CHRIS SQUIRE – Take A Straight And Stronger Course

Reading Adam Sweeting’s obituary of Chris Squire in today’s Guardian reminded me again of the support that Melody Maker gave Yes during the first few years I worked on the paper, and as such no other group brings back those years to mind quite so much as the quintet formed in 1968 by Squire and Jon Anderson when the pair met in La Chasse club, a small drinking den on Wardour Street that catered to music business insiders in those days. This support was largely the result of Chris Welch’s admiration for the group, and this had a drip down effect on most of us and, of course, on our readers who invariably voted strongly for them in the annual MM polls. But Chris Squire was always up against stiff competition – Jack Bruce usually won the Best Bass Player category, followed by Paul McCartney. He might have come third, beating John Entwistle, but this probably embarrassed him a bit as he knew better than anyone that the mighty Ox was his superior; not only that, Chris modelled his style on John and wasn’t too proud to say so in interviews.

          Chris Squire was a tall, sturdy fellow, Yes’ lynchpin, the only constant member of the group throughout their long and ongoing career, the only musician to play on every one of their 21 albums, true to the cause for his entire working life. His bass style was melodic rather than rhythmic, adding flourishes from the top of his fretboard much like Entwistle but unlike John he used a pick to help him get a trebly, twangy tone that became synonymous with Yes' sound, just as Entwistle's signature tone was crucial to the originality of The Who. In another piece on Yes here on Just Backdated I was a bit sniffy about Chris' attitude towards something I once wrote about the group’s income but I didn’t mean to offend. I’m sure he had Yes’ best interests to heart, as he did throughout his life.

          “Chris was a very special part of my life; we were musical brothers,” Jon Anderson has written on his website. “He was an amazingly unique bass player, very poetic, and had a wonderful knowledge of harmony. We met at a certain time when music was very open, and I feel blessed to have created some wonderful, adventurous, music with him. Chris had such a great sense of humor... he always said he was Darth Vader to my Obi-Wan. I always thought of him as Christopher Robin to my Winnie the Pooh.”

          So this morning I listened to a bit of Yes on my iPod, ‘Yours Is No Disgrace’, ‘I’ve Seen All Good People’ and ‘Siberian Khatru’. I have a ‘Best Of’ album on there with about 16 tracks, and two other tracks, ‘The Clap’, Steve Howe’s solo piece from The Yes Album, and ‘Every Little Thing’, from their eponymous debut record. This was the last Yes track I played this morning and I remembered it as a serious favourite of mine from 1969, one I used to include on cassettes I made up to play in my orange Mini back in the days when I drove up and down the M1 a lot to see my dad in Yorkshire, both speakers blaring out this extraordinary arrangement of what was always a great and largely overlooked Beatles song. Yes take ‘Every Little Thing’ to another level than the Fabs, opening with a brash free-form prelude dominated by Peter Banks’ guitar phrases that circle the riff ambiguously and Bill Bruford’s jazzy drumming which is all over the shop, busy and skittish. Just before the vocals pounce Banks takes the mood down and offers up the riff from ‘Day Tripper’, played straight, before Anderson swoops in: ‘When I’m walking beside her…’. At over five minutes, Yes explore every avenue of the song, grandiose maybe, symphonic in parts and embracing wave after wave of vivid crescendos that all lead to stupendous summits until the whole piece ends on a suitable note of high drama. After Joe Cocker’s ‘With A Little Help…’, it’s still my favourite Beatles cover.

          This track made me a Yes fan, at least for two or three years, but there was a lot of competition in those days and after Close To The Edge (1972) I lost touch with them, concluding their ambition had overreached itself with Topographic Oceans a year later, and never listened to them much again.

          Chris Welch wrote the definitive Yes biography for Omnibus Press, Close To The Edge, first published in 1999, that revealed how Chris Squire used to spend a lot of time in the bath back when they were poor and lived in a communal house in Fulham, hence his nickname - Fish. 

         

RIP Chris.

MY ODD CONNECTION TO YES

The first time I saw Deep Purple was at the Plumpton Festival on the Sunday night of the August Bank Holiday, 1970, and they closed their set by setting fire to their amps, or at least Ritchie threw some lighter fuel over them, together with a match, and watched the fun. The stage crew quickly doused the flames but it was enough to cause an almighty row backstage, not least with Yes who were due to follow them.

         Setting aside the obvious, few groups remind me more of my years on Melody Maker than Yes, probably because of the enthusiasm of my colleague Chris Welch who did everything he could to boost their profile. Also, I had a slightly weird connection to them. In the summer of 1968, two years before I landed at MM, on holiday in London with my mate Chris Whincup, I watched Yes rehearsing in a basement beneath the Lucky Horseshoe, a restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue. This came about because a character called John Roberts, a wealthy paper manufacturer who lived in Settle, in north west Yorkshire, had advanced them £500 and wanted us to check up on his investment.

         Roberts was well known on what passed for a music scene in nearby Skipton where I was brought up. Assumed by locals to be gay because he preferred the company of young men to men or women of his own age, he was really more sociable than predatory. He befriended many aspiring local rock musicians and those fans like me for whom rock was becoming more than just something to dance to at a party. A keen jazz fan, he made frequent visits to London to visit Ronnie Scott’s Club, and it was in the nearby La Chasse club that he met Jon Anderson who in early 1968 was working there as a washer up. Anderson told Roberts he used to sing with an Accrington group called The Warriors – a band Roberts was evidently familiar with – and about his new band Yes which needed finance; hence the £500 loan and my mission to check them out.

         Accompanied by my mate Chris, we went to the Lucky Horseshoe on John Roberts’ behalf, but apart from Jon Anderson the group had no idea who we were. We watched a while and chatted, and simply thought they sounded better than any band we’d ever heard in Yorkshire... such long numbers and very complex. I played guitar myself in a local band up in Skipton in those days, but this was way out of my league. It was incredibly loud and smoky down there but they seemed very professional and they were all very polite and friendly towards us. We were, after all, pals with someone who'd given them £500, no mean sum in 1968. 

         Two years later I was watching Yes on stage at Plumpton, following on from Deep Purple’s firestorm. I was impressed and over the next year or so renewed my acquaintanceship with them, but as their albums became more and more convoluted they began to bore me. In truth I didn’t write much about Yes on MM as Chris Welch monopolised them but I had an interesting brush with them in New York in February, 1974, when they played two nights at Madison Square Garden. That week Melody Maker celebrated their American success with a front-page story stating that the gross takings from the two Garden shows would exceed $200,000. Their bass player Chris Squire was less than happy that MM had chosen to ‘reveal’ Yes’ earnings and at a pre-show party in their hospitality suite at the Warwick Hotel he berated me over the story. 

         I responded by pointing out that anyone with a calculator could work out what they were grossing each night, simply by multiplying the average ticket price by the number of seats, but Squire seemed to think that we had exposed some dark secret. He didn’t like the idea of fans knowing how much money they made but there really wasn’t any secret about it, and I thought it a bit rich coming from him as he always seemed to me to the most money-conscious member of the band. The others didn’t care about the story at all, and neither did Brian Lane, their manager. Rick Wakeman certainly didn’t care and he joined in the argument on my side.

         The party ended in disarray when Harvey Goldsmith, the London-based promoter who promoted Yes’ UK concerts and who was visiting them in New York, was thrown fully clothed into a bath tub. It was Rick who instigated that. Harvey was all dressed up, ready to go to the Garden when suddenly Rick and some of the others in the room picked him up and threw him into a bath full of cold water. He was furious... really angry. He was soaked and had to change his clothes. Personally – after the row I’d just had with him – I’d have preferred to see Chris Squire dumped in the bath.

         More significantly, in July that same year, I took Harvey to see Bruce Springsteen at the Bottom Line in NY. I’d been telling Harvey how great he was and this was the first time Harvey saw Bruce. He went on to promote his UK concerts for the next two decades, including some whoppers at Wembley Stadium.