Drozd: “Being part of the hip, underground world of the early ‘90s, the last thing you could ever admit to listening to was Yes. I had older brothers in the ‘70s, and they listened to all the ‘70s stoner rock and stuff like that. And I always loved especially the era—I mean, I like all of it now—of The Yes Album, Fragile, Close To The Edge. It’s really beyond what they call prog rock. So I grew up on that stuff, really loved it, and enjoyed it until late junior high or early high school. I went the route where I discovered the Psychedelic Furs and R.E.M. and those kinds of bands—what we called ‘college rock’ back then. Then you go from there and get into indie rock, and I was into Sonic Youth, the Pixies, all that stuff that people my age were into if you thought you were hip or something. And then joining the Flaming Lips was great because they were one of my favorite bands.

“So anyway, I forget where I was, maybe on tour around the summer of ’94, and I was just looking for some new inspiration. I was in this thrift store and saw Fragile on cassette. So I secretly started listening to Yes on my walkman without telling anybody about it. Wayne was the first one to actually embrace it with me, and then it turned out that Michael actually had all these old Yes records that no one knew he had! You’d be really surprised how many. When I was touring with Dave Shouse and Those Bastard Souls, for example, in 1996, the violinist, Joan Wasser, her boyfriend at the time was Jeff Buckley. (This was) maybe six, seven, eight months before he died. So he was traveling around in the van with us, just hanging out and going from show to show. I remember at one point we were drinking some Jim Beam and I said, ‘Hey, anybody wanna listen to some Yes?’ You’d get a lot of ‘No!’s and a few ‘Yes!’es. I put in Fragile, and Jeff just freaked out: ‘God man, nobody listens to this stuff anymore—I love this album!’

“Sounds that used to seem really dorky and uncool a few years ago start to sound cool again, you know what I mean? Like, 10 years ago a Rhodes piano with a tremolo and chorus pedal on it, you couldn’t do that—and now you hear it all the time and it sounds great. Another cool thing that happened was when Buffalo 66 came out a few years ago. I guess Vincent Gallo is a total prog freak. One great part of that movie is him using that ‘Heart Of The Sunrise’ riff. That turned a whole different generation of people onto that Yes stuff. I think just as things go in and out of style, the prog stuff has come back in the last few years.”

Bloch: “About a year and a half ago, I played in a Yes tribute band. With the Alan White of Yes on drums! Alan lives in Redmond, Wash., and while you don’t see him out playing around, he’s around [the Seattle area]. Joe Skyward, the old Posies bass player, ran into Alan, and Joe is such a huge Yes fan you can’t even talk to him about anything else. He told Alan he was working on this series of benefit concerts for music in schools, that sort of thing, and he told Alan he wanted to do a Yes tribute night. Alan said, ‘OK, maybe.’ And it worked out for one night, an hour’s worth of music! We did ‘Yours Is No Disgrace,’ ‘Heart Of The Sunrise,’ ‘Starship Trooper,’ ‘South Side Of The Sky.’ Wow.

“As a teenager, I had all the Pink Floyd and Zeppelin records, and then punk rock came out and everyone was, ‘Yeah, fuck that shit man! Who needs that shit! Fucking Yes, man!’ In 1977, Rick Wakeman was pretty much the figurehead of everything that punk rock hated. And he couldn’t stand those people, either, ‘loudmouths who couldn’t play’! But that was 25 years ago, and so many people now don’t know you weren’t supposed to like the Damned and King Crimson at the same time. Now, it’s totally a non-issue. Now, people hear Pink Floyd and go, ‘Wow, that’s great!’ Then you play the Clash and they go, ‘Wow!’ I mean, people who are 30 now were five when that was happening, so they don’t know.

“But honestly, I don’t think there was ever any point I didn’t listen to Yes music. Pretty much the Yes/King Crimson/Genesis triptych. Even when none of them were making music I was interested in, there was never any time I didn’t listen to Topographic Oceans, for example, every now and then, or Close To The Edge, The Yes Album—pretty much all the records up to Going For The One. Never too far from a turntable. Even when getting my first bands together and playing punk rock! Even knowing that there’s people out there who’d think I was the biggest idiot if they came over and saw, you know, Fragile on the turntable! I never was that cool, anyway. There was that [Johnny Rotten] dividing line—‘I HATE’! But it was so much the case back then. Even in the early ‘80s, at a Fastbacks show up in Vancouver opening for D.O.A., one of us was wearing an AC/DC shirt and there were punk rockers in the front going, ‘Fuck you! Fuck AC/DC!’ Spitting at us! Now, it’s hard to get people to imagine that in the early ‘80s, even AC/DC was a hated band, because now they are universal. Everybody likes them.

“Yes—they are one of those bands that’s kind of defined by their material. No other band can really play those songs. Their band and their material are kind of synonymous, really. With Yes, it’s almost like it is classical music, but Yes is the only orchestra capable of playing it. They were the quintessential prog band; they really had something.”

So there you have it, kids. Get rid of those asymmetrical hairstyles. Put away your Strokes records. Don’t give the Yeah Yeah Yeahs any more of your dough. Embrace your inner geek. It’ll only cost you 65 bucks on the current Yes tour, not counting parking fees and refreshments.

Yes hit the Greensboro Coliseum stage at precisely 7:45 pm to the first of many, many standing ovations from what appeared to be a one-half to two-thirds full arena. The set was decorated with huge inflatable Roger Dean “sculptures” (Dean, of course, is the legendary LP artist who designed so many Yes sleeves back in the day) that were vaguely surreal, like weird underwater flora and fauna, but which still suggested Dean may have been spending too much time hanging out in the children’s floats department of a beach shop.

Next Page >>