t falsetto, a magnificent organ solo recorded in a literal church, cool Moog bloops and doops, wackily dissonant vocalizations, some very complex chooglin’ funk, the themes of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, and pastoral found sounds onto a vinyl platter, whose green gradient cover was perfect for separating out the seeds and stems. 

After Buford left, he must’ve taken some of the magic with him. Yes’s next album, 1974’s Tales from Topographic Oceans, is a frequently boring four-track (!) double album (!!). It received lukewarm reviews at the time, and is now considered (along with the entire catalogue of Emerson, Lake and Palmer) to be the height of prog rock’s hubris, and the ur example for the necessity of punk rock.

For the record, though, I’ll go to bat for its third track, the wild “The Ancient (Giants Under the Sun). 

Listening to Tales from the Topographic Oceans you can tell why Close to the Edge is so good and Oceans is not. On Edge, you’ve a band fighting for every moment on the record. An idea didn’t just have to be good, it had to be good enough to beat everyone else’s. 

By contrast, Oceans shows us a band who’re going along to get along. Apparently, singer Jon Anderson and guitarist Steve Howe devised the album’s concept around Paramahansa Yogananda’s spiritual Autobiography of a Yogi and everyone else just filled it in. 

After the 1974 tour, keyboardist Rick Wakeman, who famously ate takeout onstage during the album’s duller moments, left the band because he found the material half baked. 

Yes doesn’t have the cachet of the other prog giants Pink Floyd or King Crimson. They made too many records (23 studio albums), had too much turnover (Buford even rejoined the band in the 1980s for a few years), and made too much money (13.5 million records sold…and counting). And they’re still touring (!!!). But I would put Close to the Edge up against Floyd’s Wish You Were Here or King Crimson’s Red as among the greatest prog rock ever made. And that’s in no small part due to the exacting, tortuous autism that its creators had to endure to get their ideas out.