By Thor Christensen, Special Contributor
A bass player is often the easiest member to replace in a rock band. But when it comes to Yes, the opposite is true.
Performing Thursday night at Verizon Theatre, the English prog-rock band sounded amiss on its first tour without bass virtuoso Chris Squire, who died June 27 at age 67 after battling leukemia.
Squire was the band's anchor, the only member to play on all 21 Yes studio albums since 1969. But more importantly, he played bass like no one else in music. Without Squire's jazzy, baroque-style picking and fretting, Yes will never sound quite like Yes.
A photo montage of Squire appeared on the video screen as the show began. And from the opening notes of the first tune, "Don't Kill the Whale," his absence was obvious. New bassist Billy Sherwood – who'd played guitar and keyboard in Yes briefly in the '90s – did an admirable job trying to approximate Squire's rumbling gallop in "Roundabout" and "I've Seen All Good People." But an approximation was all it was.
Squire wasn't the only notable Yes-man missing. Angel-voiced lead singer Jon Anderson left the band in 2004, and his current replacement, American Jon Davidson, duplicated his high tenor with such uncanny accuracy it was easy to forget the old Jon ever left.
Keeping the show from dissolving into a high-priced tribute act were longtime drummer Alan White, keyboardist Geoff Downes and especially guitar ace Steve Howe. At age 68, Howe sounded tentative at times. But he gradually picked up steam and cut loose on steel guitar in "Going for The One" before unleashing a dazzling bebop solo in "Siberian Khatru," a song which made its public debut in 1972 at Dallas' Memorial Auditorium.
Four decades later, "Khatru" is still a high point of the prog-rock movement -- a sprawling 9-minute suite that blurs the line between classical music, psychedelic rock and free-form jazz. As long as Howe is still alive to play it, Yes is still worth listening to.
In its 90-minute opening set, Toto lived up to and occasionally transcended its rep as a band of overly-slick L.A. studio musicians.
Toto overcame its limitations as a sterile pop-rock band whenever keyboardist David Paich stretched out – like during his honky-tonk solo in "Rosanna" -- and percussionist Lenny Castro added a Latin swing to several tunes. Yet singer Joseph Williams – a late '80s recruit – had a hard time replicating the vocal parts originally sung by Bobby Kimball. Steve Lukather's hard-rock guitar solos bordered on histrionic. And some of the band's longer tunes sounded like a pale imitation of Yes.
Toto closed the set with its 1982 hit "Africa." On record, it's one of the band's best tunes, but in concert, it dragged on until it became a marathon of bombast: When a technical snafu caused the sound system to go silent for nearly a minute, it was almost as if someone from above was telling Toto to wrap things up already.
Thor Christensen is a Dallas writer and critic. Email him at thorchris2@yahoo.com
