ASSOCIATED PRESS/FILE
Jon Anderson, Yes lead singer, posed before a concert in Lowell in 2004.
WHEN I hear even a snatch of a song by Yes — Steve Howe piling on the harmonics and baroque licks during the guitar intro to“Roundabout,” Jon Anderson singing like a member of the Venusian Boys Choir, Rick Wakeman challenging Keith Emerson for the title of heavyweight champion of keyboard-solo overkill — it takes me back to listening to the radio at the age of 12 or 13. Hanging out on my neighbors’ stoop with their radio playing, listening to my own staticky bedside radio with the sound turned down low as I drifted off to sleep, I inhaled a lot of secondhand Yes in the 1970s.
Yes was in the air back then, and while I never sought out or even particularly liked the band’s music, I felt that its sincere commitment to being a prog-rock juggernaut of bombast commanded a certain respect. It seemed to me at the time that Yes’s conviction that it was expanding listeners’ minds and elevating their taste was simply part of what the era obliged one to endure. After you’d heard “I’ve Seen All Good People” a hundred times on the radio, you deserved an imaginary merit badge in Ecstatic Woe.
Earlier this week, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced its inductees for 2014. Yes, a finalist, didn’t make the cut. This outcome was especially disappointing for the Washington political operatives from both sides of the aisle who, as David Rowell entertainingly reports in the Washington Post Magazine, came together to mount a publicity campaign to help get the band elected. But even this bipartisan alliance of opinion-molders, united by a taste for noodling multi-movement epics that take up a whole side of an LP, couldn’t overcome what they regard as the Hall of Fame’s longstanding bias against progressive rock.
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