Yes - Harmony and Engine of Progressive Rock

The origins

“When you start making music that isn't sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, nor something politically correct, but something more spiritual, then it becomes like a crusade.”

John Roy Anderson was born on October 25, 1944, in Accrington, in the north of England. His family was rather poor, so at fifteen he left school to help support the household, taking on the most menial jobs. The young man was quite ambitious, and despite the hardships he tried to build himself a culture to escape the surrounding greyness. His passion for music found an outlet in rock'n'roll and American crooners, but the first band to truly captivate him was the Everly Brothers, from whom sprang an obsession with vocal harmonies that would become proverbial, influencing his future output.
At eighteen he joined a local band called Warriors. Its ranks included his brother Tony, with whom he worked out his first vocal interplay, drummer Ian Wallace, later in King Crimson during 1971-72, and bassist David Foster. Warriors mostly played covers (rock'n'roll, Motown, beat), but despite lasting several years they never got further than playing provincial venues and cutting a couple of anonymous singles. In 1967 they spent a period in Germany, during which John decided he'd had enough. He went back to England and landed in London with a suitcase and little else.
There he started hanging around La Chasse, just steps from the Marquee, and met the venue's owner, who offered him financial support once he realized his potential as a singer. It was there too that he met Paul Korda, who worked at EMI and got him to cut a couple of 45s, released under the odd pseudonym Hans Christian. Nothing much happened until, in March 1968, he ran into a tall, lanky fellow named Chris Squire, a bassist and singer who had recently disbanded the Syn and was trying to put together a new project.

Squire had grown up on classical music and had sung in a choir for years; his passion for rock was more recent, but it had completely overwhelmed him. The Syn had been a fairly solid formative experience, and among their singles one can find the charming psychedelic r&b of “14 Hour Technicolour Dream”.
Talking, the two discovered they had a lot of tastes in common, particularly for bands able to make vocal harmony a strength, hence Simon & Garfunkel, the Beatles, and, curiously, also an American band very famous at home but practically unknown in England, the Association, whose arrangements were at that moment raising the bar of difficulty for much of the pop-rock coming from across the ocean. A separate case were the Who, whose instrumental acrobatics, among the most forward-looking of the period, they loved.
The day after, the Anderson-Squire axis was already in rehearsal. The core of Yes was a reality; the rest needed just a few months to be assembled: guitarist Peter Banks had been in the Syn together with Squire, who thought it wise to call him back, while for keyboardist Tony Kaye and drummer Bill Bruford an ad in Melody Maker was enough.

The alchemy

As with many of the greatest bands, not just in rock, the power of Yes lay in their ability to make a series of seemingly irreconcilable contrasts coexist in delicate balance. Their different cultural backgrounds, different musical tastes, different life experiences created a puzzle worth more than the mere sum of its individual parts. Their interests formed a kind of musical encyclopedia.
While Chris Squire had a solid classical background, Peter Banks and Bill Bruford were jazz enthusiasts, with Wes Montgomery and Art Blakey as their respective touchstones. Their approaches, however, were different: Banks played guitar like a rock musician looking toward jazz, while Bruford played in every respect like a jazz musician, preferring a ternary pulse to a binary one. His bandmates often had to remind him he wasn't part of a swing quintet. For Bruford, rock drummers were only good at making a racket, and the other members were taken aback when, at his first audition, he showed up saying he couldn't stand Keith Moon, the drummer of their favourite band. When Anderson heard him play, though, he understood that this was exactly the kind of drummer they needed.

Classically trained, Tony Kaye converted first to jazz, via Count Basie and Duke Ellington, and then to rhythm & blues, falling in love with the sound of the electric organ. Among his regular listening at the time he joined Yes were Traffic and Family.
Both bands had in fact been crucial to the birth of progressive rock, among the first to expand the boundaries of the simple song by trying to move away from the blues-based jams of American acid rock. The biggest inspiration from this point of view, however, were Keith Emerson's Nice and Vanilla Fudge, to whom Anderson in particular looked.
With their expanded tracks crammed with quotes both popular and highbrow, but also with their twisted covers, they were masters at recontextualizing other people's musical fragments into a form that sounded jarring and “off-key” compared to the surrounding musical taste.
When the Nice reinterpreted “America” from Leonard Bernstein's “West Side Story” in a rock vein, it was a revelation for Yes. It was classical music, jazz, r&b and rock all at once. It kept shifting constantly, it was deafeningly loud yet refined, full of virtuosity yet extremely melodic, it didn't revolve around a single scale like the blues, even while retaining some of its phrasing and power. It seemed to them that all music should be like that — all that was missing were vocal harmonies.

The final realization came when Banks decided that, as far as possible, he would no longer play blues. The surrounding craze for Hendrix and Clapton soon wore him out, and he decided that avoiding blues scales and modes would give him much more freedom. The same conviction took hold at more or less the same time in other British progressive rock guitarists, as if they were a small community trying to rebel against the surrounding cultural hegemony. It effectively became the first strand of rock to be free of the blues.
Banks's approach would be happily adopted by the guitarist who replaced him from the third album onward, the even more eclectic Steve Howe.

1968-69

Yes played their first gig on August 4, 1968, and less than a year later their debut album, Yes, hit the shops. It was distributed by Atlantic, thanks to a deal secured by their young manager Roy Flynn, owner of a venue where the band had occasionally performed. Unfortunately, Atlantic's top brass failed to grasp the band's potential and gave them a shoestring budget.
The producer was Paul Clay, described by Bruford as inexperienced and ill-suited to group work (he points out the poor balance of some levels, noticed only once the recordings were finished). For their part, Yes had never before set foot in a major recording studio and had not the faintest idea of concepts like channel separation and mixing.
Tony Kaye rented a Hammond organ, whose sound was far more powerful than his Vox Continental, yet no one knew how to use it or get it onto tape. So they begged Keith Emerson for technical advice, and he gave them a crash course on the instrument's tricks.
All this fairly well explains the record's cramped sound, rather ill-suited to the ambition of its arrangements and the dynamism of its structures.
Still, there are some magical moments that not even a flawed production can obscure, among them “Yesterday And Today”, an acoustic ballad with Kaye on piano and Bruford on vibraphone. Anderson's voice glides crystalline over simple words of love, with an ethereal, sexless tone that makes it remarkably modern. A track that goes a long way toward explaining so many indie bands' fixation with Yes's music.
“Survival”, the first full taste of the yessound, is a powerful mini-suite that in just six minutes brings together an instrumental intro dense with riffs, a few swing-drummed breaks, and a ballad that gains speed as the vocal lines pile up. Squire's bass shows off distorted lines that still owe a debt to John Entwistle of the Who, but already display a distinctive melodic flair.
Banks and Bruford steal the show on the Byrds cover, “I See You”, in the middle of which they insert an unprecedented jazz excursion. At one point the guitar even imitates the sound of a violin.

1970

Yes sold terribly, but at the time — with the music market in full expansion — artists were still allowed a couple of consecutive flops in the hope of seeing them take root and mature. For the second album, Time And A Word, the budget was accordingly more substantial, and the band could afford a small orchestra, as well as an outstanding sound engineer such as Eddie Offord, young but considered the best in Atlantic's British division. The producer was Tony Colton, who had already worked on Taste's records with Rory Gallagher. On the back of the sleeve, Anderson appears for the first time as Jon, without the “h”.

The sessions were very hard on Banks, who approved neither of Colton's way of working nor of the use of the orchestra, which replaced parts otherwise meant for guitar and organ. The atmosphere soured to the point of becoming irreparable. Even before the album was released, Banks had been thrown out of the band. It might seem a harsh term, but in Yes it has often happened that departures weren't a matter of free choice, but rather an ultimatum issued by the rest of the band, or more simply by the squad leaders Anderson and Squire.
Banks would still struggle for many years to come to terms with the way they got rid of him, even though he always had praise for the albums that followed. The firing of Roy Flynn, the man to whom they owed their record deal and onto whom they would offload the blame for the failure of Time And A Word, followed not long after. Flynn was so hurt by it that he left the music world for good. Not exactly the most pleasant atmosphere in the world, in other words — but then again, which rock giants haven't had a difficult history?

Though marked by ups and downs, the album again boasts a handful of brilliant tracks. The title track is a splendid, crescendo-building baroque ballad, while “Astral Traveller” represents a decisive step forward for the band: both the syncopated guitar and the bass line look toward funk, which would later occupy an important place on Yes albums.
Another decisive influence can be found in the opening “No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed”, a Richie Havens cover that Yes enrich by weaving in the instrumental theme Jerome Moross composed for “The Big Country”, the wonderful 1958 western directed by William Wyler.
Hollywood soundtracks, westerns and musicals in particular, were after all one of the touchstones for Sixties bands aiming to build ambitious, complex music. The constant melodic and rhythmic leaps, as well as the shifts in mood, the ability to move in a few bars from drama to irony and to conjure immediate, popular imagery, effectively provided a template for what the founding bands of progressive rock had in mind (it's no coincidence that Yes too, like the Nice before them, had approached Bernstein's repertoire, having released the previous year as a B-side a free interpretation of “Something's Coming”, also from “West Side Story”).
In “Then” the two new elements, the funk one and the Hollywood one, seem to intersect, creating a sort of frantic version of the music of the 5th Dimension and the Temptations. Yes would never again sound as “black” as on this song, but the ability to craft sophisticated grooves would stay with them for a long time.

New lifeblood (1)

Chris Squire learns, shortly after Banks's departure, that there's a guitarist available. Not just any guitarist, but the most talked-about one on the London underground. His name is Steve Howe; he had been in Tomorrow, who nonetheless failed to break through despite two of the finest psychedelic singles of 1967, “My White Bicycle” and “Revolution”. After their split he drifted around here and there without finding a settled home. It's therefore only natural that he accepts the offer from a band that already has two albums behind it.

Howe's style is unprecedented; no one had ever played like him before. The harmonic refinement of jazz, the loping gait of ragtime, the groove of funk, the hardness of hard rock, a constant search for new tonal colours, a skilled dosing of volumes, a preference for sharp, dry high registers, the not-infrequent use of harmonics, the warmth of traditional musics, which he explores far and wide, from flamenco to British folk by way of country, from which he borrows his passion for a technique like fingerpicking and an instrument like the steel guitar. The striking thing is that Howe rarely shows just one of these elements at a time; rather, he manages to blend them into a single potion, varying the doses each time.
Charlie Christian, Merle Travis, Sabicas and Robert Fripp rolled into one person would plausibly produce something comparable to him. If arguing over who was the greatest guitarist in rock history is childish and pointless, when it comes to stylistic range — and originality in handling it — no real rivals to Howe come to mind.

With this new addition to the lineup, everything is in place for the big leap forward. It arrives right on schedule when the band hires Brian Lane, a young but ambitious manager who at the time was part of the film distribution company Hemdale. Lane will prove to be the key to Yes's success, reaching the top of Atlantic and convincing them to properly fund and promote the new album.

1971 – part one

The Yes Album comes out on February 19, 1971, and within a month it's sitting at number 4 on the British charts. Shortly after, the United States also takes notice, with the album peaking at number 40 and gradually selling a million copies.
Besides being the first record with Howe, it's Kaye's swan song, as he alternates on the Hammond between churchy tones and r&b-streaked distortion. Also quite skilled on piano, Kaye will gradually lose appeal in his bandmates' eyes when it comes time to introduce synthesizers and Mellotron into the band's repertoire, instruments he didn't seem remotely interested in. On "Yours Is No Disgrace" he can be heard on the Moog to fine effect (his is the memorable theme driving the song's gallop), but convincing him to play it was a struggle, and the prospect of stepping away from the Hammond was unacceptable to him.
If Kaye's style reaches its long-sought maturity, Squire's runs riot. The bassist co-writes all the longer tracks and dominates them with his runs, his odd time signatures, his biting pick attack and his harmonizations, made possible by a clever technical trick. His instrument is in fact routed through two amplifiers. The low notes are sent to the bass amp, the higher ones to a guitar amp, thereby avoiding excessive compression, unwanted fuzz and flattened dynamics — problems that had until then plagued the bass whenever its sound was distorted. Of the eager John Entwistle imitator, only a fond memory now remained.
Finally, this is the album where Anderson raises his literary ambitions, writing lyrics in which he begins to grapple with spirituality and to study the sound of words, to which he will gradually give more and more importance, eventually reaching a point where the primary requirement of his verses will simply be to sound harmonious: lyrics viewed as an instrument. This will sometimes earn him the accusation of throwing words together at random, which is frankly excessive, given that the evocative power, the landscape description and the engagement with human emotional states never actually disappear. Still, The Yes Album still moves in easily comprehensible territory, as shown by the anti-war metaphors of "Yours Is No Disgrace."
"I've Seen All Good People" is the track that changes Yes's fortunes, flooding independent radio stations. The first half is an acoustic ballad that brings together a multitude of eras and cultures: West Coast vocal harmonies, Celtic atmosphere, Portuguese guitar, troubadour-style recorder, a choral crescendo with church organ. When it dissolves, an acrobatic rock section kicks in, built on the interlocking of funk bass and country guitar.
Perhaps this is the secret behind American audiences' fondness for Yes: the new continent made up a significant and visible part of their music. And yet, their reinterpretation of those distinctly American elements produced something light years away from the American rock bands of the time. Yes were influenced by country almost as much as southern rock was, but no one could have mistaken them for the Allman Brothers. They took those elements and put them through a process of "Europeanization." Their funk was thoroughly white and devoid of sexual charge, their country handled with the detachment of an anthropologist observing the phenomenon from the outside.
Every track on the album has become a classic. "Clap" is an instrumental solo for Howe's acoustic guitar, openly paying homage to Mason Williams's "Classical Gas" and the ragtime of the great Chet Atkins. "A Venture" is a little march for piano and jazz guitar, with the rhythm section constantly shifting the accents.
"Yours Is No Disgrace" opens with a staccato of organ textures, wah-wah guitar and echoing bass thuds. What follows is an airy gallop with Anderson's and Squire's voices in unison and every instrument tracing different melodies that nonetheless fit together perfectly.
"Starship Trooper" adds the requisite spacey atmosphere, flanger included, though it doesn't skip a disorienting folk interlude either. It closes with what would become one of their concert warhorses, an obsessive instrumental crescendo built on a guitar phrase by Howe.
The most complex track is "Perpetual Change," which, besides featuring Kaye's finest performance (the imposing organ at the opening, the delightful piano flourishes in the ballad-like section), offers up a delirious polyrhythmic passage when, from around 5'30" to 6'20", the two channels play entirely different parts that nevertheless add up as naturally as if it were the easiest thing in the world. The lyrics contain some charming phonetic tricks (the insistent repetition of the mirror-image wordplay "Inside out, outside in," an early seed of something that would be taken to extremes on later albums) and reflect on the flow of events over which man has no control.
⟦Q1⟧

The Yes Album probably seemed a perfect record in 1971. Today its only flaw is a production that's slightly duller than the albums that followed, in which Eddie Offord was able to enjoy massive budgets and realize his most ambitious designs. The composition, the arrangement and the performances, though, remain masterful today just as they were then.

New blood (2)

Around the same time the album comes out, Yes buy an expensive amplification system from Iron Butterfly, complete with monitors, indicator lights and microphones, which for the first time lets them hear each instrument distinctly and leads to a marked improvement in their live performances.
At the end of the tour, tensions between Kaye and the rest of the band, Howe in particular, lead to the keyboardist's departure. But Yes are becoming famous, and they realize they need to find a replacement as quickly as possible. Anderson and Squire know exactly who they want: Rick Wakeman.
Wakeman has recently left the Strawbs, a great but at the time still little-known prog-folk outfit, preferring the steady income of session work.
Being the best keyboardist not already tied down, everyone wants him. Within a few months he plays organ on three tracks from Elton John's "Madman Across The Water" and piano on Cat Stevens's "Morning Has Broken," T. Rex's "Get It On," and three tracks from David Bowie's "Hunky Dory," including "Life On Mars?" (he had already lent his Mellotron skills to the Duke a couple of years earlier, on "Space Oddity"). Besides being songs that have become evergreens of pop-rock culture, they are all strongly marked by Wakeman's extremely elegant touch, shaped by his classical training.
The chemistry is immediate, and, according to Wakeman, on the very day they first meet they find themselves playing what would become Yes's anthem, "Roundabout."

In the same period, other innovations burst in — if not into the music of Yes, then at least into the imagery surrounding it. The first are the light shows devised by tour manager Michael Tait, featuring lasers and other effects, often at Anderson's suggestion. The second are Roger Dean's covers. The young painter and designer has just completed the artwork for Osibisa's self-titled album, a riot of warm colors, geometric shapes and a sci-fi bestiary. Atlantic suggests him to the band, who find his work interesting and happily agree. Probably without imagining that Dean's visions would seep so deeply into their music as to become a symbiont of it. Generations of Yes fans have ended up mentally setting the band's work within the artist's impossible worlds.

1971 – part two

Fragile is a small planet that looks lush on the surface, but which the back cover reveals to be eroded and crumbling.
The record comes out on November 26, 1971, enters the UK chart at number 7 and slides back down fairly quickly, but the band isn't too bothered, because this time their real target is the other side of the Atlantic. Triumph comes in March 1972, with the album peaking at number 4 on the Billboard chart. To this day the album has sold over three million copies in the English-speaking market alone, an impressive result for such convoluted music.
The reason the record sounds so full and shimmering is soon explained by the rising hiss that opens it, seven seconds of piano played backwards, to achieve which Offord spends several hours cutting and splicing tape. Despite his troubles with alcohol, Offord is the right man in the right place, willing to endure grueling sessions to get exactly what the band wants.
The song is "Roundabout," driven by a superb rhythmic interplay of acoustic guitar, made up of arpeggios and harmonics, and an intricate bass line. According to Squire, an unamplified electric guitar was overdubbed onto the bass, in order to give the sound more body, though the added instrument is practically imperceptible. Clearly audible, on the other hand, are the synth flourishes darting among Anderson's verses, Bruford's percussive dance starting at 3'25", and the fiery organ solo near the end. This shape-shifting Celtic funk-rock floods FM radio stations across half the world.
Among the longer tracks are also "South Side Of The Sky," with its flawless vocal harmonies and Wakeman's post-Romantic piano enriching the middle section, and "Heart Of The Sunrise," nearly eleven minutes of apocalyptic ballad stretched out and dramatized by an instrumental score that's now furious, with Howe on an endless run, now carved by Wakeman's Mellotron and the rhythm section's arabesques. Bruford and Squire chase each other, constantly shifting tempo, in a flood of compound time signatures.
The suite picks up the cosmic undertone already hinted at in "Starship Trooper" and pushes it to the extreme, fitting perfectly with Anderson's existential questions: ⟦Q2⟧
The rest of the album is filled out with less demanding tracks, but no less exquisite ones.
"Mood For A Day" is an instrumental serenade with an Andalusian flavor, performed by Howe on flamenco guitar. "The Fish" is a carousel of overdubbed basses in which Squire plays with effects. "Five Per Cent For Nothing" is a Bruford fragment so syncopated and anti-musical that it seems to be played in some absurd, unknowable meter. It turns out to actually be in 4/4. "We Have Heaven" is a folk nursery rhyme with references to Lewis Carroll, built on Anderson's voice stacking line upon line, each time running through a different filter.
Anderson also writes "Long Distance Runaround," one of Yes's most pop-leaning songs, so catchy and yet so refined, with its minor-key melody, Howe's angular riff, the piano staccato and the polyrhythmic verses where Bruford goes off to do his own thing.

The 2003 reissue also includes a stretched-out cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "America," originally included on an Atlantic promotional record. It deserves a mention because it's paradigmatic of a style and a genre. The ballad is shattered and then reassembled in a slow drip of instrumental digressions, emphases and inserts, almost as if Simon's version were a condensed draft from which Yes extracted a text. You may or may not like it, but "America," when compared with the original, is a remarkable illustration of the musical approach not just of Yes, but of progressive rock as a whole. It's music of enormous structural impact, in which a kaleidoscope of solo voices builds soaring sonic cathedrals of overflowing creativity.

1972

When the average rock listener talks about prog, the reference album is King Crimson's debut. In reality, that record — as beautiful and legendary as you like — doesn't represent full expressive maturity even for the band that made it, let alone for the genre as a whole. Anyone truly immersed in this universe knows that the real north star is a different album, titled Close To The Edge.
The perfect engine of progressive rock, and a rare case of an album without a single note out of place or a single moment too many, within its grooves the line disappears between balance and sophistication, between drive and tenderness, between architecture and mysticism. The spell is such that the dissonances of the electric instruments come across as delicate, while, conversely, the arpeggios of the acoustic ones swell as if they were symphonies.
Its complexity is matched only by the communicative power of this music, which, without a single radio-friendly track in sight, climbs to number 4 in the UK and number 3 in the US in the autumn of 1972.

The attention to detail becomes exhausting; more than once Offord finds himself collapsing from fatigue at the console. Just to create the sound of streams, birds and wind chimes that opens the album, it took a twelve-meter tape to get it right. "Today you'd just press two buttons," Wakeman would point out years later to journalist Chris Welch. Thinking about it, it's clear that many of rock's greatest innovations were born precisely out of grappling with the technological limits of their time.
The first side of the album is taken up by the title track, almost nineteen minutes long. The bucolic introduction soon gives way to an instrumental jungle in compound meter, led by an ascending scale from Squire. Around it blaze Howe, with lightning-fast picking tracing sharp, jagged lines, and Wakeman, with incomprehensible squeals obtained by somehow altering the electric organ — or so it's assumed, since that sound was never reproduced live.
Out of the chaos a song then emerges with a chameleon-like structure, punctuated by arabesques of every kind, such as the Morse-code organ starting around the fifth minute, the famous bass staccato at 6'04", the flashes of Mellotron and the recurring, compulsive keyboard micro-themes.
At 8'30" the track suddenly falls apart, as if dropping into a pool of water. Placid layers of synthesizer slowly coil upward in an ascent toward paradise that effectively anticipates half of new age's discography. After a baroque triumph of pipe organ, recorded in St Giles church in London, the rhythm section storms back in and Wakeman throws himself at the Hammond, unleashing an avalanche of notes. The band thus latches back onto the song form and flows into an ecstatic finale, with the instruments fading back into the pastoral sounds from which they first arose.
A possible sonic metaphor for life and a meditation on existence with an Eastern philosophical bent, which explains its cyclical structure, "Close To The Edge" is the staging of Anderson's mental designs. Its lyrics are a miscellany touching on death, happiness, the human condition as a multitude of souls (⟦Q3⟧), but it also offers timely polemical jabs at organized religion (⟦Q4⟧).
Anderson is also interested in form, which, like a good musical architect, he considers inseparable from substance, and together with Squire and Howe he arranges intense, refined vocal harmonies that play throughout with meter, key and vocabulary. Famous is the device of interpolating the words of one of the refrains each time, creating new sounds and meanings while always keeping the same cadence (“Down at the edge, close by a river/ Close to the edge, round by the corner/ Close to the end, down by the corner/ Down at the edge, round by the river […] Down at the edge, round by the corner”).
The second side opens with "And You And I," a composite baroque-folk ballad interrupted by a few graceful bursts of speed and by majestic Mellotron and Moog themes, which create yet another connection between outer space and meditative intimacy. Particularly beloved remain the acoustic guitar harmonics placed at the opening and the powerful cymbal crashes that punctuate the most solemn passages.
A kind of funk-inflected bridge between the Renaissance and a fantasy-saga future, "Siberian Khatru" is the moment on the album that comes closest to being an actual song. Despite containing numerous variations, it in fact revolves around a guitar riff and a keyboard theme, flowing more like a unified stream than a patchwork. It's amusing that it's considered the simplest track on the record, since it's actually extremely intricate: Wakeman lavishing himself on a harpsichord solo and embroidering with the Mellotron, Howe dropping an intense off-beat digression at 3'47", Squire's bass shifting throughout, moving from bursts of distorted notes to soft-footed passages in the shape of swing, or rather of what swing might sound like in a Victorian science-fiction novel.
The lyrics are among Anderson's most incomprehensible, a collage of landscape juxtapositions and disjointed phrases, practically untranslatable, but among the boldest on a purely sonic level, as shown by the crescendo of paired terms from 5'27" onward, eventually spilling into an onomatopoeic break, where the voice becomes pure timbre and verbal communication becomes superfluous. The album ends in an instrumental chase around the keyboard theme, which slowly dissolves, leaving behind an aftertaste that's both epic and melancholy.

Roger Dean's striking cover art is a simple green background that gradually darkens toward the top until it nearly touches black, with no imagery beyond the title and Yes's cloud-shaped logo, which from this point on becomes a sort of official trademark for the band.

New blood (3)

Despite the dazzling performance he turned in for Close To The Edge, and the copious financial rewards stemming from the band's growing success, Bruford feels he has nothing left to give to the Yes cause. In a move of considerable courage, he leaves to join King Crimson, choosing to follow his artistic instincts over his business sense. While Bruford is admirable in his consistency, less admirable are the zealots who still today point to his departure as the end of Yes. The band would go on to produce brilliant records for a long time yet.

The sudden change does not stop 1973 from becoming one of the band's luckiest years. In May, Yessongs is released, a live album spread across three vinyl records. Despite its bulk and price, the record reaches number 7 in the UK and 12 in the US, where it easily surpasses a million copies sold.
It already features a new drummer, Alan White, a friend of Offord's who had played extensively for John Lennon and occasionally hung around the studio. With the tour looming, White had to learn all the parts within a matter of days. Once he pulled it off, it was clear no one would easily budge him from that drum stool. His style is more muscular than Bruford's, and although he wields less of a rapier touch, he proves perfectly capable of building the complex patterns his bandmates require.
At year's end, Yes win the Melody Maker poll, and Wakeman is named best keyboardist. Yet his relationship with Anderson starts to fray, and the sessions for the new album find him particularly unhappy.

1973

A concept album inspired by sacred Hindu texts, Tales From Topographic Oceans is released on December 14th amid feverish anticipation, and reaches the coveted number 1 spot on the British chart. In the US it stalls at number 6, but that's still an excellent result given the decidedly unfriendly structure (a double vinyl with tracks running from nineteen to twenty-two minutes).
On the cover, fish float in the air beneath an immense starry sky, with an Aztec pyramid in the background.
Barring an enthusiastic review in the Times, the work was torn to shreds by critics, and to this day you can still read all sorts of things about it, from accusations of excess and bloat to claims like "the record that by contrast sparked the birth of punk."
Forgive the digression, but this is too glaring a historical myth to let slide. Punk was born from the convergence of many different factors, factors that had little to do with any need to shake off progressive rock, a music that spoke to rather different social strata and geographies. The mistake of picturing the history of rock as a prog empire suddenly toppled by the barbarian invasions of punk is about as naive a notion as one could still hold in the new millennium, and yet many still spread it and take refuge in it, preferring a nice piece of fiction to the facts.

In any case, the album contains top-notch material across at least three of its four sides.
"The Revealing Science Of God" opens with a building vocal digression that, at the peak of its tension, opens up and spreads into an utterly captivating instrumental expanse. The track is remarkable, played and handled with surgical precision, full of instrumental nooks and lyrical melodies, much calmer and more linear than the convulsions of earlier work.
Less interesting is "The Remembering," the one weak spot of the record, which revisits the mood of the opening track but with far more banal melodies, with a music-box quality repeated well past the point of reason, as if the band had run out of ideas and stretched a three-minute song into a full suite.
"The Ancient" is something of a bone of contention, an apparently free-form jumble that is in fact razor-sharp, with Mellotron bursts, insistent tribal rhythms, vocalizations and astral jazz passages, guitar digressions almost in the style of Robert Fripp, and a gorgeous acoustic-ballad finale. It's a dark, anti-naturalistic, sophisticated track, a true gem.
Closing things out is "Ritual," which, after alternating a furious instrumental charge with a romantic ballad, makes room for one of the most futuristic moments in Yes's history. From 14'20" to roughly 16'55", White unleashes an assault of drums and cowbells over which Wakeman unspools infernal electronic cacophonies. Industrial music didn't exist yet in 1973, and Yes certainly had no intention of theorizing it, yet the final effect of those moments comes remarkably close to what would, years later, be given that very label.

New Blood (4)

His solo career, capable of impressive numbers, and his increasingly unbearable clashes with Anderson push Wakeman to the painful decision to leave the band. Just a few days later the keyboardist suffers a heart attack, likely caused by excessive drinking, and Anderson decides to set aside personal grudges and ask him to come back once he's recovered. Wakeman appreciates the gesture, but confirms his decision.
His contribution had effectively given Yes their color, lifting them from the rawness of Kaye — valuable, but confined to the electric organ alone — to an endless palette capable of drawing in any keyboard instrument imaginable. His replacement will have a formidable shadow to measure up against.
Initially, Vangelis is considered, but the Greek musician's terror of flying would have made any tour impossible. The offer is turned down, and the band settles on Patrick Moraz, a Swiss transplant who had just recorded an album under the name Refugee alongside former members of the Nice, soon to be forgotten.

1974

Relayer is released on November 28th, climbing to number 4 in the UK and 5 in the US. Reviews are kinder than those for its predecessor, with Melody Maker and Billboard even singing its praises. Today, opinion is polarized between a minority that pans it for the same flaws attributed to Tales, and a majority that instead recognizes its uniqueness and expressive urgency, celebrating it as one of the finest records of the progressive era, which it is.
The sequencing structure actually echoes Close To The Edge, with one track on the first side and two on the second. The record closes out the cycle in which Yes aimed to build an expanded form of songwriting, outside the conventions of popular music. Where the gurus of Sixties rock reached for fragments of Indian music, offering a watered-down, thoroughly Western-leaning version of it, Yes seem to aim for the reverse process: pushing rock toward Eastern philosophies, rather than importing and exploiting them according to rules foreign to them. In essence, no cut-rate raga-rock, but skillful loosening of the compositional joints of the standard song — not to enter a realm where "anything goes," but to let emerge the "holistic" dimension of a form of writing that looks beyond a mere patchwork of various pop themes.
"The Gates Of Delirium," twenty-two minutes long, depicts a battle. After a pastoral introduction, the track climbs in intensity. The harmonies of Anderson and Squire dominate from 2'10" to 7'50", running through a lush melody and several shifts in mood. As the music edges toward the heart of the battle it grows fiercer, eventually spilling into a ten-minute instrumental section that remains to this day the most violent creation in the band's history. Distorted synth and guitar themes, with notes pitched to the point of agony, pile up with the speed of a river in flood, while the instrumental fabric is packed with electronic effects the band created using scrap materials, as well as pieces of car bodywork being struck and tapes of noises captured from outside. Cavernous bass lines drive an obtuse rhythmic pattern that culminates in a triumphant march in 11/4.
True to its title more than ever, this is stunning, tragic music, a tornado of metallic, jagged timbres, a prog piece shaped like a dagger. Around the sixteenth minute, though, the battle comes to an end, giving way to an invocation of hope in the form of a ballad. It's led by a gorgeous pedal steel guitar melody from Howe, while Anderson's angelic voice rises over the expanses of Moraz's Mellotron, in a mood of deep peace. This section, known by the subtitle "Soon," was also released as a single and has established itself over the decades as one of their signature pieces.
Side B opens with "Sound Chaser," a frenzied blend of space rock and jazz fusion. The musicians shine, each carving out their own space amid supersonic scales of funky synth and electric piano, guitar solos echoing into the void, and bass lines endlessly speeding up and slowing down. It's music that still sounds futuristic today, though its best-known element is the onomatopoeic refrain devised by Anderson, who bursts in amid his bandmates' digressions declaring: "Cha cha cha, cha cha!"
Closing the record is "To Be Over," nine minutes of new-age ballad in which Howe manages to fit sitar and country guitars together in perfect harmony. Although harmonically rich, it almost risks sounding flat when set against what came before it.

After Relayer, Yes's music would undergo a strong normalization in terms of form. While the songs would remain dense with twists and ideas, these would almost always be folded into fairly well-defined, on average much shorter songs. Still, what truly makes the record unique is its sound, unthinkable with the lineup of two years earlier.
Bruford could never have imagined playing drums with the ferocity White shows on this record, driving up stormy charges and pounding the skins with real fury. And Wakeman would never have known how to approach the keyboards with Moraz's jazz touch, which is truly the focal point of the record. Moraz has the visceral quality of a born improviser, one that in the Sixties had led him to open shows for jazz musicians of the caliber of John Coltrane.

1975-76

1975 is spent partly on tour and partly recording the various members' solo albums, some of which meet with good success.
On October 19th comes out "Yessongs," a film drawn from the same concerts as the album of the same name from three years earlier. It's an essential visual document, not only for its fine-quality footage, but because it gives fans around the world the chance, for the first time, to grasp what a juggernaut Yes were live. The costumes are stunning, ranging from eccentric jumpsuits to Camelot-court capes, Wakeman's specialty. Among alternative-rock listeners it's still fashionable today to mock those costumes — people who then spend half their time discussing "Game Of Thrones," proof that the law of poetic justice remains an unappealable reality.

In June '76 the band plays at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia in front of more than a hundred thousand people. The earnings from that tour are staggering, and everything seems to be going swimmingly.
But when they head to Switzerland to begin rehearsals for the new album, something goes wrong. The very touch that made Relayer such a singular record turns out to be a poor fit for the Yes sound, as the band has decided to return to engaging with the song form. What's needed is someone with a more proportionate, more regal touch... in short, what's needed is Wakeman. Moraz reads the writing on the wall and bids the band farewell, though he retains fond memories of his time with them, and Wakeman happily returns, both because he appreciates Yes's retreat toward simpler music, and because his solo career appears to be on the commercial wane.

1977

Going For The One, however, isn't a turning point only in musical content, but also on the level of personal relationships. It is in fact the first Yes record produced without outside help (Offord was by then lost to his own demons, and from that point on would work on few projects of note, though he did land a nice gig in 1984, producing the second Pallas album, the neo-prog classic "The Sentinel"). There are changes to the cover art too, where the Hipgnosis studio replaces Roger Dean, with reasonably effective work, even if not especially well suited to Yes's music.
In the year of the punk explosion, the quintet reaches the peak of their success at home, where the record hits number 1 and comes close to half a million copies sold. In the US they make do with a still-respectable number 8.
The title track is a country-rock number with astral keyboards, vocal polyphonies and aggressive pedal steel guitar riffs. "Parallels" is built on a square, relentless beat, entirely submerged beneath a powerful church organ. The folk ballad "Wonderous Stories," simple yet enchanting, does well as a single. Another ballad, but with more ethereal tones, "Turn of the Century" is conceived by White around some guitar lines from Howe. The drummer sets aside his own instrument, opting instead to punctuate with metallic idiophones. It's easily his most delicate performance.
The problem is "Awaken," sixteen minutes in which Yes once again visit the territory that would later be labeled new age. It's one of their most beloved tracks, and criticizing it is usually treated as blasphemy, yet one cannot pretend it holds up against the richness of the suites on earlier records, if only because it repeats certain themes for several minutes on end. The album as a whole is nonetheless solid, and the shorter tracks are all irresistible.

1978

Unlike the rest of the world, where punk still remained the province of a select few, at home the band had to contend with an invasion of mohawks and studded leather. While it's true that punk wasn't a reaction to progressive rock, but rather the natural evolution of genres like garage rock and early rock'n'roll in the United States, or glam and pub rock in Britain, and while it's also true that the American wing of the movement had no interest in the fate of progressive rock, it's equally true that in London and thereabouts the whole circus took hold partly thanks to the stunts pulled by Malcolm McLaren and the music press, who identified progressive rock as the evil to be rooted out. Often to the detriment of the punk musicians themselves, many of whom had grown up on prog and loved it - just think of Keith Levene, founder of Clash and Public Image Ltd, or Maurice Deebank, guitarist of Felt, both diehard Yes fans. Johnny Rotten himself would soon reveal himself to be an admirer of Van Der Graaf Generator, exposing the groundlessness of that theory once and for all.

Be that as it may, for a while the Yes name carried little cachet in Britain, which explains the sudden dip in sales for Tormato, which failed to climb higher than number 8. They found consolation in the million copies sold in the US, where it peaked at number 10.
It's a controversial record, one whose songs are usually praised while its production is panned. The more aggressive tracks do indeed suffer from a lack of sonic depth, but the arrangements are rich and unusual, the dynamics dizzying, the melodies winning, and the atmospheres more varied than ever. Despite all the criticism it received, the band still performs these songs live today, and audiences cheer them on, proof of the material's quality.
Above all, though, it's a bold record, a pivotal moment in the band's history, representing the point where Yes collided with new wave, absorbing some of its sounds. Comparing it to an album like "Secondhand Daylight" by Magazine, the most progressive record of English post-punk, you can spot several points of contact.
"Future Times/Rejoice" is a blazing march of airy harmonies and floating keyboards, with Anderson reeling off his now-proverbial prophecies about wars and religions.
To underscore the nervy melody of the environmentalist anthem "Don't Kill The Whale", Squire comes up with an outlandish bassline, plastic and syncopated, one that could easily slot into the repertoire of Barry Adamson, further proof of how close the band had drifted to the sensibilities of Britain's new musical generation. "Circus Of Heaven" even tries its hand at reggae, and although the band doesn't sound entirely at ease, the willingness to take a risk is admirable.
In "Arriving Ufo" you can hear every kind of oddity: basses and guitars filtered until they generate indistinguishable whooshes, voices turned into hisses, rhythmic pulses with an electronic timbre achieved who knows how, intermittent signals, gusts of symphonic keyboards, rhythms suddenly broken apart. It's remarkable that, despite everything, the track still holds together and shows a certain pop completeness. At times it already sounds like Buggles.
Squire delivers the album's most poetic moment, the superb orchestral ballad "Onward". ⟦Q1⟧. It's the most intelligible Yes lyric since "Time And A Word". Though it hardly suits the hideous cover art with its mushed tomato - thankfully the last one from Hipgnosis.

New Blood (5)

⟦Q2⟧ (Jon Anderson).

And so it is that, after watching 1979 slip away over an album produced by Roy Thomas Baker - later scrapped due to personality clashes - Anderson decides to quit the band. The final push comes from the commercial success of the Jon & Vangelis project, which lands a sizeable hit with "I Hear You Now" at the start of 1980.
Chronically restless, Wakeman also leaves, convinced there's no future for the group. So maimed, Yes seem truly finished - until, that is, they strike up a friendship with Buggles after meeting them in a recording studio.
As it happens, Buggles are made up of precisely a singer and a keyboardist, Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, and they're technically far above the average new wave band. They've just released a masterpiece in The Age Of Plastic, which marries the sounds and form of new pop with the art-rock refinement of a few years earlier, even though most people reduce it to the one hit "Video Killed The Radio Star". Those people are strongly advised to revisit gems like "Kid Dynamo", "Clean Clean" and "Johnny On The Monorail". The album, moreover, proudly displays the influence of Yes. The two of them are rabid fans and can hardly believe their luck at joining the team, though Horn would come to feel the weight of having to replace an icon like Anderson.

1980

The sessions move quickly in a mood of enthusiasm, and by August Drama is in stores. With the punk hangover now past, no one needs to feel embarrassed about liking Yes anymore, and sales return to former levels, with a solid debut at number 2 in the UK. Things go worse in the US, where it reaches only number 18, likely because the band had gone too long without a genuine hit single on that market.
The American tour is nonetheless crowned by several sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden. Which makes you wonder where all that money went, given that longtime manager Brian Lane gets fired precisely because of the meagre proceeds from that run of shows. Such are the wonders of rock's golden age, when musicians moved mountains of cash and somehow made it vanish right under their own noses. Or simply squandered it, depending on whose account you believe.

Coming back to the album, it was as roundly panned at the time as it was later reassessed. It's a genuine prog-new wave hybrid, or rather a Yes-Buggles hybrid, with extremely modern sounds, a production superior to that of Tormato, and a cover that, thankfully, is once again in the hands of Roger Dean.
"Machine Messiah" boasts polished synths, hard-rock riffs, acoustic arpeggios and vocal harmonies so vivid you'd think Anderson were still in the fold. "Does It Really Happen" contains one of the most iconic basslines to gallop through Squire's repertoire, while "Run Through The Light" bears the imprint of contemporary work by Police. "Into The Lens" weaves together piano romanticism, martial rhythms and vocoder-filtered vocal counterpoints, with Howe experimenting with sounds across three different guitars.
Despite having been written mainly by the Yes wing of the group, "Tempus Fugit" is the track closest to the Buggles style, at least melodically, and stands as a perfect fusion of the project's two faces.

Most of the audience seem to appreciate the work of the two new members, but Horn remains deeply marked by a couple of instances of heckling during the British tour, where some troublemakers called out for Jon Anderson. Partly these incidents, partly the financial mess caused by the falling-out with Lane, soon led to the lineup's collapse.

New Blood (6)

Yes cease to exist at the start of 1981, and for a couple of years it seems like the split is final. Squire and White, however, stay in touch. After failing to recruit Jimmy Page and Robert Plant into a supergroup, they decide to launch a new project called Cinema. They enlist a South African immigrant, Trevor Rabin, who in the second half of the Seventies had fronted Rabbitt, a band devoted to a muscular prog-rock that has aged rather well. The new core then has the idea of calling in none other than Tony Kaye for keyboards, who accepts instantly.
Recording begins at the end of 1982 and proves rather turbulent. Kaye leaves again, for the same reason that had pushed him out a decade earlier: he's not comfortable with more modern keyboards. Squire manages to change his mind after a few months, but by that point most of the album has already been put together, and Kaye only adds a few touches of organ and piano. The rest of the keyboards are played by Rabin and by Trevor Horn, this time in the role of outside producer.

1983

Despite the band's commitment, Atlantic still isn't fully convinced, and production costs begin to climb. At that point Squire meets up with Jon Anderson, bringing him a couple of demos and making it clear he could save the project. Anderson is impressed by the songs and agrees to return, on condition that he's allowed to write a few lyrics and tweak some melodies. It proves worth the gamble: Anderson's return convinces the label to loosen the purse strings, and at that point it becomes clear the band will go back to being called Yes.
90125 comes out on November 7, 1983, after much tribulation. The success is enormous: three million copies in the US (number 5 and a year on the charts), half a million in Germany, 450,000 in France, 200,000 in Canada, even 100,000 in Italy, where Yes had never previously caught on, unlike other prog giants.
Paradoxically, it will struggle precisely in the UK, due to a sound steeped largely in the dynamics of American arena rock, never especially popular over there. Peaking at number 16, it will be their lowest-selling record since Time And A Word, though it will gradually creep up to 100,000 copies. Everywhere else, though, it's a celebration.

The triumph is owed entirely to "Owner Of A Lonely Heart", two weeks at number 1 in the US as a single, one of the masterpieces of Eighties music. The video, a huge hit on MTV, is directed by Peter Christopherson and Storm Thorgerson.
While in practice the song sits somewhere between new wave and AOR, its soul remains progressive to the bone, bursting as it is with stops, restarts, surges and showy flourishes. Horn's skill lies in presenting it as a simple pop-rock song.
There's nothing simple about it at all: it opens with a sampled drum breakbeat (probably the first in history), keyboard parts played on the Synclavier, warped brass squiggles programmed on the Fairlight, sounds no one had ever heard before then. The others pitch in just as hard, with Rabin unleashing a solo as sharp as a blade and Squire following with the elongated notes of his fretless bass, as well as devising the famous Motown-style bridge. Anderson's voice, soaring to imperious heights, is the final flourish on an unassailable track.
At least two other songs on 90125 operate at this same level. One is "Changes", an elaborate, atmospheric rock track that veers back toward Police, not before unleashing a polymetric intro of marimba and syncopated drums devised by White. The other is "Leave It", by far the most complex vocal arrangement of the band's career, probably with a little help from samplers, a labyrinth capable of putting Sixties vocal groups to shame. Its accompanying video is directed by the celebrated duo Godley & Creme.
The first and only Grammy of their career, however, comes from the tumultuous instrumental "Cinema" - not that a band of this stature needs such accolades to be legitimized.
The cover art is by Garry Mouat and screams the Eighties from every inch. Hard to disagree.

Curtain Call?

The final stretch of Yes's career doesn't warrant much in-depth analysis. After fifteen consecutive years of great music spanning the most disparate styles, the creative dead end was inevitable. The lineup changes are mentioned here only for the sake of completeness, but will likely just confuse you, both because of the constant coming and going of former members, and because the new arrivals from this point on would prove entirely inconsequential to the band's story.

In 1987 the five members of 90125 released Big Generator (number 17 in the UK, number 15 in the US, two million copies sold worldwide). The element of surprise was gone, even though the singles "Rhythm Of Love" and "Love Will Find A Way" are sparkling pop trinkets, and indeed the last truly well-known Yes songs. Unfortunately the rest of the tracklist offers little else.

In 1989 Anderson put together an alternative lineup with former Yes members. Squire, however, denied him the use of the band's name, so the album came out under the name Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. Nothing miraculous, but it distanced itself from the official group by delivering an album of progressive rock, however lightweight.

In 1991 came Union, an attempt to broker peace between the two versions of the band by bringing together all eight musicians. Despite containing nothing of real substance, it sold a million copies (number 7 in the UK and 15 in the US). It would be the last notable commercial success of their career.
For the modest Talk (1994) the lineup had shrunk back down to five members: it's the last album to feature Kaye and Rabin.

In 1996-97 two double CDs came out (Keys To Ascension 1 and 2), which saw the Tales From Topographic Oceans lineup reunite. Both works contain a live section, revisiting old classics, and a section of new compositions that are surprisingly respectable, in a style that's essentially unchanged. Fans start to hope again, but Wakeman, ever the mercurial one, leaves the group, which replaces him with the unknown Billy Sherwood.

So in '97 came the lightweight Open Your Eyes. Everyone turned up their noses, but then in '99 came The Ladder, with the addition of one Igor Khoroshev on keyboards. The album alternates between catchy, pop-leaning tracks and others where the intricate acrobatics of earlier days resurface.

In 2001, round and round it goes: back to a four-piece, having lost the two recent recruits along the way, and entrusting an entire orchestra with the task of replacing the keyboards. Magnification thus completes the band's rebirth. The use of the orchestra is well balanced, the melodic choices are good, the complexity just right, and the effort toward creative renewal is evident in tracks with strong harmonic sensibility, often quite accessible, yet still riding the line of a tradition built on extreme articulation and performative flair.

There's little to say about Fly From Here (2011) and Heaven And Earth (2014). Geoff Downes even returns on keyboards, but the fact that Jon Anderson was replaced without much ceremony speaks volumes - and this time not by someone of Trevor Horn's stature, but by two harmless journeymen, the Canadian Benoît David and the American Jon Davison respectively. These are albums that were born old, steeped in a plasticky, idea-free prog. Boredom takes over within minutes.

On June 28, 2015, Chris Squire - the only member present on every album - lost his battle with leukemia, leaving the rock world in mourning. Founding guitarist Peter Banks had already died on March 7, 2013.
In case you've lost track, which would be entirely understandable, Yes currently consists of Steve Howe, Alan White, Geoff Downes, Jon Davison and Billy Sherwood, who rejoined at Squire's request. All things considered, the first three are longtime members, and the chance to see them live shouldn't be underestimated, provided you're ready to accept a stand-in for Anderson on vocals.

The Quest (2021) immediately presents itself as an album for nostalgics of the golden age of progressive rock, seeking out classic sounds in the wake of 70s symphonic rock tradition, at times indebted to sonorities reminiscent of Alan Parsons Project, elsewhere marked by a strong presence of acoustic tracks. It's certainly a more interesting album than the vast majority of their catalogue from the thoroughly disappointing Union (1991) onward - probably the watershed year after which (aside from the pleasant exception of Magnification) it's genuinely hard to find anything truly relevant.
It really starts off well with the one-two punch of "The Ice Bridge" and "Dare To Know", featuring a mellotron indebted to the Keith Emerson of "Fanfare For The Common Man", before moving on to echoes of Wakeman and Howe's trademark guitar work, which keeps quoting itself, reaching some genuinely notable moments.
For the rest, it continues with a prog sound scaled back to the bare essentials, never pompous, sometimes catchy, sometimes drowsy, where nothing feels truly memorable. The album picks back up with Howe's masterful finale on "A Living Island", with an epic guitar that is certainly the most thrilling moment of an LP where it's mostly sheer craftsmanship holding the whole thing together.

Related works

Without going into detail - that would require a separate article - a few important albums connected to the world of Yes definitely deserve a mention.

The Six Wives Of Henry VIII (1973) remains probably Rick Wakeman's most representative creation, a spirited parade of keyboard virtuosity, stylistically closer to Keith Emerson than to Yes albums. Its only flaw lies in the use of choirs, perhaps a bit overbearing. It won over audiences (number 7 in the UK and 30 in the US) and paved the way for the triumph of the following Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (1974, number 1 in the UK and 3 in the US), which unfortunately sounds rather bombastic and hard to digest today.

Chris Squire's Fish Out Of Water (1975) is essentially a Yes album in relaxed mode, with a few orchestral touches and without Howe's sharp-edged guitar tones. The melodies are gentle, and it can be appreciated by those who prefer the band's less abrasive incarnation.

Jon Anderson is the one who had the most notable career on his own. Besides the pleasant synth-pop successes alongside Vangelis (all collected on the 1984 anthology The Best Of Jon & Vangelis), there are at least two albums of excellent craftsmanship.
The first is Olias Of Sunhillow (1976, number 8 in the UK), made entirely by the singer himself by layering hundreds of tracks, building the rich vocal harmonies all on his own and adding, to the considerable mass of keyboards, instruments such as harp, sitar, recorder, mandolin and Saracen guitar. With its mix of folk melodies, exotic touches, cosmic electronics and meditative calm, the album still sounds modern and credible today, perhaps even more so than the Yes albums that immediately followed, even though it lacks their structural complexity.
The second is Deseo (1994), completely unexpected given it came after years of lackluster efforts both with Yes and as a solo artist. The fruit of the artist's exploration of Latin America during that period, it's more stimulating than any Yes album released after 90125. It features Cuban, Venezuelan and Brazilian musicians, who contribute to a set of harmonious songs sitting at the crossroads between the technological West and local traditions, with dynamic, enveloping arrangements. "Amor real", a duet with Milton Nascimento, stands out.

Despite his immense talent, Steve Howe's albums aren't particularly interesting unless you play guitar yourself. Asia, on the other hand, which he founded together with Geoff Downes after the 1981 diaspora, are more than interesting. The lineup featured two other giants of British rock, namely John Wetton (King Crimson, Uriah Heep, Family) and Carl Palmer (Elp, Atomic Rooster, Crazy World of Arthur Brown). At the very least, their debut album, Asia (1982, number 1 in the US), is an AOR classic, essential listening for fans of the genre.
Going further back in time, it's worth paying some attention to Tomorrow (1968), the psychedelic debut album from the band of the same name. Howe only wrote "Revolution", but his guitar defines the record from start to finish.
The Buggles have already been covered, while Bill Bruford's solo career, every bit as interesting and bizarre as you'd expect, is left for a possible future feature on King Crimson, a band much closer to the drummer's natural sensibility.

In retrospect – the protagonists

Despite constant lineup changes, Yes managed to maintain a real sense of cohesion. "Survival" certainly sounds a long way from "Owner Of A Lonely Heart", but only because fourteen years of technological evolution separate them. Looking at their career step by step, you realize the change was organic, and that there were never any traumatic breaks within their musical narrative.
It's striking just how many musicians managed to leave their mark while passing through Yes, developing styles that would go on to become classic and instantly recognizable.

Chris Squire is one of the most celebrated bass players in rock, probably the most melodically decisive and technically advanced to have emerged up to that point. It would take Geddy Lee to pick up his mantle, both of them masters at playing anything-but-simple parts while singing at the same time.
Among the guitarists, although Steve Howe stands out for the reasons already outlined, it has to be said again that Peter Banks, despite working on still somewhat unrefined records, was one of the founders of the instrument's progressive grammar. As for Trevor Rabin, he remains one of the best in the AOR field.
Rick Wakeman is comparable only to Keith Emerson for the role he gave the keyboard within a genre that was primarily guitar-driven. Tony Kaye, though less celebrated, is a pillar of the Hammond organ, while Patrick Moraz needed just one album to leave his mark. His jazz-inflected style on Relayer is still admired today for the way it combines rough edges, spontaneity and flawless geometry.
Bill Bruford is one of the most intelligent drummers on record. He always preferred doing great things that few people would notice over bombastic showmanship aimed at easy applause. Though famously difficult in temperament, his artistic integrity is rock-solid. Alan White suffers somewhat by comparison on a technical level, but one can only admire his ability to diversify his contribution, including through unusual percussion instruments, which he sometimes built with his own hands.
There isn't much to say about Jon Anderson - a mind in constant ferment, and his voice remains the one element by which everyone identifies Yes.

In retrospect – the legacy

While there have never been any doubts about Yes's ability as musicians, it's much harder to find the effects of their work on the pop-rock universe properly acknowledged.
One admission came from The Wire magazine, which, while trashing them - heaven forbid they not fulfil every snobbish stereotype to the letter - nonetheless conceded their central role in building a vast rock audience open to influences otherwise quite alien to that world. And, one might add, in getting that audience used to levels of complexity unexplored until then.
What deserves even more emphasis, though, is the enormous number of artists who felt their influence.
Leaving aside strictly progressive rock, since that would make things too easy (think of New York's Cathedral, Scotland's Pallas, or more recently Norway's Wobbler, to name only the most blatant cases), what were bands like Styx and Kansas, who thoroughly dominated American arenas in the Seventies, if not Yes with a gym membership instead of a reading list?
Moving into the alternative world, Mew picked up both the rhythmic intricacy and the angelic vocal parts, and there are moments, like the recent single "Satellites", where they seem like a reincarnation of the band.
The more symphonic side of Mercury Rev, heard on tracks like "The Dark Is Rising" and "Holes", had surely given a listen or two to things like "And You And I".
Wayne Coyne on "The Soft Bulletin" by Flaming Lips impersonates Jon Anderson throughout, and, as it happens, it's their most baroque record, complete with Mellotron.
Anderson also comes to mind with the small avant-rock guru Bob Drake, former founder of Thinking Plague. Or rather, he seems like his demonic alter ego.
Everything Everything are practically summed up by "Leave It". Their cousins Field Music have also racked up some obvious debts, especially on the album "Plumb", though leaning more toward the pastoral side of Yes.
Several bands straddling guitar rock and chamber pop, with their female choruses, refined arrangements and geometric crescendos, don't do much to hide the connection - think of songs like "All Day Day Light" by Morning Benders and "Hanasakajijii" by Anathallo.
Although Anderson and company wouldn't dream, in two lifetimes, of the unhinged screams of post-hardcore trio Fall Of Troy, their influence on the sweeter vocal lines, as well as on rhythms and guitars, is undeniable.

The British electronic scene of the Nineties - the IDM side in particular - was full of progressive rock nerds, and Yes were among the most beloved bands. Many DJs of that generation also came of age playing around with the grooves of Squire, White and Bruford. Dj Shadow made the connection explicit by sampling Rick Wakeman, while in 1995 The Deseo Remixes was released, in which Anderson's album was reworked by names like Global Communication and Future Sound Of London. The former in particular, over the course of their career, knew how to craft idyllic atmospheres that make their interest in Yes easy to understand.

The last word, though, goes to the most important band made possible by Yes, Rush, in the person of frontman Geddy Lee, who has publicly praised them on several occasions and named Relayer as his desert island album.
"I didn't know Yes until a friend lent me 'Time And A Word'. I was stunned. I'd never heard a band like them, and never heard a bass player mixed so high. Chris Squire's melodies were brilliant and absolutely over the top, but they always stuck to the skeleton of the songs, never straying out of context. His lines helped hold the songs together."

Contributions by:
Michele Chiusi (tracks: "America", "South Side Of The Sky", "The Revealing Science Of God", "The Remembering", "The Ancient" and part of "Heart Of The Sunrise". Albums: "Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe" and all titles from 1996 to 2001);
Marco Sgrignoli (part of the introduction to the album "Relayer" and various consulting);
Fabio Federicis (insights on Roger Dean)
Valerio D'Onofrio ("The Quest")

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