I have a story about the first time I heard Roundabout. I was seven years old, and I was in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, at Conference Point (church camp), summer of 1974. I slept on a top bunk in a green cabin. Previous occupants had written on the ceiling. Right above my head someone had written 'Confucius say: Man who go to bed with itchy butt wake up with smelly fingers.' Who was this wise Confucius? Anyhow, I didn't like being at camp too much, but there were these hippie junior ministers who played acoustic guitars and had us sing hippie religious songs, like I am the resurrection, and tunes from Godspell. They were pretty cool. They also had a Chevy van with these big speakers that weren’t locked down to anything. So, one night we were going somewhere and I got to ride in the van. I got in it and someone put one of the speakers in my lap and said I had to hold onto it. They turned on the stereo and I soon felt an amazing vibration surge through my hands and into my brain and I had no idea what was going on...but it was like some kind of epiphany. I didn’t know it was Roundabout at the time. But I recognized it when I eventually heard it again, and I knew it was Chris Squire's Rickenbacker bass that had affected me so much.
That bass comes in at 0:45. It has this woody, round texture, almost like a thick cord of elastic rope, this is what it feels like to me. Rick Wakeman's keyboard riff at 1:53 is pretty dramatic as well. We had a pipe organ at my church, so I probably thought this was another hippie religious song.
Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there...they just stand there, doing what mountains do. In the image below, Jon Anderson says, 'Look yonder! A mountain! Standing there!'
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