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NOVEMBER 20, 2003
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Source: Sacramento News and Review
http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sacto/2003-11-20/arts.asp
Tales from autobiographic oceans
A renewed appreciation of Yes, the only band to successfully merge the pop
smarts of ABBA with the bong-fueled inscrutability of King Crimson
By Jackson Griffith
People who write about pop music occasionally get together socially. And
when they do, typically this question is asked: “What are you listening to
these days?”
Thus begins an elaborate dance, the rock critic’s equivalent to peeing on
fire hydrants and trees, which positions the writer either as a person
who’s into the right tunes at the right time or as some clueless hack who’s
woefully behind the curve.
Here’s an answer that might pass muster: “Lately, I’ve been into ‘Yekatit’
by Mulatu Astatke--a superb Ethiopian instrumental jazz-funk band from the
early 1970s -- along with some home recordings by Art Lessing and a vinyl
pressing of an early-’90s album by Caboose, which was, you know, FM Knives’
Chris Woodhouse and Cake’s Gabe Nelson pretending to be XTC. And, of
course, recent stuff by the A-Frames, Lyrics Born, My Morning Jacket, Death
Cab for Cutie, Centro-Matic, Fountains of Wayne and, um, OutKast and the
White Stripes, which everybody already knows about.”
And the following might get you laughed out of the room: “I’m really loving
Limp Bizkit’s recent homage to the Deftones, Mandy Moore’s album of cover
versions, and that new two-CD best-of package by the Eagles.”
The reason I bring this up is because of a few recent conversations, which
started out OK but veered off in a dangerous direction when I blurted out
the following confession: Recently, I have become enamored, or re-enamored,
with the music of Yes, a band that epitomized wretched progressive-rock
excess in the 1970s.
Now, if there is one transgression that calls for immediate admission to
whatever re-education camp exists for music critics, then admitting that
you’ve been freely ingesting massive amounts of ’70s prog rock via
headphones must be punishable by the most draconian of measures, whatever
those might be. A forced listening session spanning the entire recorded
oeuvre of everyone even marginally involved with the Strokes? Or the
complete works of Nico, while a loop of Ciao Manhattan plays in the
background?
Admitting you have an appetite for any kind of prog is an invitation to a
metaphorical bum’s rush, at least from people who value the compression and
brevity of the prevailing punk-rock aesthetic. And Yes, whose first album
was released in 1969 but who didn’t hit its stride until a trilogy of
albums--Fragile and Close From the Edge in 1972 and the double album Tales
From Topographic Oceans in 1974-- was one of the most successful,
commercially speaking, which made matters worse. (Those albums, along with
most of the band’s Atlantic Records catalog through 1977, have been
reissued by Elektra/Rhino Records in deluxe remastered versions, with
plenty of bonus material; more reissues will follow.) It’s one thing to
profess a liking for, say, Van Der Graaf Generator or Magma, bands whose
relative obscurity and lack of accessible material still offer enough snob
appeal to offset their progressive-rock leanings. But Yes had big hit
records, and you could sing along, even if you weren’t future Dungeons &
Dragons material.
Why was Yes so roundly reviled by critics? OK, let’s start with a few
negatives. The band’s lyrics, by singer Jon Anderson, were impressionistic,
in that characteristically acid-damaged way that sent diehard haters
running for their Johnny Cash records. For example, on Close to the Edge’s
“Siberian Khatru,” it could be said that Anderson achieved the same effect
that one might get by flinging Magnetic Poetry pieces at a refrigerator
door: “Outboard / River / Blue tail / Tail fly / Luther / In time /
Suntower / Asking,” and so on. Yes, we’ve all had days that felt just like
that, haven’t we?
More typical was this lyric, from that album’s title cut: “In her white
lace / She could clearly see the lady sadly looking / Saying that she’d
take the blame / For the crucifixion of her domain / I get up / I get
down.” Or who could forget the chorus of “Roundabout,” from Fragile: “In
and around the lake / Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there”?
It didn’t help that Anderson sang those lyrics in a fey, ethereal voice
that sounded like a boys choir of hobbits after Frodo stole Galadriel’s
secret elven mushroom stash and fed it to them in the recording studio.
Singing like that, of course, is only acceptable if you can shift into
banshee-wail mode, à la Robert Plant or Jeff Buckley, at the drop of a
wizard’s hat.
Compounding the problem was Rick Wakeman, the E. Power Biggs of rock ’n’
roll, an overblown organist and synthesizer player who, after temporarily
exiting Yes in 1973, released the solo albums The Six Wives of Henry VIII,
Journey to the Centre of the Earth and -- gallantly venturing into “some
jokes write themselves territory” -- The Myths and Legends of King Arthur
and the Knights of the Round Table, which toured as an ice-follies production.
Lastly, there was the band’s cover art, by psychedelic illustrator Roger
Dean. The band’s first three albums, 1969’s Yes, 1970’s Time and a Word and
1971’s breakthrough The Yes Album, featured band photos on their covers, at
least on the American versions. And 1977’s Going for the One sported a
cover by the English firm Hipgnosis, already well-known for its striking
album-cover designs for Pink Floyd, Genesis and Led Zeppelin. But Fragile,
Close to the Edge and Tales From Topographic Oceans--along with 1974’s
Relayer (on which fusion-jazz keyboardist Patrick Moraz replaced Wakeman
for one album) and the three-LP live set from 1973, Yessongs--featured
Dean’s ethereal and trippy designs. In retrospect, they seem perfectly in
sync with the band’s musical aesthetic from the period and communicate it
effectively.
Couple that psychedelic imagery with double- and triple-album sets, along
with songs that often spanned the entire length of an album side, and it’s
no wonder that critics turned their noses up and their thumbs down.
Many still do. Not me.
So, what's to like?
Well, the core rhythm section on The Yes Album, Fragile and Close to the
Edge -- Steve Howe on guitar, Chris Squire on bass and Bill Bruford on
drums -- was one of the strongest and most inventive combinations in rock.
Bruford, on board from the beginning, left after Close to the Edge to join
another excellent English prog band, King Crimson; his complex, driving
rhythms, unfortunately, were not duplicated by the drummer who replaced
him, Alan White. Howe, who replaced Peter Banks, could play in a variety of
styles--whipping out the kind of warp-speed amplified noodling considered
de rigueur by prog bands one minute and then shifting to acoustic guitar
for complex Elizabethan-flavored filigrees the next.
But it was the bass parts of Squire that really made the Yes juggernaut
fly. Squire was the only consistent member of Yes all the way through the
various lineups to the great schism of the late 1980s -- wherein he, White,
original keyboardist Tony Kaye and guitarist Trevor Rabin were granted
ownership of the band’s name, while Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe
performed under their own names (effectively lampooned by joke-punk band
the Dead Milkmen in the song “Anderson, Walkman, Buttholes and How”).
Squire was the most important component of Yes’ sound, as important to it
as Paul McCartney was to the Beatles’ music. Like McCartney, Squire found a
way to underpin and propel the songs that was more than thumping a chord
progression’s root notes along with the beat -- he often played against the
grain but usually managed to find the right notes. Listen to the druid-funk
passages of “Siberian Khatru,” or “Close to the Edge,” to get an idea of
how smart a player he could be.
Aside from strong playing, it was the arrangements that made Yes’ records
work so well. Much of so-called progressive rock got bogged down in
converting pretentious ideas to sonic reality, and often there weren’t
enough old-fashioned pop-music hooks to enthrall the less-obsessive
listeners. Yes had pop-music hooks in droves; even the album-length suites
tended to shift, melodically or thematically, as often as that classic of
attention-deficit-disorder orchestral music, The Planets by English
composer Gustav Holst.
In fact, it was that balance between lofty ambition and pop accessibility
that made Yes’ music relevant and continues to make it relevant today. How
else do you account for so many people buying a double album, whose four
songs -- “The Revealing Science of God/Dance of the Dawn,” “The
Remembering/High the Memory,” “The Ancient/Giants Under the Sun” and
“Ritual/Nous Sommes du Soleil” -- were based on four-part “Shastric
scriptures” that Anderson read about in a footnote on page 83 of
Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi while on tour in Japan?
That’s pretty esoteric, as were most of Anderson’s lyrics. But many of the
melodies were as pure pop as anything offered later by ABBA or the Bee
Gees, even if the instrumental backing was far less conventional.
It's easy to scoff at the grandiose psychedelic excesses of Yes today. The
“Stonehenge” sequence in the 1984 film parody This Is Spinal Tap shamed a
lot of erstwhile Gandalf-rock bands into hiding their prog roots, but Yes
already had moved out of leprechaun territory with shorter song structures
on Going for the One in 1977. By 1983’s 90125 and its hit “Owner of a
Lonely Heart,” produced by Buggles mastermind Trevor Horn, Yes was as
resolutely contemporary as former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel, even if
it wasn’t taken as seriously by the cognoscenti.
But where would rock music be without the sharply angular music of Yes?
Would the Police have found its sound? Or the Sugarcubes, whose former
singer Björk, arguably one of the most original and creative forces in pop
music for the past decade, evokes a similar sense of crystalline arctic
strangeness in her music that Yes did on its best records? Even such
current indie-rock darlings as Grandaddy, Death Cab for Cutie and others
sound as if they’ve been cribbing a few lessons from the godfathers of
accessible prog rock.
Time to take another listen? Yes, indeed.
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