Yes Authenticity – 685

Fantastic subject. I am afraid this is another screed from me. Feel free to skip it unless you want to go deep into the weeds!

To my mind artistic authenticity, in a band context, is all about being true to yourselves and how you present your collective endeavours to the outside world. Sounds simple enough, right? Let’s see if that holds up.

Yes (especially with Eddie Offord in the producer chair) were completely authentic all the way up to “Going For The One”. They were about pursuing a creative vision. The authors / drivers of that vision may have shifted over time and from album to album but the aim was to make Yes music for a Yes audience and trust that record company, management, publishers, agents and promoters would let them get on with the business of creating Yes music and they in turn would concentrate on helping to build that audience and drive revenues. Nothing wrong with wanting to get paid and wanting to get paid for having built an audience has nothing to do with musical authenticity.

All is well until “Tormato” which is a strange and sometimes brilliant (but sometimes not) transitional record in terms of balancing the competing forces in the band but the problems start with “Drama.”

My reading of the first Horn / Downes period is that Howe, White and Squire were as much joining Buggles as they were restocking the Yes line up. Had the commercial benefits been vested in ditching the Yes name then I am pretty sure that is what would have happened. So this version of Yes is inherently inauthentic for me.

The same problem reoccurs with “90125”. Outside forces (the touring market, management, record company) are what drive the shift from Cinema to Yes. Again completely inauthentic down to hiring Tony Kaye apparently to bolster the idea that the Rabin (assisted by Horn) band were actually Yes. Doesn’t make “90125” a bad record, in fact it is a brilliant record, but the idea that it is a band project made in the same spirit as the band that made “Relayer” or “Fragile” is at best fanciful.

The choice of producer may have had an antecedent in the “Drama” project but come 1983 Trevor Horn’ s track record was as a hit maker not a follower of artistic muses. ABC, Dollar, Frankie, Malcolm Mclaren … Yes? Does that seem like a natural or authentic progression for either party? Not so much.

The 80s were clearly problematic for a lot of musicians for whom the new technology meant multiple re-thinks. You only have to listen to the programming on a record like Thomas Dolby’s “Flat Earth” or Kate Bush’s “The Dreaming” to hear that the very language of pop and rock music was changing and moving away (for a while) from collective endeavour towards something more auteur-driven. A Fairlight or an 808 were not tools that would respond well to having multiple pairs of hands on them all at once!

Obviously Yes (to the extent that it was still a collective entity) had no idea where the changes they were experiencing were going to lead.
You have to have lived through it to get a sense of how fast things moved on (here at least) from Pub Rock, Country Rock, Jazz Fusion and then through Punk Rock, Power Pop, Post Punk, Mod, Ska, Rockabilly, the gloomy young men in Oxfam raincoats doing the proto-Goth thing, early forays into Electronic pop /rock, the birth of Hip-Hop and then the New Romantics on the one hand and NWOBHM and the Oi! movement on the other. All in the space of 6 years or so rom 75 to 81 ish. Head-spinning!

Appears to me that Yes dealt with all that by allowing themselves to be effectively commanded from without. Not least by the demands of MTV and US radio as filtered to them by the record company. And that is where the problems start for Yes as a living breathing creative entity. Had they existed as Cinema from “Owner” through to “Talk” they would still have had hits, possibly even more hits, and the Yes idea(l) would have been intact for them to come back to later.

So when did Yes go back to being authentically Yes, at least in -performance? From “Keys” for sure (though not “KeyStudio”). On record? Not until “Magnification” which for me is the only post “GFTO” record really worthy of the band name.

I know you have made a strong case for “The Ladder” and I would try and make one for the first version of “Fly From Here” but both are guilty of trying to have its “90125” cake while trying to convince people that they are in the lineage of the 70s masterpieces too. For what it is worth I think “Magnification” is actually a magnificent late stage renewal of the Yes idea and would be unimpeachable if Jon’s lyrics were perhaps a bit more word-salad a bit less self-help. That album sticks out in the best way imaginable and were it not for forces well out of the band’s control it might have heralded a new-era.

So who has successfully been a progressive Rock artist or in a progressive Rock band from the late 60s / early 70s to now and retained that sense of an authentic creative self?

Crimson and Fripp for sure. Zappa definitely. I love a lot of the music from “Yellow Shark” to “Zoot Allures” and especially the big band live albums but I find 90% of his lyrics insufferable. Rush definitely. Not a big fan but I get it. The Dead and its members are paragons of creative and commercial virtue. To which I would add Robert Plant, David Sylvian, Brian Eno and Peter Hammill for not dissimilar reasons. Can’t find any evidence of any of them having done anything just for the potential financial / commercial benefits. And that is what I think the true litmus test is. If a band cashes in control then their authenticity is toast.

Asia for example were for me one of the most inauthentic bands of that, or any era. Asia were essentially a re-booted UK (who were lets not forget on the brink of being something commercially when they split the first time) with more creatively biddable members replacing the more idealistic ones and all the difficult and truly progressive elements of that band shaved off in favour of a radio-friendly pomp and sheen.

The Floyd I rule out because for me everything after “Animals” is either a Rog project (with decreasing input from band mates and Gilmour often reduced to a special effect) or a super-charged Dave solo album with varying degrees of assistance from within and without the “band”. If the band isn’t planning on touring and have stadiums and arenas to fill then band don’t make records seems to be the way of it. Which is the definition of inauthentic in my book.

Genesis strike me as being much the same because I don’t think Banks’ and Rutherford’s involvement with progressive music was especially authentic in the first place. When they were outnumbered by three musicians with real progressive instincts the band was a different beast entirely. They offered nods to the PG / SH eras down the line but it was more I think to keep fans connected than out of a genuine desire to push the envelope. ELP I can probably argue either way though the releases post “Works 2” don’t really help their case all that much.

What makes me a little despondent is how good the music being made by many current and former Yes members has been under their own flag or as part of a side project. The Steve Howe’s trio records, DBA, the last Wakeman album “Red Planet”, exo X xeno, “Syndestructible”, “Squackett”, Anderson Stolt, Prog Collective, “Change We Must” and any number of Bruford projects. All fantastic.

For me (Rick’s somewhat patchy catalogue not withstanding) it is probably a good deal easier to pick out the handful of duds from the much larger tranche of creatively successful Yes related releases of the last 30 years or so.

“Magnification” aside I am not hearing that kind of free-wheeling creativity in the Yes records of the same vintage. And that’s the problem right there.

When it comes to the next Yes record would a major shift in sound be inauthentic? Not in the least of it. Remember it is no longer a British band with its creativity forged in psychedelia, the west coast harmony groups of the 60s, the R&B / Jazz clubs of post war Britain, the Counter-Culture and the likes of The Move, The Kinks and The Who blasting out from pirate radio stations.

With a majority American line up and only one member with that precise lineage and of that 60s vintage, a new record wont sound like 60s or 70s Yes and would it be inauthentic if they tried!

On the other hand if their new music is as good as the exo x xeno record then it could represent a return to form and a return to being properly progressive.

They can be truly authentic by letting let go of the 70s and the Cinema eras. In those circumstances they could still do something special, something both progressive and modern and yet true to the Yes spirit. It won’t sound like Fragile and all the better for it.