Wait: Don’t click off. I know you’re dying to get back to posting at your Franz Ferdinand newsgroup or burning Interpol bootlegs or queuing up in the Pixies ticket drop line (why, I don’t know; next to Jane’s Addiction, they were the most overrated band of the late-’80s alterna-wave). But hear me out. I know you clicked on the word “Yes” already. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.

Yes has been extant in one form or another since 1969, and to commemorate this auspicious time line-age, the British group is currently trekking across America on its 35th anniversary tour.

Roughly a year and a half ago, I found myself revisiting my Yes roots courtesy the Rhino boxed set In A Word (1969 - ), an anthology tracing the band’s history across five discs of hits, album classics and a handful of unreleased tracks. Now, when it comes to Yes, I’m no spring chicken, as the following dates gleaned from my teenage trove of ticket stubs will reveal: Nov. 22, 1971, Municipal Auditorium, Atlanta (Fragile tour, with opening act Emerson Lake & Palmer); Oct. 3, 1972, Coliseum, Charlotte, N.C. (Close To The Edge, with the Eagles); Feb. 10, 1974, Carolina Coliseum, Columbia, S.C. (Tales From Topographic Oceans, with John Martyn. This one is particularly memorable, for not only did I get to see great guitar master Martyn in full extemporaneous flight, my buddies and I had ingested some rather potent chocolate mescaline—you remember that, right? Kinda like taking E but without, like, getting dehydrated, collapsing and dying. At one point during a Rick Wakeman synth solo, one of my friends turned to me, grimaced and grunted, “Dem’s some low notes,” then leaned forward to puke up a most amazing Technicolor mass of amoebic goo, but politely so, under his chair); and Nov. 24, 1974, Coliseum, Greensboro (Relayer, with Gryphon). Scary, huh?

Yet by the late ‘70s, I’d all but abandoned Yes, having been fully converted to another cause courtesy of Patti Smith, Television, the Ramones, Pistols, Clash, etc. You know the drill. Some Yes songs I’d absorbed in the ‘80s through MTV osmosis (“Owner Of A Lonely Heart” kinda bugs me to this day, and I think Steve Howe still refuses to play it because he’d quit the band at that point), but by and large Yes hadn’t been a part of my life for a quarter-century. Scanning through Rhino’s recent three-CD 35th Anniversary Collection, however, I heard something, and that something was my inner Yes geek calling me.

So I decided to write about the box, but from a perspective of other Yes geeks and not some omniscient critical perspective. Why rehash what aficionados and haters have already hashed many times over the years?

From my intro:

It’s been ages since Johnny Rotten scrawled “I Hate” over a Pink Floyd T-shirt logo, clearly drawing a line in the sand. Quaint though it may seem now, the punks-versus-dinosaurs credo meant that a lot of progressive-rock bands from the pre-’77 era took it on the chin from punters and critics alike.

Perhaps most unfashionable of all was Yes. The band didn’t do itself any favors by festooning its gatefold record sleeves with fantastical Roger Dean artwork and apparently commissioning Spinal Tap’s stage and costume designers for its tours. Complex, neoclassical tunes that comprised entire album sides? Please. Gimpy psychobabble song titles like “The Revealing Science Of God” or “Universal Garden”? Fuhgeddaboutit—gimme a “God Save The Queen,” a “White Riot” or an “Orgasm Addict”! Sci-fi/new-age album names like Tales From Topographic Oceans and Keys To Ascension? Conceptual bollocks to that, mate! And apocryphal or not, the yarn about Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman having a direct hand in getting the Sex Pistols booted from A&M Records attained deeply symbolic status among those who needed to nurture a loathing for all things prog.

Still, Yes has had its, dare we say it, kickass moments. The band, for all its labyrinthine lineup changes over the years (even—gleep!—the Buggles were Yes-men for a spell), was always made up of genuinely gifted musicians. Time, and the occasional boxed set, does heal all wounds. It can happen to me. It can happen to you.

So I polled a couple of prominent Yes fans—you may have heard of them: the Flaming Lips’ Steven Drozd and Fastbacks/Young Fresh Fellows/producer/savant Kurt Bloch—and here’s part of what they told me.

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