Yes in the Press

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JANUARY 15, 2002
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Source: Stop Smiling, Volume 2, Issue 1
(Article is reprinted from Stop Smiling, Volume 1, Issue 5)

For Proggers Only: A Mad Professor Waxes On YES

Pushing the Musical Envelope: The Legacy of 70’s Progressive Rock and Punk

By Mark Abellera

Twenty or some years have passed since the golden age of progressive rock music in the early and middle 70’s. One of the pillars of the progressive rock movement is Yes, a group of explorers attempting to expand the possibilities of rock music. However, by the end of the 70’s, "prog-rock" lost much of the enthusiasm from fans and seemed to dissolve, as a new musical movement emerged: Punk. Many are not fully aware of the true significance that Yes and its progressive rock brethren have in the history of rock music. With his new book, Music of Yes: Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock, DePaul University Associate philosophy professor, Bill Martin, shows that Yes is much more than "Owner of a Lonely Heart." Martin’s book is not a hagiography, but an examination of the musical framework of Yes, as well as an examination of the larger social, cultural and historical frameworks that spawned both the rise of Yes and other progressive rock groups and their eventual breakdown.

Stop Smiling: In documentaries such as The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, not only Yes, but progressive rock in general was not given a footnote, merely passing over the movement as if it did not exist. Why do you think this is the case?

Bill Martin: I think for a bunch of reasons. Number one, you could say that progressive rock is just supremely uncool. It’s very hard to set it along side some of the more really Rock ‘n’ Roll-y and also macho strutting sort of stuff in rock music. It’s difficult music, it’s not a radio airplay music for the most part. It requires some attention span, it’s not pop marketable — that sort of thing. I think those are all bad reasons to exclude it and not very justifiable when you think of them, but I suppose on another level, in a way progressive rock… it’s not Rock ‘n’ Roll, it’s not Rock ‘n’ Roll music. It’s avant-garde music that takes off from rock music and it sets off into another territory. And so it just doesn’t fit very well into the standard categories, but I mean the problem is if you don’t like progressive rock music, blame it on the Beatles because they were the ones who really started things down that road of expanding the parameters. It wasn’t only the Beatles, but obviously the Beatles had such a big impact on people. It was the Beatles, it was the late 60’s, it was a time of experimentation, etc. And so the other thing is that I think that another major role is just played by cynicism, it’s just played by people who just want to shut down the whole spirit of the late 60’s, and especially the kind of utopian and idealistic spirit and just turn their backs on that. And I think that’s really an awful thing, I think that’s a tragic thing.

Stop Smiling: But in the early 70’s, Yes had a song by the name of "Roundabout" that was rather popular and broke the Top 40. What was different about that song compared with the rest of their work in the 70’s?

Martin: It was a very Yes type song. It wasn’t like, 'Oh, Yes did a pop song so that they could have a Top 10 hit.' I don’t really know how far it made it up the charts, but it was pretty far up. If it wasn’t number one, it was top five. And to me, it’s a very strange song to have toward the top of the charts. But it was just because the spirit of the times, that something that was a very experimental rock song could break through and that people were open to it. And it really transformed the way a lot of musicians understood rock music because it was so filled with musical intelligence, great playing, and had a lot of thinking in it. So to me, it is not an unusual Yes song in what they were trying to do, in general. It wasn’t any kind of thing where they were going to make a concession to the pop sensibility at all. It was actually more the spirit of the times were such that people were more open to those sorts of things.

Stop Smiling: What other messages or perspectives about life and times in the 70’s did the music of Yes cover? I know that you said 'utopian spirit.' Could you elaborate on that and maybe some other messages that can be heard in the music?

Martin: Yeah, I think they were trying to be visionary and I think you see that especially in Jon Anderson, but also in Steve Howe. I mean as the version of the band that came around that made the Yes Album and Fragile and Jon Anderson and Steve Howe wrote "Roundabout," they were really collaborating very closely and there was just this visionary aspect of it. And the other musicians, too, were always trying to expand the boundaries of the possible. And to me, it’s both that in their lyrics there’s that utopian aspect and there’s also a tragic aspect. So it’s not just, ‘Oh, we’re happy, everything is humorous.’ I think some people take that away from it, but it has those two aspects that in the end it got this very radical affirmation of the possibilities. And it works on the level of the lyrics and what they’re saying expressly. I mean, although, their lyrics are very subtle, they are very poetic. But it’s also working on the level of what they are doing with their instruments and harmonies and rhythms and just the kind of things they are playing. So there is this general message of expansion and expanding the possibilities. And to me, that is very much in the spirit of the late 60’s and their name sums that all up.

Stop Smiling: To the unaccustomed listener like myself, Yes’ work in the 70’s maybe has a sound that could be considered a bit pretentious or overdone. Is that a valid point?

Martin: I think there were times that they were pretentious, you might say, but see usually when you say that someone is pretentious, it means they are setting out to put on something. They’re pretenders. They’re pretending to be bigger than they are. Whereas I don’t think that’s the spirit that the band went forward in. I think they were honest explorers. I think it’s actually a cynical comment to say that they were pretentious and the idea that they got too big for their britches. They just tried to do a lot of far out things. And that means that they didn’t always succeed, although, I thought that for a certain period they just succeeded on an incredible level. But at times, did it get too overblown? Yeah, probably, but I think that is in the nature of the experiment they were pursuing, as opposed to pretending to be doing something they weren’t capable of doing. I think they were really capable of just doing amazing things. And then I think on another level, the people who call it pretentious, again, I think it’s cynical in the sense that people are saying, ‘Well, look you guys are just rock musicians, don’t think that you could do something great’ and ‘Well, they were pretentious because they thought they could do something great.’ And if that’s pretentious, I’m all for it. I wish there was more of that spirit now really. And again I connect it to the late 60’s in the sense of what people in the streets were doing, too. They thought they could somehow remake the world. It’s easy later to say, ‘Oh well, they didn’t.’ But I would affirm the spirit of thinking that we could do that and to go ahead with that spirit than to get into this rut of just thinking, yeah nothing that thinks it can be great would ever be great. To me, that’s one of the worst sorts of things in the world now.

Stop Smiling: So, it’s kind of myopic to say that rock music or progressive rock music shouldn’t go that route or use the instruments in such a way that maybe it’s too advanced for the time or that people aren’t ready for it?

Martin: Well, here’s another term that I think applies to Yes, which is 'perfectionism.' I think that they just thought they could get better and better. And the funny thing is, why does that have to be justified? Why does that have to answer to someone who wants to say, ‘Well, you can’t!’ I mean, what else would anybody who was really serious about something want to do than to get better and better. Maybe it’s stretching things, but even someone like Michael Jordan, who is one of the greatest athletes in the world, would probably still say that he would want to get better and better. That’s what people who want to accomplish something great do. There is this one question that is valid in all of this that is not just a cynical question. And that is whether you can come out of rock music and out of the materials of rock music and do something that’s on the level of a great contribution to the history of music, regardless of what kind of music your talking about. Well, can you really accomplish that on the basis of the basic material of rock music? I get into this in the book and I talk about, Is rock music something like comic books? I mean maybe there is just a limit to what you could do with a comic book in terms of the real issues that you could take on. One way I put this provocatively is that, Do you really want a comic book that is about the Holocaust? [It's called "Maus." - Ed/}Because maybe the material that you’re using just trivializes the content. And, of course, there have been some comic books about the Holocaust and especially this thing called, "Mouse" [sic], by Art Speigalberg [sic]. Or the other way to put it is that, Is rock music primarily teenage music or adolescent music? And I don’t think it is. Even the rock music that I think that everybody agrees is just great rock music, but that focuses on adolescent themes, I’m thinking really of Tommy and Quadrophenia by the Who. I mean, yes, it focuses on adolescent themes, but it’s not music purely for adolescents, in fact, it’s really an adult reflection on what it means to go through these kinds of periods of transition. And it’s very historically located because, of course, adolescence is not the same thing in every society and, in fact, in some cultures there really isn’t even such a thing as adolescence. So it’s a very European, post-Second World War reflection on the transition to adulthood and it’s very sophisticated. And then a group like Yes is simply doing more… musically. [However] I happen to think Pete Townsend’s lyrics are sophisticated and the music is great, it’s not a matter of it not being great. But Yes in a certain sense is going even further down that road. And to me, it seems that there’s no limitation to what you could do with an electric guitar or a bass guitar or the drums or whatever, and they’re just taking it as far as they could take it.

Stop Smiling: So, is it then this virtuoso element that you were explaining earlier that separates bands like Yes and King Crimson from say Pink Floyd or other bands of that nature whose musical work maybe is not at the same level of intricacy?

Martin: Yeah, in the book I make a distinction between what I call experimental rock, which is a category for me and includes groups where some of the musicians are not really what you call very skilled. I guess I’m thinking of something like the Velvet Underground, but they were making very interesting contributions to music and writing great songs. For groups such as Pink Floyd, where again they are very good musicians, but they are not what I would call virtuosos. Then, I make a distinction between that and progressive rock, where one of the key differences is that the musicians are virtuosos. What I mean by that is just very simply that if you need a piece of music played, they can play it and difficulty isn’t really an issue for them, they’re just master musicians. But I don’t valorize that per se, I mean it’s not saying, ‘Therefore, any album made by a progressive rock band will be better than an album made by an experimental rock band.’ This is because there is still the question of the content of the music. Just being a master musician by it self doesn’t mean that one will play great music or masterful music. And that’s one of the problems of some progressive rock that many critics have focused on. That sometimes it [prog-rock] just devolves into virtuosity for its own sake, and that is a real problem. When you have the ability to do some of these things instrumentally, it’s easy to just go off into what I think of this sort of masterpratory school of wanking off on your instrument. So that is a danger. But, the flipside of that is that it’s an expanded vocabulary that might allow you to do even more with musical material, assuming the material is sound in the first palce. It seems to me that the best works of Yes are a demonstration of that, that the basic material there is very good composition. And then because the musicians have such great vocabulary with their instruments and Jon Anderson with his voice and his lyrical ability, it expands the possibility of rock music.

Stop Smiling: Beginning in the mid-70’s, progressive rock seemed to loose its steam — to the point where prog-rock hit the proverbial wall and punk music began to come into the fold. What caused the demise of progressive rock or was there a demise at all?

Martin: I think there are several reasons. You have to look at it at different levels. One question might be, ‘Did they just run out of ideas? Did the music exhaust itself?’ I think that there might be something to that on some level, but on the whole I don’t think that’s the main reason. Then the question might be, ‘What was happening in the music business?’ And it’s certainly the case that toward the end of the 70’s, there was a general homogenization in the music business and the beginning of some very serious niche marketing, where originality was something that was a real problem for the marketing of music. That’s when you get the language of product — putting out an album is putting out product. You get the involvement of Artist & Repertoire people, the A&R men, you get them involved right in the studio as the album is being made. It’s saying, ‘Take this note out.’ ‘No, you can’t do that,’ etc. So you get that heavy involvement and I’ve got a whole theory about that that I associate with the philosopher, Theodore Adorno, in the book. But the largest questions have to be social and historical and cultural. And I guess there are two things I’d say about that. One is that the kind of idealism that supported progressive rock in the early 70’s had somewhat run out by the end of the 70’s and that’s a bad thing to my mind. But on the other hand, there was also a kind of demand, just a kind of general, cultural demand for something that was more straight-forward and in-your-face — in terms of a response to the things that were happening in the world. And especially when you get to the point where the Reagan period is looming or in England, the Thatcher period, which was before the Reagan period, and the kinds of just outrageous reactionary sorts of messages that the system was putting out I think demanded a kind of very straight-forward response, such as you see from the Sex Pistols, especially, but also the Clash and some of the other very intense punk groups. The interesting thing is you could say, ‘Well, punk happened for primarily musical reasons, that progressive rock became so top-heavy, so to speak. That rock music flipped over into its opposite.’ So what had been very ornate, sophisticated and developed all of a sudden became very raw, stream-lined, and again very direct. But I tend to look at things in the larger culture and the larger history. So to me it’s not just music, but it’s a larger cultural ethos that’s coming into play.

Stop Smiling: In your book, you describe what you just spoke of as the 'YesPistols' dynamic, where in the early 70’s music moved away from what you termed in your book the ‘blues-orthodoxy’ or the basic 1,4,5 musical structure, then punk rock seemed to go back to the ‘blues-orthodoxy.’ Do you think that this trend asserts itself in music today?

Martin: I think that is a basic marketing trend. I mean the interesting thing was, it’s not that the Sex Pistols — I hate to say similar groups because no one was really quite like them — but it’s not like the Sex Pistols or Richard Heln and the Voidoids or whatever, themselves were caught up necessarily in the ‘blues-orthodoxy.’ Although most of their music follows that kind of basic Rock ‘n’ Roll format. But it’s more the critics I think and in part it just shows how uncreative most of them are and uninteresting most of them are. The critics followed right along with the music industry so to speak, in laying down the law that unless it’s somehow blues based, we’ll just say, ‘Well, that ain’t real Rock ‘n’ Roll.’ And the funny thing was, I don’t think that the critics really meant to play into this, but it turns out that it just played nicely into the kind of marketing strategies that record companies were turning to. It seems to me to follow a parallel course with the so-called film reviewers or movie reviewers, where they become so tied to the movie industry that they are really just adjuncts to it. And that’s what a lot of so-called music criticism has turned into. And again, that’s why so much of it isn’t very interesting and turns out to just say more and more things like, ‘Well, if you like 10,000 Maniacs and R.E.M., then you’ll like so and so.’ Well, if I like 10,000 Maniacs, [then] I’ll just listen to them.

Stop Smiling: What makes Yes an important band in regards to the evolution of rock music?

Martin: I think you have to look at progressive rock more generally. I think that it is important on a lot of levels. I guess the thing that I would point to especially is that with groups such as Yes and King Crimson and some of the other very experimental progressive rock groups, you had something that was really unique in the history, which is an avant-garde that was also popular. It’s usually thought to be a contradictory thing for something to be both avant-garde and embraced by millions of people, but in that period of the early 70’s, that really was the case. And again, it was the Beatles who really opened that up and then these other groups took it even further. And to me again, it’s not primarily a musical thing, it’a larger cultural and historical thing. It was a period in which people took their aspirations for a different world and a redeemed world very seriously and believed that they could bring that into being. And I think they were right. It didn’t happen, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong to take their aspirations seriously and, of course, my hope is for a reemergence of that. So, I think that’s the number one thing. Then Yes, in particular, took it further than anybody else. They kept on doing more and more experimental kinds of music and experiments don’t always succeed. To me that was good about them, that they tried these things anyway. And they took them out to the people and there was a very strong, affirmative, visionary vibe around the band. And to me that’s a very exciting thing and it’s a thing that ought to be affirmed.

Stop Smiling: You mentioned earlier that you wanted to see more of the experimental mentality that was seen earlier in the 70’s. It could be said that more groups are showing more of an experimental bent in their music. For example, bands such as Tortoise and Medeski, Martin and Wood [who share a similar outfit of instruments as Emerson, Lake and Palmer]. What path do you think music is taking? I know it’s a question that can never fully be answered, but what are your feelings about this?

Martin: I like Tortoise… and the spin-off group called the Sea and Cake, I like an awful lot. They are sort of a funny kind of group because in a way they do have a little bit of progressive rock in them, but they’re also not unlike the Velvet Underground, in some ways. One of their albums begins with a thing called "Jacking the Ball" that has an African, sort of King Sonny a Day guitar-thing going on in it… the singer sounds a little like Lou Reed. It’s a really neat sort of a thing, but in a way, too, it’s very typical of where some of the more interesting things these days are at, which is a neat collage of some of the more interesting elements that we’ve seen in rock in the last 20 years. A group that I like an awful lot, Living Colour, has a great sound, it’s an original sort of sound — Vernon Reid is an amazing guitar player, Corey Glover is just a cool singer. But you could also just see where all the elements came from. You could see that it’s a bit ofHendrix, it’s a bit of what used to be called hard rock or heavy rock, acid rock. It’s a bit funky, it’s Sly and the Family Stone, etc., and it’s all cool stuff, but it has the limitation in my mind that it’s a bit of a pastiche. And I get into this in the book actually. This idea from the Marxist thinker named Frederick Jameson, of the idea of the ‘post-modern pastiche’ where that’s mainly what we’re seeing now is this pastiche of different elements that were already there, but an inability to go to the next level and make it into a new, original synthesis. And I think that’s what a group like Yes was doing in the early 70’s, but you might say that’s where that whole question of the exhaustion of material comes in. I’m sure it’s not that nobody wants to do an original synthesis, but there is that question of, ‘Well, at a certain point, aren’t some of the elements played out?’ And I don’t know where all that is going. I don’t know that anyone could really know. But, I guess I don think that it has something very deep to do with society, in fact, that society itself is at an impasse. Society itself is at the point where on the one hand you have this glittering, gleaming technological… what to my mind is bullshit foisted on you all the time, that some microchip driven something is going to save the world. Yet, on the other hand, if you pick up the phone your not necessarily going to be able to call someone. If you drive down the road you might fall into a giant pothole. If you flush your toilet it might not work. And it’s all of this all at once. I think a lot of the music nicely reflects that state of things. It is also, in a way, music for this time of social impasse. I mean, I’m a musician myself and so of course I think about... well, gee, if I knew what the next big thing should be, what the next great development should be, then I sure as heck would do it. And maybe that’s just my own personal limitation. It probably is. But, I think there’s something like a heavy feeling that this society doesn’t know where to go and it needs to find that out before it can go somewhere else in music, or in painting or in whatever.

One may listen to a progressive rock composition in this current time, where the musical landscape is so filled with redundant and unoriginal bands, only find that the music may be a little too indigestible for one’s ears. Though, we realize that the vision 70’s prog-rock groups endowed is refreshing in its attempt to push rock music into another level. No matter if the song ultimately worked or failed, such groups should be commended for their attempt to create something new and original.

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