Music of Yes: Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock

Yes is one of the most creative groups from the progressive rock period. In the early 1970s, Yes evolved into a visionary, virtuoso band, producing a series of adventurous, controversial, and difficult works. In this pathbreaking book, wholly devoted to the serious discussion of a rock group's oeuvre, Bill Martin follows the trajectory of Yes from the group's formation in 1968 to the present, with a special focus on what Martin calls Yes's "main sequence" - from The Yes Album (1971) to Going for the One (1977). Professor Martin situates Yes within the utopian ideals of the 1960s and the experimental trend initiated by The Beatles, then developed by such groups as King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Although sometimes critical of Yes's work, Martin defends Yes against their supposed blissed-out over-optimism and their departures from blues orthodoxy. Drawing upon the thinking of Adorno and Marcuse, Martin demonstrates the power of Yes's Romantic, utopian, Blakean, ecological, multicultural, and feminist perspectives, showing how the vision which unifies these is developed though extended and sophisticated musical creations.