----------------------------------------------------- AUGUST 9, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------- Source: South Florida Sun-Sentinel http://www.sun-sentinel.com/entertainment/music Still saying Yes By Sean Piccoli IF YOU GO Yes Where: Mars Music Amphitheatre, West Palm Beach When: Aug. 11 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $25-$69 Info: Call Ticketmaster Every bout of technical euphoria, every soul-questing lyric, every two-minute solo and 20-minute suite, everything ever multitracked in studios or played in concert, and anything yet to come -- Yes drummer Alan White has one word for all of it: "Output." That's pretty plain talk, considering the British rock collective known as Yes -- which performs Sunday at West Palm Beach's Mars Music Amphitheatre -- tends to inspire more decorative language. One practicing philosopher analyzed Yes in a book subtitled Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock, while the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll says critics have dismissed the music as "irrelevant high-flown indulgence." White says it's just a band. "We're just trying to give [fans] back the music they all love and just getting on with business," he says of the current U.S. tour, which coincides with the release of a five-disc anthology, In a Word: Yes  (1969- ). The missing end date in the box set's title indicates that he, singer Jon Anderson, bassist Chris Squire, guitarist Steve Howe and keyboardist Rick Wakeman may not be done creating. White confirms as much, saying, "We're pretty much striving for more output." Output has rarely been a problem for Yes, the most prolific of the progressive-rock bands and the only practicing example of a genre that came out of Great Britain in the late '60s. Egged on by the experimentalism of Genesis, Moody Blues and Pink Floyd, and convinced that rock could take on the trappings of classical and jazz, "prog" bands including Yes, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer flourished in the '70s. The band formed by Anderson and Squire made what many consider the quintessential Yes records in that decade: The Yes Album (1971), Fragile (1972) and Close to the Edge (1972). All blended suitelike compositions, orchestrated jams, lyrics steeped in nature and spirituality and Anderson's pennywhistle of a voice. All were illustrated with Roger Dean's liquefied Yes logo and his otherworldly landscapes. White did not play on any of those, but came aboard from John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band in the summer of 1972, right after original Yes drummer Bill Bruford quit to join King Crimson. Anderson, Squire, Howe, White and Wakeman -- a classic '70s combo -- are together again for the first time in six years. The return of Wakeman, in particular, has Yes fiends abuzz. The keyboardist who replaced Tony Kaye after The Yes Album in 1971 and was himself replaced on four occasions -- by Patrick Moraz in 1974, Geoff Downes in 1983, Kaye in 1994 and Igor Khoroshev in 1997 -- is the embodiment of the prog-rock aesthetic with his classical training and his grand, gestural style of play. That's Wakeman supplying the trills, fills and stabs on 1972's Roundabout, the band's most enduring single, and generally presiding over his keyboard like the Phantom of the Opera on Fragile and Close to the Edge. White calls Wakeman "a catalyst" for the whole band. "The chemistry is really right," he says. "It just feels really good and the audiences are obviously seeing that. For the band, I suppose it's a feeling of going back to the '70s and how we used to play, doing things without looking at each other. We've been through our adventures as a band, different people coming in and out, but even the roadies who have been involved a long time say it just doesn't sound the same without Rick in the fold." So the tour is a veritable Return to Yes, although the band has managed to survive in some form through parts or all of the last four decades, with a few notable interruptions. Wakeman and Anderson once walked out together, in 1980. In came Downes and Trevor Horn, members of the British New Wave band the Buggles, which had its biggest hit in Video Killed the Radio Star, the song-clip that launched MTV in 1981. The Downes-Horn edition recorded one album, Drama, that definitely sounded more prog than New Wave and yielded one cult-of-Yes classic, the rippling Tempus Fugit. The band broke up altogether in 1981. Solo careers proliferated. White even jammed with a suddenly bandless Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, although no Led Zeppelin-Yes supergroup ever came of the summit. Yes reformed in 1982 without protean guitarist Howe, replaced by a South African named Trevor Rabin. Most of its prog-era peers were out of the picture by then. Emerson, Lake and Palmer was gone. Genesis and the Moody Blues were morphing into pop bands. Pink Floyd had its own personnel troubles. And music was headed elsewhere, away from Yes' utopian metaphysics. Punk -- the short, loud, speedy antithesis of prog -- had seen one of its own, Billy Idol, become a pop idol. Def Leppard was writing the playbook for glossy metal. Synth-pop was the British export capturing everybody's fancy, and the world, truth be told, was not much in the mood for high-minded pronouncements unless U2 was making them. But an odd thing happened. With Rabin co-writing and old mate Horn producing, the 1983 Yes album 90125 took off, propelled by the some of the catchiest little numbers Yes had ever composed. Hold On, Leave It and It Can Happen combined Rabin's deft hook-work with Yes' layered virtuosity, and Owner of a Lonely Heart became the band's first and only pop chart No. 1. Yes had reinvented itself, '80s-style, and scored the best-selling album of its career, although fans of the primordial Yes regard 90125 as just so much airplay-scented fluff. Anderson, too, missed the old gang. He soon was touring with a foursome called Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe, which was Yes so far as they were concerned, except that four other guys -- White, Squire, Rabin and Kaye -- actually got to tour under the name Yes while both parties litigated the brand ownership. Yes didn't know who Yes was anymore. But the sparring quartets called a truce in 1991 and merged like Brady kids into an octet that put out one album, Union, and toured for awhile before breaking apart. Anderson, Squire and White have anchored Yes ever since and operated the turnstile at guitar and keyboard. Albums keep coming, although none as popular as 90125. White insists the group is forever searching out "new music, new directions," but Yes has thrived of late as a perpetual tour phenomenon with a deep back-catalog. A typical concert lasts three hours. "We have too many songs," White quips. Fans parse them on Internet sites such as Yestalk.org, where one devotee claims to have plugged every Yes lyric into an Excel spreadsheet to look for patterns. Among the findings: The word "love" appears 279 times in Yes songs; the word "hate" just six. The band officially discourages anything resembling worship. "We don't believe we're superstars," Anderson recently told Music Street Journal. "We don't believe we're legends. We believe we're musicians trying to make it work, trying to get it right, trying to do good shows and trying to survive the business." White seconds that view and rejects another long-standing criticism: that Yes and other prog-rockers considered themselves somehow superior to mere rock 'n' roll. "It's not snobbishness at all," he says. "We don't pretend to be anything more than we are. The pretense is not there. We're just getting on with what we feel we should be doing. We just do what we do. The critics who can't see that, I don't know why. We're just regular guys, trying to play the best we can for as many people as possible." Close Window YesInThePress.com For site comments, problems, corrections, or additions, contact YesinthePress@aol.com