This is another essay from Facebook, captured for posterity (or my book!)

TL;DR: Rush had just the right number of bandmembers, and you can see why by looking at bands like Yes and their trajectories when replacing people in their lineups.

I was thinking about the passing of Alan White, longtime drummer for Yes, this morning, and what he meant for Yes, and why his presence worked for the band.

And yes (no pun intended!), there’s a Rush reference - a giant one - in this, because I can relate almost anything to Rush. Really. Wanna talk circles? Well, π is the relationship of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, right? π is roughly 3.14, SLIGHTLY more than three, and that works out to the number of Rush members there were - three, plus just a little, people like Hugh Syme (synths on 2112), Ben Mink (violin on Losing It), and Andy Richards (synth programming for albums like Power Windows and Hold Your Fire). Anyway… we’ll circle (hah!) back around to Rush, but I need to talk about Yes, first.

Back to Yes. Yes was a fantastic and prototypical progressive band in their beginnings, shortly before Rush really became Rush. They had five really identifiable members, with largely equivalent reputations on their instruments, and I’m going to start with the lineup for The Yes Album, where they actually became what people think of when they think of the band:

  1. Jon Anderson had an incredibly distinctive voice and a particular approach to lyric construction;
  2. Chris Squire, z”l, was wonderful at constructing vocal harmonies, and apparently could play bass just a bit;
  3. Tony Kaye, who played Hammond and piano, and still remains a giant on those instruments;
  4. Bill Bruford, who played drums and had a rather original approach to them, being largely uninterested in the Ringo Starr bricklayer approach, while at the same time lacking Keith Moon’s manic technique;
  5. Steve Howe, a master-of-all-trades on guitar who also contributed backup vocals and song construction.

I can’t say as much about how Yes constructed songs as I can about how bands like Pink Floyd and Rush and Led Zeppelin built songs, but looking over their history and their arc, Howe either inspired or allowed the band to build songs with an architectural approach.

With Steve Howe on board, the band really started to try to find space for every member to play to their utmost capabilities in every song. To some degree they were already there; Squire was already known as an incredible bassist with songs like “No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed,” for example. (If you listen to that song, you’re not going to wonder who’s on bass), and Bruford’s technique - while still immature for him - was already something you could understand in development.

But with Howe, everything opened up: Bruford’s drumming made more sense, as did Squire’s bass playing (which seemed less dominant under Howe than under Hackett, the previous guitarist, to my ears - but being less dominant didn’t diminish it in the slightest.) Instrumentally, the only thing that didn’t really advance was the keyboard work, under Tony Kaye, who - despite being quite capable - was content to play piano and organ.

(This relative passivity is why Kaye left the band and was replaced by Rick Wakeman, who was and remains a giant in keyboards, along with people like Jordan Rudess and Keith Emerson and a very few others. I don’t mean to slag Kaye; he only suffers by comparison.)

With Wakeman, you had five distinctive, inspirational musicians, all who could (and did) play as hard as they could on nearly every song. An analysis of songs like “Heart of the Sunrise” or “Roundabout” can be exhausting - they’re great songs, and I love those songs, but they’re also incredibly dense. (I actually prefer “Perpetual Change” and “Starship Trooper” from “The Yes Album” to both of these songs, because they’re less dense, even though I will always wish “Starship Trooper” had had Wakeman on it.)

That’s the pace that led Yes for a number of albums: they strove for that equal placement of every instrument, and golly, with five people in the band, that’s a lot of “equal placement!” – and if it wasn’t there, well, it showed. A lot.

Bruford left the band and was replaced by Alan White, initially for a tour, but White became an integral part of the band. His first album with Yes was the rather polarizing Tales from Topographic Oceans - an album I have to confess I’ve never really gotten into - followed by Relayer and Going for the One, albums I definitely dug, and a lot.

In fact, I think it’s safe to say that while Bruford-era Yes was “more influential” for musicians, Yes’ greatest commercial and popular success was with Alan White on the kit, not Bruford. White was the drummer for 90125, after all, and a list of his albums with Yes is nothing short of phenomenally long.

… Why?

I think it goes back to that “equal placement” aspect. White was technically and artistically gifted, albeit in different ways than Bruford, but I think the biggest difference was that White was less “forward” in the songwriting than Bruford was. I don’t mean that as a comparison between the drummers (although Bruford remains a more influential drummer for me, personally); it’s just that White tended to hold down the drums as a rhythm instrument more than as a lead role, as Bruford did.

With a five-piece band, White stabilized things: he let the other instruments breathe more. Listening to frenetic pieces like “Going for the One,” one could argue that this might not have actually happened… but can you imagine that song with a percussion section going eight hundred miles per hour?

And with that, we circle back to Rush at last.

The thing about Rush is that every instrument - synthesizers, bass, guitars, drums, vocals - had their place in the mix.

Geddy Lee played bass hard - even during lead sections - because who was he competing with? … nobody. Alex Lifeson would have been playing lead in a different sonic region, after all, and Lee was filling in not only the low notes - the traditional bass role - but where the rhythm guitar would have gone, as well.

The synthesizers, too, tended to “fill in space” in the music, rather than cramming in. (I am aware of the “Signals” album waving its figurative hands at me as I write this. Rush had a few albums where this “fill in spaces” ethic was a struggle, because the technology was so new and so fun. It took time to learn.)

The vocals… Geddy’s vocal range had been drastically polarizing for Rush’ early career, but the thing about that has always been: where would you sing? I’ve recorded Rush covers, in my own innate baritone/tenor range - I ended up having to drop the melody by an octave, because I can’t sing in the same register as Geddy could. And if you disregard the skill level differential - which is considerable - the truth is, the vocal register impacts the songs even out of the gate.

The songs were built around Geddy’s high tenor. Singing them in anything else just doesn’t work.

The same applies to the guitar: Lifeson had a unique talent in playing guitar such that the entire song was served. Look at “Envy of None” - a lot of naysayers have said, “Where’s the guitar?” and my response is “It’s right there!” It’s an album slathered in guitar, but because it’s Lifeson, it doesn’t have to be in your face; it sits in the mix and builds the songs, just as his guitar did in Rush, but since the balance of the musicianship has changed, so has his role on guitar.

And the drums… the same thing that applies to Lifeson applied to Peart. Because of the way the songs were built, Peart had room to play with his frenetic, hard-hitting approach, without stomping on the rest of the instrumentation.

(Signals is the main outlier here; I love the album but the production suffered because of the synthesizers’ dominance in the songwriting, something that Rush fought with in varying degrees for many, many subsequent albums. They never had the same problems that Signals had, but they also never quite found the balance they had had on prior albums until “Snakes and Arrows”, in my opinion, and even there the synths were largely in the very far background.)

I don’t think you find that balance with a band that had more members: you end up with a melange like Yes, where the music is dense and loses something in the creation due to the density.