There's nothing so life affirming as hearing the music you loved growing up, played live by the very people. There's definitely something comforting in hearing something you know like the back of your hand, visiting the emotional landscape you trod so often in your adolescence. At some point that's all the pleasure you need, all the comfort you need. Should Yes be breaking new ground even unto this point in their careers? Is that a fair kind of expectation? Should their fans have to step up to new horizons with this band? It sure makes one wonder.
In the mean time, a night of Yes going through mostly their older portions of their successful catalogue is a night of majestic nostalgia.
What's Good About It
What's good about Yes this time through is that Jon Davison has become more accustomed to the music and found his voice within the music. The last time I saw them, Davison had just arrived and was singing in only his fifth gig with the band. The band have also tinkered with the arrangements so even the really familiar tracks had little interesting wrinkles in them.
The light show was better than last time and they sound really good in the State Theatre. It just seems to be a good fit for the music and the sound and the space. With a few odd moments, the playing is still superb. Overall, the band still has the nimbleness of turning on a dime as well as the rigorous discipline of playing complex passages with precision.
More importantly the gestalt of Yes music was very much alive and present, and so the sonorous passages of their most splendiferous amazing wonderful extraordinary beautiful music, came alive. There were no metaphorical clowns, no tigers, lions or bears. Just the glory of Yes music.
Jon Anderson quipped last year "Squire said, 'we don't do reggae'". It's a very good thing that Yes play on the beat, uncompromising and hard. It's the way rock bands ought to be.
What's Bad About It
They started a little slow with the opening number 'Close to the Edge'. It was so noticeably slow that I thought it was going to be a really long night. At one point, after the choral section of 'Close to the Edge' you could hear Geoff Downes push the beat to speed it up but the band fell back to the slower pace straight after the organ break. Sometime during the late part of 'And You And I' the band sort of woke up and started playing at a more familiar speed. By the time they were into 'Siberian Khatru', they were playing with gusto, which was a relief.
It was probably more 'interesting' than 'bad', but for the first twenty minutes it really felt like it was going to be a 3hour concert of Yes-In-Slo-Mo.
What's Interesting About It
With any Yes concert, you always find the choice of material interesting. This concert featured a full in-order play through of 'Close to the Edge' and 'Fragile'. In-between were a couple of tracks form the new album 'Heaven And Earth', while the encore was 'I've Seen All Good People' and 'Owner of a Lonely Heart'.
On the one hand, it was a selection that really favours the golden era of the early 70s when they made their mark, with a couple of current pieces and the hit single from the 1980s. You can't fault the choice, but on the other hand you're left wondering about all the other great moments. There's effectively nothing from 'Tales from Topographic Oceans' through to 'Drama', then 'Big Generator' through to 'Fly From Here'. That's a lot of great music they're not addressing at all. They can't please everyone, but they didn't really go out of their way to please anybody but the Baby Boomers and one token gesture to their 80s success.
That being said - and I don't mean the above as negatively as it might sound - it was a setlist of beautiful Yes music. The highlight of the night was surely the material off 'Fragile' where the most progressive arrangements were brought to life. 'We Have Heaven' segueing into 'South Side of the Sky' was masterfully executed and the vocal arrangements really blossomed beautifully in those sections. 'South Side of the Sky' is one of those rarer gems of Yes' catalogue that doesn't make it on to the set list as often as say, 'Roundabout' or 'Heart of the Sunrise', so it was fully contextualised against the rest of 'Fragile'. The downside is that you wonder if they couldn't find a way to play more grand things than 'Cans and Brahms' and 'Five percent For Nothing'.
For Absent Friends
'Cans And Brahms' and 'Five Percent For Nothing' were the oddities of the night. 'Cans and Brahms' was in its heyday, Rick Wakeman's spot to show off his chops and the latest sounds of his arsenal of Keyboards. Geoff Downes has the chops, but when he plays it, it becomes historic curio that highlights the quaint old keyboard sounds.
'Five Percent For Nothing' was Bill Bruford's short compositional contribution to 'Fragile'. When the band plays the highly abstract jazz-inflected piece, we're reminded that Bill's long absence from the band, and the guys are just going through the motion for the sake of completeness in playing the whole album. They're both strange moments in the concert. By going for completion, the band opens up an emotional space where other members used to sit, and we become aware of it.
And of course, as good as Jon Davison is, the biggest absent friend is Jon Anderson. Having seen his solo show last year, there were moments I reflected on him not being in the band. Last time they were here without Anderson, it seemed to open up new possibilities. This time through it seemed more of a sad absence.
I Worried About Alan White
In previous occasions, Alan White was the rock solid time-keeper, giving tremendous impetus to the music. This night made me wonder a bit, what with the slowness the start as well as the drum sound not being as prominent and powerful as last time. He just didn't quite sound like ALAN WHITE, the guy who has that big sound on 'Instant Karma' as well as the thunderous fills on 'Drama'. Last time I saw Yes, I walked away feeling like he played the best. This time I felt worried for the first parts of the night, like maybe he was under the weather or something. It just didn't have the same sort of oomph as last time.
And that makes you worry. Bands slow down over time. It's inevitable with maturing and ageing. The flash and sizzle gives way to considered deliberation, but a more prosaic explanation is that people grow old. While the band laboured through the early part of 'Close to the Edge', I really thought "jeez, is the end of Yes nigh?"
It reminded me of Peter Banks' death. It did.
When the pace finally picked up - thankfully - the usual bump-and-grind came back. I guess intimations of mortality is part of great art but for a moment there, I really worried.
Steve Howe And The Mid Range Honk
One of the most interesting things about Yes if you're a guitar geek like me is how Steve Howe changes guitars. It's rare that somebody plays 3 prestige semi-acoustics, let alone the Fender double neck slide guitar and the Line 6 Guitar on the stand. Across all the guitars he plays, there is one thread to the sound that marks out his tone and it's this mid-range honk. A lot of guitar players - especially guys given to distortion and overdrive cut the mids. That scooped mids on the guitar is the sound of metal, and this the big difference why Yes just won't sound metal, even with all the furious riffing.
Because Steve Howe plays these semi-acoustics and usually with a clean tone, he can keep the mid-range in there. In turn, the midrange is everywhere in his tone across all the guitars including the solid bodies. There are moments he sounds unlike any other player on the planet - it can only be Steve Howe playing. Then there are moments his tone even sounds like Frank Zappa's clean tone on 'Zoot Allures', when he gets on the red Stratocaster. When he hits the harmonics, they have this ballsy mid tone that gives them a bloom and sparkling full-ness. It's quite the master lesson in tonal control.
Steve Howe has also changed the solo he plays on 'Owner Of A Lonely Heart'. It's thankfully, no longer the weird country lick melange but a closer approximation of the angular pentatonic played by Trevor Rabin on the original. It sounds a lot better now. The 80s hyper-modernism of the song is brought back into sharp focus.
More Rickenbacker 4001
Chris Squire on the other hand had fewer changes of bass guitars than last time. Most of the night he was on his Rickenbacker 4001 bass. This is most likely because most of the material played was from the era where the Rickenbacker was central to the sound. If there was one upside to the setlist, it was that there was plenty of Rickenbacker 4001 action and as you know, I like it that way.
I think his particular 4001 is a 1964 model. That thing is like 50years old now, and still going strong.
The man who described playing in Yes to be like being a trapeze artist where precision is everything, played and sang with about precision as humanly possible. That alone is always a kind of spectacle.
'Heaven And
I'm not a fan of the new album that came out earlier this year. It doesn't really kick up a pulse and it doesn't really go in for prog rock ideas much; instead, it gives way to a kind of MOR/AOR vibe which frankly doesn't fit in with the rest of their oeuvre. I was going to write about it, but I was so disappointed I shelved doing the crit on this blog. It was like a moment where the band took a turn and went the other way to where you wanted them to go (which is how I feel about Peter Gabriel after 'So').
Be that as it may, as they say in mobster movies, the 2 songs from the album played live sounded great. The band certainly plays this material live with much more conviction than you hear on the album. They sounded a lot more interesting and complex - exactly the way Yes is supposed to be. I'm beginning to think that maybe the mix on the album is not representative of the music that's actually on it.
Play Any 3 Albums
It's highly unlikely but I want them to move outside of the early 70's a bit. If it's wish-casting, I'd like to hear 'Relayer', 'Drama' and 'The Ladder' in its entirety. I'd even settle for 'Tomato' or 'Open Your Eyes'. If the encore was 'Roundabout' or 'Starship Trooper' after doing that, I'd be more than totally okay with it.
