----------------------------------------------------- AUGUST 25, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------- Source: Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53859-2002Aug23.html Summing Up Prog-Rock 'In a Word': Yes  By Eli Attie If you want to understand the sprawling, three-decade career of progressive-rock pioneers Yes, consider this snatch of song lyrics from 1972's "Siberian Khatru." Like a biopsy from a cancer patient, it reveals a great deal about the body on the table: "Sing, bird of prey / Beauty begins at the foot of you. Do you believe the manner? / Gold stainless nail / Torn through the distance of man / As they regard the summit." Three things are instantly diagnosable. First, unlike the work of some broken-down bluesman wailing about his mojo, this stuff comes from the cranium, not the heart. Second, with typical prog-rock audacity, these guys owe more to J.R.R. Tolkien, even W.H. Auden, than to Elvis Aron Presley. Third, and perhaps most important: The lyrics to "Siberian Khatru" make absolutely no sense at all. That's Yes in a nutshell: brainy, gutsy, utterly incomprehensible. With preposterously self-important song titles like "Holy Lamb (Song for Harmonic Convergence)" and "The Revealing Science of God" -- with 15-minute, multi-movement epics that sound like Pink Floyd wrestling Brahms in the cockpit of a UFO -- it's hard to know if the boys of Yes took too many bong hits, or too few. What's clear from "In a Word," a meticulously packaged five-CD career retrospective, is that, unlike the Beatles, the Stones and nearly every other group that grew into rock prominence, Yes never set out to be a bar band. It wasn't content to rock your world; it wanted to catalogue its geological formations. And this is both the band's glory and its downfall. In those rare moments when Yes achieves its oversize ambitions, the results are wholly original, even groundbreaking. The rest of the time, well . . . let's just say the multicolored frocks and translucent fiberglass landscapes didn't help very much. With its elaborate stage sets and high-flying profundities, Yes can be seen as the real-life Spinal Tap -- the fairy godparents of rock's pretensions. After all, this is a band that had so many drummers and keyboard players and guitarists coming and going, at one point there were two entirely different, competing lineups. This is a band that staged such tedious and overblown concept shows that, during one performance on 1974's "Tales From Topographic Oceans" tour, keyboard player Rick Wakeman had takeout chicken curry delivered to him onstage. This is a band so eager to reinvent itself that in the early '80s it briefly merged with new-wave novelty duo the Buggles, famous for their lone hit "Video Killed the Radio Star." To form a stranger union, Siegfried and Roy would have to join up with Metallica. In some ways, all that churning embodies the very idea of progressive rock -- a constant pushing of boundaries, even when the boundaries are there for a reason. Some credit the Moody Blues with the birth of the genre, because the sap-rockers used classical orchestration on their '67 concept album, "Days of Future Passed." But it was really Yes, Genesis and King Crimson who brought prog-rock to life. In the aftermath of the '60s psychedelic explosion, many rock bands were searching for new and bolder terrain, even at the risk of abandoning rock's essential primitivism. Prog-rock was an attempt to combine the sonic force of traditional rock-and-roll, the structural complexity of classical music and the loose-limbed improvisation of jazz -- to bring a newfound seriousness, at times a newfound pomposity, to rock's ragged ranks. There's a reason Yes was the most successful of all the prog-rock bands: Its members are outstanding musicians, fluent in every genre. Wakeman virtually invented the organ as the improvisational core of a rock band. Guitarist Steve Howe moves seamlessly from jazz to rock to classical, often within a single verse and chorus. Bassist Chris Squire and drummer Bill Bruford formed one of the tightest, at times funkiest, rhythm sections in rock; very often, the groove-based riffs they adapted from Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown and other funk founders are the only thing keeping the band from careening into oblivion. Perhaps because of all that ability, Yes tends to bludgeon itself with complexity. Why play one note when 50 will suffice? Why limit a song to 12 minutes when there are corners of your synthesizer you haven't yet showcased? Anyone who set out to complicate rock from the '70s onward has to tip his hat to Yes. Similarly, Yes perfected the psychedelic premise that lyrics don't need to make sense -- that you can sing incoherently about hobgoblins and hedgerows, and the fans will still hold those lighters aloft. In France, they create powerful government commissions to stop this sort of thing. At times, Yes did hit the mark -- and the results are a true epiphany. On the 1972 hit "Roundabout," arguably the definitive Yes song, the jazz-inspired chordal voicings and the muscular bass are a powerful counterpoint to Jon Anderson's ethereal vocal melodies. On "Long Distance Runaround," the band manages to rock out in two different time signatures -- at the same time. But far too often, Yes gets lost in a dense thicket of musical boasts and aimless experimentation. Mid-'70s offerings like "To Be Over" and "Gates of Delirium" sound like the soundtrack to a bad laser show. If this was the music of your youth, there's a good chance you were an early candidate for rehab. As Spinal Tap taught us, there's a fine line between clever and stupid -- and there's an equally fine line between good Yes songs and truly awful Yes songs. Sometimes the elements click, sometimes they simply don't. This may be the problem with prog-rock itself, which tries to thread together so many sounds and influences. The best rock-and-roll has always been a product of its limitations. A rock band's style comes more from what it can't do than from what it can. This is true of Keith Richards's unadorned blues guitar vamps, or Peter Buck's jangly arpeggios on early R.E.M. records. Neither Richards nor Buck was a virtuoso, so we came to know them by their small bags of tricks. Yes, an assemblage of world-class noodlers and conservatory prodigies, couldn't fit its tricks in giant steamer trunks. That's why the band's music is all over the map -- too busy to have a defining signature, too intellectually restless to repeat what actually works. It may also be why the band strikes gold only occasionally. It's the law of averages: Try everything over the course of 33 years, and you're bound to crank out a few fist-pumping classics. In rock-and-roll, as in all artistic endeavors, self-importance is a decidedly double-edged sword. The same sense of cinematic swagger that brought us "The Godfather" also birthed the overblown "Heaven's Gate." "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," for all its splendor, ushered in a whole era of baroque embarrassment. Yes had the courage to aim impossibly high -- and the musical chops to get there. With a touch more focus, a dash more humility and a lot less translucent fiberglass, who knows what it could have achieved? Close Window YesInThePress.com For site comments, problems, corrections, or additions, contact YesinthePress@aol.com