YESSONGS

Yessongs as a live album was a highly seductive object in the mid-70s. Singer Anderson and guitarist Howe, with bassist Squire and keyboardist Wakeman had invented a rock music that unfolded like ballet, something that was episodic, many-colored but also loud, and anywhere between 7 and 25 minutes long. Combined with the triple gatefold sleeve and its tableau of impossible geology in surrealist watercolors, it had a magical impact as a total sensory package. Anderson's hi-register vocal tone sounds reserved, focused, innocent and yet faraway; a critical quality that made this far out but disciplined music take on the more serious mood one experiences at a symphony hall. Crucial to Yes' mojo was Steve Howe's variety of guitars, from mandolin, sitar-guitar, pedal steel, traditional acoustic, to several different electric Gibsons: all offered distinct timbres and shades lent specifically to each `drama' the group was enacting. But on top of this was his idiosyncratic but brilliantly pure playing, sometimes involving three different axes inside the same song! Rick Wakeman also traveled with a large battery of instruments, constantly calling on different sounds for different pieces. Chris Squire, had a more limited palette, playing the same trebly Rickenbacker bass for the entire performance but making up for it in shear texture and attack. But perhaps the most remarkable player is newly recruited drummer Alan White, who takes all the brittle and mechanical sounding earlier studio versions and makes them flow with funk and life. With this digitally remastered CD you get improved dynamics over the original analog LP and clearer hall echo from the Rainbow Theatre in London. You also get a few brief moments of aging tape noise. As a live recording, it has a very satisfying signature: you feel like you are in the second row but you can hear the size of this voluminous music blowing beyond you into an unrestricted black backdrop. Without this important aura of space surrounding the imaginary (russian-inspired?) theatre of Yes' wildly virtuosic presentation, Yessongs is not quite the special document it has come to be recognized. Songs like "And You And I" and "Starship Trooper" are delivered with a shattering ecstatic quality that is hard to locate anywhere else in the history of live electric music. On the tour following the release of Close To The Edge, the Yes seemed a force of nature, like no other time in their career, and thankfully some persons with microphones listened in on the right nights. Love `em or hate `em nobody had this combination of pithy goodwill and vast unbridled baroque nerve in 1973.