Chris Squire, Underneath It All
The music-nerd cliques I knew in high school had some strict demarcating lines, and one of them was: Yes vs. Zep. I was, to my enduring shame, on the Yes side—not that I don't still unabashedly love them, but why did I ever think that learning to love Close to the Edge necessarily meant I couldn't also embrace Houses of the Holy? To be honest, I could sort of hear what I was missing, as it was put to me very clearly one time by an elder peer: Led Zeppelin were white bluesmen who really knew how to cut loose, while Yes were starchy classicists with every note set carefully in place. I felt seen by that comment, but as a one-time classical music snob, junior division, I also didn't entirely mind the picture.
As I've grown deeper in my Yes love (I even hazed myself into kind-of loving Tales From Topographic Oceans), as well as coming to appreciate fully the majesty of Zeppelin (who, as Jon Brion has puckishly pointed out, may be closer to classical musicians after all), I've begun to hear more affinity between the two groups, especially the further you go back (this "lost broadcast" of the early lineup finds Yes in particularly loose, swaggering form). And, for all of Jon Anderson's elvish gobbledygook, he wasn't the one who actually sang about Gollum and Mordor.
Still, there's a grain of truth to the stereotype; even when Yes did seem like they might let it rip, they tended to revert back to their charts and colored within the lines. (This song is a maddening case study: I sure would love to hear the song promised by the lively slide-guitar boogie that kicks it off...but instead it swerves into a ponderous chorus around :48 and never recovers.)
I was recently thunder-struck by a thought, probably not original to me, that Yes's true ace in the hole—the element that puts the rock into its prog-rock, and consistently elevates it above chin-stroking amplified chamber music—is Chris Squire's restless, questing bass guitar. Drummers Bill Bruford and Alan White, guitarists Steve Howe and Tony Banks, and keyboardists Tony Kaye and Rick Wakeman all contributed their share of original parts, even wild-sounding gambits amid the band's meticulously mapped-out charts, while vocalist Jon Anderson has always been on his own astral plane. It is Squire's fat bottom line, I'm coming to think, that gives Yes's music whatever rock soul it can be said to have.
He was, in short, the closest the band had to its own Keith Moon—i.e., a player who didn't just do the unexpected on his instrument but inexhaustibly reimagined the very sound and purpose of it. Where Moon often seemed to be dancing circles around the other members of the Who, sometimes leading, sometimes catching up, always at odd angles in relation to the music at the center, Squire picked his Rickenbacker with the earth-shaking gravity of a stomping mastodon but the nimble lightness of a jazz fiddler. Listen to the paradoxical power and delicacy of his isolated part above, then to the full band mix; it is hard to overstate how brittle and empty that song would sound without this underpinning, and this is true of nearly everything the band recorded.
And though he had many high points throughout his long career with Yes, from the jab of "Beyond and Before" to the singing expanse of "The Silent Wings of Freedom," I still turn to his funky, fussy bass line on "Roundabout" as Exhibit A for the way his playing rattles the poise and equilibrium of the music's otherwise classical-ish pretensions. Indeed the entire Fragile album is a good showcase of his work, not least because it contains the hypnotic throb of the uncharacteristically drone-jammy bass aria "The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)."
At its best, Yes's music has an earthy rootedness to it that anchors its countless noodling frills and furbelows, because in a sense it was solidly constructed from the bottom up. And while I marvel (and occasionally cringe) at the many spires and ornaments that rise from that foundation, what I hear in Yes after all these years is just how firm a foundation lies under them.
As I've grown deeper in my Yes love (I even hazed myself into kind-of loving Tales From Topographic Oceans), as well as coming to appreciate fully the majesty of Zeppelin (who, as Jon Brion has puckishly pointed out, may be closer to classical musicians after all), I've begun to hear more affinity between the two groups, especially the further you go back (this "lost broadcast" of the early lineup finds Yes in particularly loose, swaggering form). And, for all of Jon Anderson's elvish gobbledygook, he wasn't the one who actually sang about Gollum and Mordor.
Still, there's a grain of truth to the stereotype; even when Yes did seem like they might let it rip, they tended to revert back to their charts and colored within the lines. (This song is a maddening case study: I sure would love to hear the song promised by the lively slide-guitar boogie that kicks it off...but instead it swerves into a ponderous chorus around :48 and never recovers.)
I was recently thunder-struck by a thought, probably not original to me, that Yes's true ace in the hole—the element that puts the rock into its prog-rock, and consistently elevates it above chin-stroking amplified chamber music—is Chris Squire's restless, questing bass guitar. Drummers Bill Bruford and Alan White, guitarists Steve Howe and Tony Banks, and keyboardists Tony Kaye and Rick Wakeman all contributed their share of original parts, even wild-sounding gambits amid the band's meticulously mapped-out charts, while vocalist Jon Anderson has always been on his own astral plane. It is Squire's fat bottom line, I'm coming to think, that gives Yes's music whatever rock soul it can be said to have.
He was, in short, the closest the band had to its own Keith Moon—i.e., a player who didn't just do the unexpected on his instrument but inexhaustibly reimagined the very sound and purpose of it. Where Moon often seemed to be dancing circles around the other members of the Who, sometimes leading, sometimes catching up, always at odd angles in relation to the music at the center, Squire picked his Rickenbacker with the earth-shaking gravity of a stomping mastodon but the nimble lightness of a jazz fiddler. Listen to the paradoxical power and delicacy of his isolated part above, then to the full band mix; it is hard to overstate how brittle and empty that song would sound without this underpinning, and this is true of nearly everything the band recorded.
And though he had many high points throughout his long career with Yes, from the jab of "Beyond and Before" to the singing expanse of "The Silent Wings of Freedom," I still turn to his funky, fussy bass line on "Roundabout" as Exhibit A for the way his playing rattles the poise and equilibrium of the music's otherwise classical-ish pretensions. Indeed the entire Fragile album is a good showcase of his work, not least because it contains the hypnotic throb of the uncharacteristically drone-jammy bass aria "The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)."
At its best, Yes's music has an earthy rootedness to it that anchors its countless noodling frills and furbelows, because in a sense it was solidly constructed from the bottom up. And while I marvel (and occasionally cringe) at the many spires and ornaments that rise from that foundation, what I hear in Yes after all these years is just how firm a foundation lies under them.
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