Yes
Yours Is No Disgrace

This also happened in those early seventies, characterized by a fervent musical foreign affinity in our region: a song extended to almost ten minutes, the first of this magnitude among the many in the Yes career, placed at the opening of their third LP "The Yes Album", had a specific Italian release on a 45 rpm record, of course cut in half, one portion per side!.

The five Yes members photographed on the cover, slender and long-haired with the still innocent air of the have-nots, appear in all their rising youth. There is also the newest member, Steve Howe, the first on the right, who shakes things up from start to finish in this piece as he does with the rest of that album, with a varied and then highly innovative guitar score among imperious staccatos, tight arpeggios, wah-wah pedal lashes, jazz scales with closed tones, long trails of distorted and elongated sound, acoustic interludes, and more. As a presentation to the general public of a musician, who until then had been scraping by in the London underground, there are few more effective and explosive in force of the highly personal jazz and ragtime approach at high volume, broadly unusual in a much heavier rock guitar landscape.

The group's historical keyboardist Rick Wakeman was still serving in the Strawbs at the time, and luckily so...: it happens that Tony Kaye on the organ was much more vigorous and skilled, especially in the setting of the Hammond drawbars and the use of the Leslie speaker. His sidelining shortly after the release of this album in favor of the ambitious blond gave Yes a more symphonic and grandiose dimension, a more spectacular stage appearance, certainly a much more competent piano contribution indeed at a virtuoso level, but it took away that bit of blues and healthy simplicity that Kaye's double keyboard always ensured for the Yes sound with the right registrations and the percussion device emphasizing and characterizing the attack of the sounds, keeping it more sober and flowing.

To appreciate Kaye's role, it’s enough to listen to the attack of the piece: the guitar starts with dry and dynamic chords and the organist, intervening after the first round, does nothing but double them, however cleverly anticipating them in upbeat, supporting them more and especially with a hell of a sound!

Although the song lasts a long time, it is not a suite, but rather an expanded and extended piece, with melodies that gladly repeat with different arrangements, different rhythm, different atmosphere. The very special rhythm machine of Yes, a fundamental contribution to the peculiarity of this formation especially in its golden age, which this very song inaugurated, is already in full swing: Chris Squire’s blasting and hyper-creative bass couples with the dry, yet at the same time delicate bass drum, snare, and hi-hat games of curly-haired Bill Bruford, a decidedly jazz drummer lent and never bent to the rock cause. On record, and this is the case, the affair worked great ensuring originality, unpredictability, and progressive spirit galore. Live, there was not as much effectiveness... better the later Yes with Alan White, more powerful and compact, much more suited to face ten twenty thirty thousand in an arena.

Even the other excellent peculiar characteristic of Yes is fully in place on "Yours Is No Disgrace": the bassist’s special counterpoint work more than ever gives the group’s choirs that unmatched mobility and harmonic richness. Squire, even before he learned to play, was already a singer, as a young boy in a professional and well-established London choir. Much of the piece is generously led by two voices, and Squire's is usually almost never a third or fifth harmony... it’s quite a new melody that, constantly intersecting with that of main singer Jon Anderson, creates intervals of fourth, sixth, seventh, and ninth that indelibly stamp the Yes brand in the history of choral singing in rock.

“Yours Is No Disgrace” is certainly the crown jewel among the six songs that compose “The Yes Album”. It vies for fame and appreciation with “Starship Trooper” (this one truly a suite, in three movements). The group has always held it in high esteem, probably also for a recognition factor being chronologically their first career exploit; it’s no coincidence they’ve been used to start their concerts with it for many years now and still do today.