The Tris McCall Report

Yessay

Haters, do not front!

Since Jersey Beat is still a punk magazine (no matter what I’ve managed to do to it over the past few years) I doubt too many of you will nod your head in agreement when I say that Yes was the greatest band of the Seventies. In fact, I think most of you will contest that Yes were a good band at all. Conventional rock history usually names Yes as the main culprit in the arena rock bloat that precipitated the punk revolution – a hippie-mystical, tree-hugging, self-indulgent, cape-wearing collective of hyper-geeks who existed only to be batted into oblivion by the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and primal three-chord release. If Yes holds a lesson for modern rockers, it’s a cautionary one: a burning example of a group that capsized under the weight of its own pretentions.

To me, a rock band without pretentions is like a tailor with no thread – you can have the best material in town, but if you can’t stitch it together, you’ve got nothing but window-dressing. Surely this is the reason why so many of the reviled groups of the prog-rock era (ELP, Camel, Gentle Giant, Gabriel-era Genesis) are huge favorites of mine; these were groups where the stitchwork always threatened to outshine the material in its intricacy and ingenuousness. That’s the sort of thing that drives purists and other anti-intellectuals batshit. Special opprobrium is reserved for Yes because they were million-sellers: they were the group that, with Fragile and "Roundabout", took the progressive revolution on to the pop charts. This guarantees that prog fans don’t take them seriously, and jealous guardians of top-40 bubblegum view them as alien invaders, cruel super-nerds who, in a dastardly move, threatened to deny the Archies their proper place atop the rock and roll pantheon. Van der Graaf Generator and Amon Duul just did not generate the same anxiety.

Consequently, both groups ascribe to Yes the worst traits of their peers. Prog-haters accuse Yes of ELP’s indiscipline and interminability, King Crimson’s humorlessness, the narrative incoherence of Genesis, and the pseudopolitical self-importance of Rush. To prog snobs, Yes indulged the worst commercial aspirations of all those groups without their harmonic, compositional, or sonic sophistication. Distaste for Yes has filtered into popular consciousness so thoroughly that even the group’s advocates feel a need to apologize for their appreciation. The Rhino repackaging of the "essential Yes" came accompanied by a press release accusing the band of everything from space jams to Tolkienesque reveries. We’re encouraged to engage with Yes as an amusing reminder of the madness and excesses of the Seventies, like bell bottoms, or maybe the Nixon administration.

I don’t expect I can undo thirty years of defamation in a few paragraphs. I would, however, like to examine the popular understanding of Yes and show why it is wrong, dead wrong, the most flagrant mischaracterization in the rock story. Almost every derisive assumption regularly made about Yes does not hold up under scrutiny.

We’ll move through these myths, now, and take a look at exactly why they deserve to be rubbished:

Myth 1: Yes epitomized self-indulgent Seventies rock.

Not on your life. While it’s true that Yes songs contain solos, so do Eric Clapton’s; in the seventies, if you didn’t solo, you were considered a pinko spy. But while Clapton, Beck and Page (and their legion of imitators) were always perfectly willing to take leads over sprawling, ramshackle excuses for songs, Yes composition was invariably tight. Long songs were regularly broken into manageable sections that were structured according to impeccable logic, and even instrumental sections consisted of interwoven themes. Never did Yes jam. They never committed an aimless note to tape. If their songs were overlong at times, that was the spirit of the era – fucking "Hotel California" goes on for seven minutes, too. Pick on the Eagles, why don’t you?

Myth 2: Yes put virtuosity ahead of songcraft.

This is a popular knock, and it always prompts me to ask: who was the virtuoso in Yes? Certainly not guitarrist Steve Howe, an accomplished and fluid player who was nevertheless nowhere as interested in showing off as were his contemporaries. Rick Wakeman did have a taste for the classics, but as an organist he was decidedly Jon Lord’s inferior. Wakeman’s predecessor, Tony Kaye, blasted away at his Hammond with a brutal simplicity bordering on punk. Always more imaginative than skilled, Bill Bruford never pushed his way to the front of the mix or grandstanded a la Neil Peart; even his solo piece "Five Per Cent For Nothing" is more quirky than flashy. That leaves bassist Chris Squire – and if you want to argue that he was virtuosic on that Rickenbacker of his, here I think you’ve got a case. But from "Roundabout" through "Heart Of The Sunrise" to "The Silent Wings Of Freedom", Squire always put his staggering bass guitar innovations and thundering riffs at the service of the song. His parts often were the compositional framework – if they were also awesome and impossible to replicate, hey, don’t hate.

Prog-rock housed players like Keith Emerson – guys who could flit from Mozart to Joplin to Jimi Hendrix in mid-phrase. The musicians in Yes did not possess that kind of virtuosity. Howe, for instance, had his country-boogie mode and his psychedelic mode, and God forbid you asked him to expand on those. Wakeman could do a few things well, and rarely took chances. Kaye could do one thing well; in fact, he did it better than any other organist of the period. The brilliance of Yes was that it didn’t matter: each instrumentalist augmented the talents of the others so perfectly (and compensated for their weaknesses) that it always seemed like they were as finely-calibrated as the London Philharmonic. You could listen to The Yes Album fifty times before you realize that Kaye knew about three chords and two voicings. Like all truly great rock bands, Yes shone as an ensemble – as such, they were closer to the tradition of the Police than that of King Crimson.

Myth 3: Relayer is impenetrable, and Big Generator is crap.

Yeah, and It’s Hard isn’t too hot, either. You laugh, but look: nobody judges Led Zeppelin on In Through The Out Door. There is no perfect band with an unblemished track record of flawless albums. Groups should be judged on their peak sound, not their substandard material. The practice of dismissing Yes by comparing Tormato to Led Zeppelin IV is ridiculously unfair. Yes should be assessed on the basis of their overlooked debut, The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close To The Edge, with consideration given to Tales From Topographic Oceans and Time And A Word. That’s a six-album skein that can stand with anybody’s.

Myth 4: Yes lyrics are Tolkienesque fantasy gobbledygook.

This is the one that really burns me up. Listen, I’ve read Tolkien. I’ve read Fritz Leiber, too, and Piers Anthony, so trust me: I’m familiar enough with the genre to be able to say with certainty that there’s no fantasy in Yes lyrics. "Starship Trooper" borrows a title from Heinlein, but no content: here, and elsewhere, anything that sounds vaguely mystical is metaphor. Jon Anderson is a remarkably consistent lyricist, and for a guy whose writing is rich in allusion and literary technique, he’s coherent, too. His great topic is ecology, and if the people who thoughtlessly knock his work took the time out to sit down and actually engage with his writing, I suspect they’d be moved.

Assimilating Anderson’s writing to a fantasy model blunts the impact of his critique. Unlike the quasi-medieval fables spun out by Peter Gabriel or Tony Banks, Anderson was always singing about current events, present threats to the environment, and humanity’s place in the universe. "Death-defying mutilated armies scatter the earth/crawling out of dirty holes/their morals disappear." That’s Anderson in "Yours Is No Disgrace". On an album that tucks "Give Peace A Chance" into a reinterpretation of Through The Looking-Glass, that’s not a statement about the Fellowship of the Ring – that’s about Vietnam.

The pastoral idyll of "Roundabout" notwithstanding, Anderson’s lyrics can be boiled down to a single line in the second chorus of "Perpetual Change": "deep inside", he sings "the world’s controlling you and me". For Anderson, our relationship to the natural environment is all-determining, and constantly jeopardized by our cavalier relationship to our ecology. If this sounds hippy-dippy upon reading, it almost never is in practice; Anderson can be unremittingly hard-eyed and damning, and his writing almost never degenerates into the palnts and birds and rocks and things reveries of his less-incisive peers. That’s not to say he doesn’t want you to revel in the beauty of nature: he does. But on Close To The Edge, where he brings his considerable erudition and breadth of association to the problem, he folds his druidic impulses into a eco-religious narrative of tremendous poetic force.

Again, it is infuriating that Anderson and Yes are blamed for the trippy, superficial excesses of their peers. I think the world of Robert Plant, but he’s the guy with the mist in the valley and the Battle of Evermore and the barbarians from the land of the ice and snow. Michael Moorcock was actually in Blue Oyster Cult for awhile; now hipsters want to recuperate Buck Dharma on the basis of "Don't Fear The Reaper". Go on, break out the twelve-sided dice while you’re at it, and don’t let the orcs slay you on the way to the keep. The same people who mock Yes for writing "fantasy" lyrics are happy to shell out their ten bucks to ogle Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings crapola. You can’t have it both ways, people. And leave Yes out of it altogether – Jon Anderson had bigger concerns than hobbits.

Myth 5: Yes was the whitest band of all time.

Progressive rock was not a funky genre. Yet of all the prog-rock brethren, Yes was the least beholden to classical ideology and the most in touch with American sources. Chris Squire eventually developed his own alphabet of tropes on the bass guitar, but they were frequently underpinned by his explicit reggae and Motown influences. Given his druthers, Steve Howe clearly preferred to boogie: he’d contribute country-fried instrumentals like "The Clap" and hoe himself down with extended workouts like "I’ve Seen All Good People". Even Rick Wakeman, the confectioner of "Cannes And Brahms", always soloed like a bluesman.

Moreover, Yes drew far less from Krautrock and the avant-garde – and far more from the pop charts – than any of their peers. The characteristic Yes harmonies were probably copied not from Gregorian chant or English madrigals but from American hitmakers The Association. Anderson himself is often likened to an elf, emerging from the forest to sing in those high, mystical pipes of his, but that voice wasn’t channeled from the pristine netherworld. It carries with it the grit and studied ache of a practiced singer emulating integrated American radio. Listen to "Sweetness", or "And You And I" if you need more proof: the elf had soul.

Tris McCall’s own ultimate Yes collection:

"Beyond And Before", "Looking Around", and "Every Little Thing" from Yes

Three songs from the fantastic and overlooked debut – a gutbusting amalgam of psychedelic experimentation, jazz exploration and pop radio economy. "Every Little Thing" might not be the most revelatory Beatles cover ever waxed, but then again it might be: a wild explosion of color and rock exuberance, and Anderson singing over it all like a champion, proud, captivated, awed.

"Time And A Word" from Time And A Word

The second album was a crisis of confidence – are we prog or are we pop? – but it still crackles with potential energy. The title ballad extends the Beatles fetish, but all of that will be gone by the next album, when Anderson steps out of Paul McCartney’s shadow for good.

"Starship Trooper", "Perpetual Change", and "Yours Is No Disgrace" from The Yes Album

Three monumental pieces of pop-prog – hooky, intricate, attention-grabbing, occasionally profound. "Perpetual Change" is Anderson’s statement of purpose, and "Yours Is No Disgrace" the first full flowering of Squire’s majesty, but it’s the "Wurm" outro of "Starship Trooper" that provides the early Yes its crowning moment: a pounding three-chord haymaker that combusts into a fiery and epiphanic solo by Howe.

"Roundabout" and "Heart Of The Sunrise" from Fragile

Anderson lost his laser-like lyrical focus for this album (one of the songs is actually pedestrian enough to whine in emo fashion about a long-distance relationship) but the band picks up the slack. Squire provides the rough-hewn wood, Wakeman sands down the edges, and Bruford and Howe put the cathedral together.

"Close To The Edge" and "Siberian Khatru" from Close To The Edge

The undisputed masterpieces of the prog-rock era. "Close To The Edge" is a side-long song that never drags – it’s a breathless journey over landscapes of sound. "Khatru", a meditation on religion and the ages of man, is even better; hair-raising enough to justify its pretentions, rocking enough to justify its length, and bejeweled with the funkiest harpischord solo in history. "And You And I" is no slouch, either, but hey, I can’t take the whole album.

"Ritual – Nous Sommes Du Soleil" from Tales From Topographic Oceans

Further extrapolations – exegesis, really – on the ideas of Close To The Edge, the gorgeous "Ritual" highlights Anderson’s answer to Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. This is what sunlight sounds like.

"Parallels" from Going For The One

They are bombastic at times. Did I ever say they weren’t bombastic at times? But when you’re in the mood for vainglory, you don’t settle for Radiohead – you go to the source.

"Future Times/Rejoice" from Tormato

Tormato is a much better than its reputation. Of course, considering what its reputation is, it would be better than its rep if it was a damned letter bomb. Some of the tracks are overblown, and Wakeman is particularly indisciplined here, but when the group catches fire, they recapture the old magic with unerring precision.

"Leave It" and "It Can Happen" from 90125

Yes peaked early, to be sure, but they aged gracefully. 90125 was an attempt to harmonize the Yes approach with eighties recording techniques. Unsurprisingly, it’s now those eighties techniques that sound forced and unpleasant, and the basic Yes arithmetic that still adds up to listening pleasure. But Trevor Horn grew up idolizing Yes – something historians of the new wave would do well to remember – and found a way to fit the fifteen year-old act into the frame of modern rock without sacrificing any of their intellectual force or power.

Subsequent recordings have occasionally leaned toward greatness, but this is where the story ends. It was long, it was thoughtful, it was exhilarating, and it continues to cast a mammoth shadow over art rock, synth-rock, head music, and hit radio production techniques.

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