Music of Yes by Bill Martin

Author:Bill Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812699456
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2015-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

“Long Distance Runaround”

We begin with a mixture of the swirling winds and the personal relationships that draw us out, into the roundabout; we then find ourselves confronted with the overwhelming powers of nature, obscuring even the struggle to hear any human voice (and the only voice that can be heard can say no more than “move forward”), on the south side of the sky. Feeling already somewhat drained, we turn the record over, and now we are decisively in the realm of the social and the interpersonal.

(I don’t want to get back into the issue of LPs versus CDs, but the fact is that the organization of experience is quite different for each, and the space that exists and physical activity required at the end of side one of the Fragile LP is a good example of this.)

The playfulness of the instrumental music of “Long Distance Runaround” is very much in contrast to the irony and bitterness of the lyrics. In rock music it is typical to give the writer’s credit to the person who composed the main themes of a piece and the lyrics, and Jon Anderson is credited here. Anyone who has heard the acoustic version of the song (mentioned earlier, in the portrait of Chris Squire) knows that this is almost a whole other piece than what appears on Fragile; I assume that the acoustic version represents what Anderson wrote, and the fleshed-out Fragile version represents the group composition process. This is a useful demonstration of what group composition is all about—quite often what is involved is a theme that one person contributes, and a set of elaborate parts that the other group members integrate into this theme. In the process, it is often the case that the original theme is substantially transformed. (A much bigger example of this sort of thing would be “Gates of Delirium,” also credited to Anderson.) There is another significant aspect of this process that especially needs pointing out here. One of the stark differences between the acoustic version of “Long Distance” and the Fragile version is that the latter has an amazing bass line. I assume that this bass line was written by Chris Squire (just as I assume that the guitar lines in “South Side of the Sky” were composed by Steve Howe, though the song is credited to Anderson and Squire). It is standard practice that the composition of a bass line does not enter into the credit for the composition of a piece of music. (This has changed a little bit in recent years, both because of the more liberated and up-front role of the bass guitar in recent rock music, and because there are more lawyers involved these days.) In the case of Squire and his approach to the bass guitar, however, clearly an expanded definition of composition is called for. I’m not saying any of this to take credit away from Jon Anderson, but more to point toward (1) an amazing bass line that is a

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