Great Funeral Pieces
I Want This Played at My Funeral — Würm By Yes
The song that blew my mind
I first heard Yes when I was nineteen. It was 1994, and I lived in a student house in Nottingham, UK.
The other guys were listening to stuff like me. Primal Scream, The Smiths, The Prodigy, AC/DC, Stone Roses, and Guns ’N’ Roses. The standard student fair of the day.
Except in the room next to me, a guy called Ben Palmer wasn’t interested in that stuff. He was into jazz and prog rock. A classically trained trumpet player tired of the period's banging guitars and brash laddishness.
He liked tracks that went on for days. Pieces that never resolved and drifted off into obscure time signatures. John Coltrane, Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery, Genesis, Faust, Can, King Crimson, and Yes all emanated from his room. While the rest of us got our thrills from Primal Scream’s Rocks, which seemed to be on an eternal loop in our house during the spring of 1994.
So there I was sitting in my room one evening — probably listening to Rocks — when this haunting guitar progression came shuddering in from next door.
“What was this?” I said to myself. “Pink Floyd?”
