On with the list.

Yes, Fragile

In high school I was pretty oblivious to what was cool. This is not tantamount to not caring if I was cool; I cared very much. I just had no clue how to be cool, except by accident. I liked what I liked and when this made me a geek, I hung my head in shame; when it made me cool, I wore the apellation proudly. But there were certain realms in which I more or less carved out my own tastes. One way in which I pretty cleanly diverged from most of my peers, for instance, was my appreciation and eventual obsession with certain prog-rock bands, namely King Crimson, early Genesis, and Yes. Wes and I had unearthed these old musical dinosaurs around eighth and ninth grade and, because this was pre-Internet, I thought we were alone in a vast musical desert where we had stumbled upon the secret ruins of a lost civilization. I was probably halfway correct, at least in terms of the age demographic: it was doubtful there were many other fifteen-year-olds in central Iowa listening to dubbed cassette copies of Fragile. If there were communities of like-minded Yes fans out there, we had no way of knowing them. So I listened to these bands and learned (most of) the drum parts and forced my unconverted friends to listen to dozens of seemingly interminable prog-rock suites.

Early on, Wes handed me the aforementioned dubbed cassette, and I pushed play, and the now-familiar acoustic guitar fade-in of "Roundabout" began. After that, the album, and the band's entire ouevre, might as well have been on autopilot, because I was hooked. There�s a certain ineffible awe that firmly instills itself in any young person discovering a musical genre for the first time, and this overwhelming wonderment automatically mitigates any flaws and makes us blind to any shortcomings our conquering heroes might possess. (It helped that Fragile is still, after thirty-two years, damn near flawless.) The summer after ninth grade I bought Fragile on CD (thank you, Columbia House) and its timing was somewhat appropriate; the cover art and some of the songs suggest a vernal theme. (Never mind that "South Side Of The Sky" is unequivocally about winter, its swirling guitar lines and beautiful but somehow remote middle section suggesting barren arctic tundra. That wouldn't come till later.) "Roundabout" and "Long Distance Runaround" and "Mood For A Day" all speak of summer, maybe even of summer romance, though Jon Anderson's famously inscrutable lyrics don't give us many clues.

I don't really want (or need) to go on at length about the prodigous playing ability of Yes' members, or some of the sonic trademarks the band put into play (Steve Howe's hollow-bodied sustain, Bill Bruford's punishing snare tone, Rick Wakeman's thunderous mellotron, Chris Squire's unmistakable Rickenbacher). What Fragile represents is that unlikeliest of prog-rock events, a confluence only achieved a few times in prog-rock's entire inglorious history: Fragile is the marriage of solid, virtuosic playing, intricate, sometimes epic compositional structures, and evocative, often beautiful melodic ideas. The piano in the middle of "South Side Of The Sky" will attest to this, as will the layers of melodic basslines during "The Fish", or the pastoral simplicity of "Mood For A Day", or the slower vocal sections of "Heart Of The Sunrise"�that song's recurring lyric How can the wind with its arms around me? somehow more plaintive for its syntactical ambiguity. I learned a lot of drum parts and was moved by a lot of beautiful music during those early formative years of my teens, but there are only a few occasions when I was moved while learning those drum parts. What Yes and many of their peers later forgot�and so many technically capable musicians continue to forget�is that impossibly fast arpeggiated runs and the rhythmic dexterity of odd meters don't mean a thing without heart, without some emotional glue there to make the listener care about whatever you're saying with your instrumental wankery. Fragile made me care. Even when I was too young to know any better, I knew it was different.

Of course, throughout the Nineties Yes and their ilk were roundly dismissed by the musical literati: too bombastic, too fey, too self-indulgent. You could apply these criticisms to ninety-nine percent of rock and roll, but never mind. The grunge generation had spoken: Yes was dumb. Then, a little later in the decade, things started to change. Scott Miller of the Loud Family praised the early work of Yes. Vincent Gallo featured "Heart Of The Sunrise" in Buffalo '66. The Red House Painters covered "Long Distance Runaround". Stephen Drozd of the Flaming Lips pointed to prog rock as a major influence on his playing and composition. At the start of the new century, the band's catalog was remastered and reissued. The real coup de grace against indie elitists was leveled this past spring, when Pitchfork stopped shopping at Snark & Smug long enough to sing the praises of early-period Yes. The votes were in; Yes was cool again.

So maybe the current crop of musical misfits, emboldened by albums like Kid A, are also looking over their shoulder to their experimental progenitors, toward the spirit of relative open-mindedness which ruled the musical climate of the early Seventies and allowed bands like Yes to publish eighteen-minute, sidelong epics with a straight face. Perhaps bands like Yes laid the groundwork for today's esoteric envelope-pushers like Godspeed You! Black Emporer or Sigur Ros. Perhaps Yes does have a place in the substrata of today's hipster canon. Still, I'm not about to go tromping around Wicker Park wearing a Yes t-shirt with the infamous bubbly logo. Unless it could somehow be made clear that I'm making a quasi-ironic, meta-sincere post-zeitgeist statement about the recursive synthesis of pre-millenial musical trends and the retro-kitsch implications of a latter-day canonical discourse within a previously delineated macrcosmic paradigm. But only then.

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