by Will Romano
Squire and Banks, the latter a self-taught guitar player and an emotional and musical free spirit, were both in the bands the Syn, and Mabel Greer’s Toyshop (though Banks eventually left the band). Anderson had previously been in a band called the Warriors (which also included drummer Ian Wallace). Hammond organ player Tony Kaye was playing in various bands, most notably Johnny Taylor’s Star Combo, and Bruford had, mostly notably, briefly joined Savoy Brown for a few gigs.
“As Mabel Greer’s Toyshop we kept playing at the Marquee,” says Banks. “God bless the Marquee. If it hadn’t been for [that club], a lot of those bands would never have existed.”
“The musicians in Yes had already spent about ten years in other bands, so we weren’t young spring chickens when the band started,” says Jon Anderson. “We were all in our midtwenties. We were convinced that we were making a very different approach to music than most people.”
This was evident on some of the more mature numbers the band performed and recorded. It seems the elements that made each member great were synthesized and combined to create a sound that the band would develop for the next five decades—three-part harmonies, Anderson’s soaring vocals, Squire’s aggressive bass playing, guitar acrobatics, and effective, mood-changing keyboard texturing.
Yes’s eponymous debut hit the shelves in the fall of 1969 with memorable psychedelic pop rock songs such as “Beyond and Before,” “Harold Lang” (which sounds as though it may have had an impact on a young band named Genesis and, in particular, its singer, Peter Gabriel), a jazzy seven-minute cover version of the Byrds’ “I See You” (one of the best examples of the band’s harmonies at work that slips into a bit of classical-jazz-rock during the quiet portion of Banks’s extended solo), the Beatles’ “Every Little Thing” (check the “Day Tripper” guitar riff that Banks slyly slips into the song), “Beyond and Before” (cowritten by Mabel Greer’s Toyshop guitarist Clive Bailey), “Looking Around,” and “Survival.”
“The only thing I can think about Yes was, because no one really cared [about what we were doing], there was nobody to tell us what we could and couldn’t do,” says Banks. “Socially we weren’t rebelling against anything at all. It was the tail end of the ’60s, and at that time, the whole hippie movement was becoming more political. Certainly in America there were protests against Vietnam, and some of that was mirrored over here in London. There was certainly no political motivation of any kind in a band like Yes. Musical motivation, yes, but social and political, no.”
Jon Anderson’s idea to fuse an orchestra with Yes’s psychedelic pop rock sound achieved mixed results on the band’s sophomore record, Time and a Word. (Deep Purple and the Nice had already utilized orchestras as well.)
Despite the bright spots, and mainly because of the lows, Time and a Word marked the end of the line for Peter Banks. Though his guitar playing served a complementary function within the band (his solos oftentime elevated songs), he never completely saw eye to eye with the other members. His sometimes erratic approach (from the band’s point of view) didn’t always suit a prepared musical program.
“I’ve always have been an improviser,” says Banks. “That was one of the problems. I would throw something in from left field. It was difficult particularly for Jon, because he would expect a certain organization. I would put in a guitar lick that just wouldn’t fit. I can understand. I was asked to leave. We did have disagreements, particularly at rehearsals, but that was the thing that worked well for the band. We were all different people and came from different social backgrounds and different musical backgrounds, and through some strange chemistry, the music pulled itself together.”
Eventually the band recruited Tomorrow guitarist Steve Howe, who was as much influenced by Chuck Berry as Chet Atkins; the countrified, stratospheric boogie of Jimmy Bryant (whom some had dubbed the most precise and fastest guitarist on the planet); and pedal steeler Wesley “Speedy” West.
Tomorrow had generated a buzz with their song “My White Bicycle,” something of a British psychedelic anthem/relic. Howe had also previously played with the Syndicats, the In Crowd, and Bodast (as well as chief songwriters for the band, Dave Curtiss and Clive Maldoon, of “Sepheryn”/“Ray of Light” fame), and had worked as a guitarist for R&B/soul singer P. P. Arnold and with Delaney & Bonnie in 1969.
“Ducking and diving and darting around the musical possibilities seem to have come from early musical influences,” says Steve Howe. “I had already been playing the guitar before I had heard the Les Paul records he’d made with Mary Ford, and I had heard the Tennessee Ernie Ford records, with brilliant guitar playing by Jimmie Bryant and Speedy West before I picked up the guitar.”
The impact of these artists is obvious: “Cactus Boogie” displays Howe’s countrified soul, and the “cracked whip” heard in “Diary of a Man Who Vanished” from the guitarist’s 1979 solo record, The Steve Howe Album, is clearly influenced by Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “cracked whip” in the song “Mule Train.’ (In Ford’s case, the crack was created by his voice; in Howe’s it was “Howe hitting a metal tea tray with a drumstick, adding tape delay, then compressing with a Urei 1176 while adding EMT plate reverb,” says recording engineer Gregg Jackman.)
The band’s first record with the new guitarist, christened, appropriately enough, The Yes Album, was a declaration: This was a new band, with a new direction, building on an established sound, which would, essentially, give the band a career.
The Yes Album showed Yes in a different, perhaps better, light. Though Emerson Lake and Palmer were headed for superstardom (they were already considered a supergroup before they played their first gig), Yes appeared to be gaining ground on them as well as on similar acts, such as Jethro Tull and even their idols, King Crimson.
“We felt secretively competitive [with] King Crimson,” says Howe. “Obviously, ELP was closer to our field of play and, obviously, there was respect for what they did: Rick and Keith Emerson ... in a way, you had to think of them in the same breath. But we soon realized that, hang on, we owned a little bit of acreage somewhere in the plot of what was called the English resurgence, or what I call post-psychedelia. There was a nice spaciness about us, and we were kind of finding our feet in a whole new world.”
“The funny thing was, at the time, when I was involved [with] Yes I was also involved with Emerson Lake and Palmer,” says producer Eddy Offord. “I was spending a lot of time with both bands. No one wanted me to work with the other band. So Yes said, ‘You have to get away from ELP,’ and ELP said, ‘You have to get away from Yes.’ Everyone was just trying to outdo everyone else to see who could be more adventurous, more cutting-edge and ... who could go the furthest. Both of them certainly had one eye on what everyone else was doing to see if you they could do it better.”
The impact of Howe was felt almost immediately. In the opening bars of the first track on The Yes Album, “Yours Is No Disgrace,” Howe wrings every ounce of twang and squeezes out a brassy, slightly wah-inflected metallic tone (via an early flanger device) from his rig and his trusty Gibson ES-175.
“Yours Is No Disgrace” marks one of the longest songs to appear on a Yes recording to date—over nine and a half minutes, foreshadowing larger pieces of the band’s future repertoire, prominently featuring the Moog synthesizer, most notably in the opening instrumental section where it states the main theme.
Recorded live at the Lyceum Theatre in London in July 1970, “The Clap,” a solo acoustic piece marked by a ragtime fingerpicking style, is yet another facet of Howe and the band. The title “The Clap” is said to be a misnomer (it was meant to be simply “Clap,” a tribute to the birth of Howe’s son, Dylan). Amazing how one word can completely change the meaning of a title.
Yes s/t (1969).
“Starship Trooper,” a title inspired by Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi book Starship Troopers, though it has little (if anything) to do with the book’s story line. However, there do seem to be a few threads running through the song. It appears, once again,
that the lyrics capture Anderson’s journey to the divine (within him and without), wrapped in personal memory, the wisdom of astral traveling, new-age sentiment, and UFO imagery.
“I remember Jon was a very nervous singer,” says Offord. “Yes would build up a song, and poor Jon had to sing his little part over this masterpiece. The guy was quaking in his boots, you know? He was always nervous, and we would always try to find ways for him to relax. In the beginning he was more nervous about his lack of musical education, but I think as time went by, and [as he] built an alliance with Steve, who provided more of the musical things, he become more confident.”
The Yes Album was a breakthrough for Yes, reaching number seven on the British charts in April 1971 (it became a Top 40 hit in the U.S. in 1972). Still, The Yes Album was a mixed bag of originality and recycled ideas (e.g., Howe repositioned “Nether Street,” a song he cowrote as a member of Bodast, as “Würm”—the transcendent climax of “Starship Trooper).
One suspects, too, that the songwriting credits have as much to do with “democracy” in labor as with the need for each of the key composers in the band to seek sole credit for something, even partial bits. (Who could argue that the “Life Seeker” section of “Starship Trooper” wasn’t straight out of the spiritual playbook of Anderson? Or that the harmonized voices of “Disillusion,” from the same song, weren’t influenced by Squire’s love of Simon & Garfunkel and his church choir experience as a boy?)
As cynical as it sounds, this is what fueled the competition within the band and pushed Yes to greatness. The individual spotlighting of talent (which would reach its pinnacle by the next Yes record, Fragile) could very well be one of the key components of prog rock. Besides, featuring a solo guitar piece such as “The Clap,” regardless of the brilliance of the writing and performance, is not the best way to prove to the world that you’re a cohesive unit. It’s to show off. Fans said thank goodness.
There would be more of that with the band’s Fragile album, an even bigger success. “The Yes Album came out, and that did very well,” says Howe. “It encouraged us to be experimental again and just go for it. The challenge was to be extremely original and competent on Fragile. The recording techniques—and Eddy Offord was brilliant at that time—were very advanced, and we felt that we were at the cutting edge of what you could do at that time.”
Yes was constantly in motion. This fact, coupled with a general frustration that Tony Kaye had to be dragged kicking and screaming into using the emerging technology of synthesizers (though he had indeed used a Moog on The Yes Album), caused the band to decide to dump the organist in favor of a more flamboyant and flashy player, Rick Wakeman of the Strawbs, who’d studied at the Royal College of Music and was not only committed to using synthesizers but had begun making a name for himself doing just that.
“Tony Kaye was mostly playing B-3 and not much else, and not wanting to do much else,” confirms Offord. “Yes then found Rick, who could kind of become an orchestra electronically.”
Yes was synthesizing all sorts of influences, beginning with the opening tune of Fragile, “Roundabout” (which features the immortal lines “In and around the lake/ Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there,” inspired by the band’s travels through the U.K. countryside): Very likely the song that introduced a generation of Americans (and others) to Yes, it is a fine example of the band’s individuality coming through while supporting a tune.
“When I moved to acoustic guitars with Yes on ‘Roundabout,’ I proved to myself that I wasn’t going to be pinned down as a guitarist,” says Howe. “I knew that I wasn’t going to be a blues guitarist and nothing else, let’s say. I’d hedgehop.”
“Roundabout”’s reverse piano fade-in, followed by Howe’s bright harmonics, was a foreboding and unusual entrance into a world of rugged and mysterious musical terrain. “Jon came into the studio one day and said, ‘I want to hear this kind of “meeeooohwrr” sound,’” says Offord. “We talked about different backward sounds, and we finally settled on a backward piano. So what we did was turn the tape over and record the piano forward, and stop at exactly the right time so it coincided with the first note of Steve’s guitar. It all kind of blended together. It was a physical tape manipulation, rather than putting it into the sampler and hitting the button.”
If Yes were established as five guys, of varying degrees of musical knowledge and influences, spotlighting individual talent, then Fragile was the clear culmination of the band’s original mission that was left unfulfilled by The Yes Album.
Not only did each member have his moment in the sun within each song, but on Fragile each member had the focus placed squarely on him: Wakeman performed a multikeyboard interpretation of an excerpt of the third movement of Brahms’s Symphony no. 4 in E Minor for a solo titled “Cans and Brahms”; Bruford supplies a snaky sixteen-bar rhythmic workout (at thirty-five seconds it almost seems like a cheeky comment on the royalties he’d receive from the song) with “Five Percent for Nothing”; Howe unveils his classical/Spanish acoustic guitar concert piece “Mood for a Day” (if “Clap” has almost a Robert Johnson—or Big Bill Broonzy—style American ragtime/rootsy feel, then “Mood for a Day” is in the classical Andrés Segovia vein, with just a hint of folk/country, a characteristic that comes to the surface with more prominence in the version from 1973’s triple live LP Yessongs); Squire performs a groundbreaking bass-guitar composition, “The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)” (“Bill Bruford nicknamed me the Fish because I used to spend a long time in the bathroom when we used to share hotel rooms together,” says Squire. “He would say, ‘Get out of the bath. You’re like a fish in there.”’); and Anderson pieces together a multitracked acoustic and vocal collage called “We Have Heaven” (which repeats at the end of the record as stray, uncredited audio, much in the same way Sgt. Pepper’s and Abbey Road close.)
The cynical would quip that the band was being rushed into putting together a record, and that a record with four long pieces and lots of short solo ones was all they could muster in a short time period, or that individual members, feeling that much of the writing was being done by Squire and Anderson, simply wanted a piece of the pie for themselves (i.e., a bigger share of the writing credits and hence royalties).
Even if any of this were true, Yes were taking a huge risk in presenting themselves in this manner. They were, after all, still very much a rock band, and a rock band that very clearly wanted the world to know that five strong musical personalities existed within the unit.
“It was remarkable that Fragile does exactly that,” Howe said in 2005. “I don’t think we’ll ever have another record like that, which I think is a terrible waste, because in fact, I never wanted Yes to get into a mold with making records. . . . That technique of featuring the band and the individual all on one record was probably why we were so happy.”
Completing the package and forging a relationship that would last for the better part of the rest of the 1970s, artist Roger Dean was tapped to provide the cover illustration for Fragile. (Dean would go on to illustrate the band’s subsequent records—Close to the Edge; Yessongs, which proudly displayed the artist’s work in double trifold, multipaneled splendor; Tales from Topographic Oceans; and Yesterdays, as well as quite a few Yes member solo records. Dean also designed the band’s iconic logo and, with brother Martyn, Yes’s live stage sets.
There was no forethought on the part of either the band, the artist, or Atlantic to link Yes’s music with a specific artist or artist’s work with the intent of building a lasting bond. Dean just happened to be available with an image of a flying reptile/dirigible /spacecraft orbiting the earth that seemed to speak to the escapist elements inherent in Yes’s music.
“The apotheosis of album art came with Roger Dean,” says Mark Wilkinson, himself an illustrator who has designed covers for albums by neo-prog band Marillion and former lead singer Fish. “How important his work was to Yes and prog music in general is difficult to say. The band had already established th
emselves as brilliant musicians long before Roger worked for them, but he certainly enhanced the experience for their fans in the same way as Hipgnosis did for Floyd. I dare say some people bought Yes albums because of the cover art. Dare I also say that, to that extent, he was one of the first cover artists to rival the band in importance, certainly as far as marketing was concerned for the record company.”
Fragile was Yes’s breakthrough moment: In Britain it went to number seven in December 1971 (the second Yes studio record to fill that slot in eight months) and it entered the Top 5 in the U.S. in 1972. (A three-plus-minute edited version of “Roundabout” appeared as a single, backed with “Long Distance Runaround,” suddenly making the eight-and-a-half-minute track radio-friendly.)
“No one ever said, ‘Let’s make a single,’” says Offord. “It was just another Yes song. Then, in America, they cut it down, and that was important because it was the first real radio play that the band ever had, and it helped break them in America.”
“People would come up to us and say that the music you’ve just done from Fragile, this will be played in ten years,” says Anderson. “[We’d] say, ‘This will only last a couple of years, if that.’ Not thinking that if you spend enough time on certain kinds of music, it will last the test of time.”
CLOSE TO THE EDGE
With the success of Fragile, Yes were in the unenviable position of having to follow up a bona fide hit. Wanting to push themselves harder and further than they had gone, Yes cued themselves up for what would become (in the minds of many) their masterpiece.
Once the bond was formed between Dean and Yes, it is difficult, in retrospect, to divorce the images from the music. The cover of Close to the Edge at first blush seems criminally underdecorated; in retrospect, it is quite fitting of the nineteen-minute title song. The LP cover appears to be a slice of some unknown forest preserve. The forest, olive, and deep greens fade into one another, matching the array of natural noises blending and quelling in a maddening rush of white noise at the opening of “Close to the Edge.”