No one familiar with the music of Kansas would question their status as a progressive band. Not all their songs have progressive attributes, it’s true, but that’s the case with every progressive band. Genesis. Tull. Even Rush. Even Yes.
But Kansas is seldom mentioned in any list of great progressive bands. This probably owes to their origins, being about as un-British as it’s possible to be; how could a bunch of scruffy, overalls-wearing corn huskers from Possum Gulch Midwest possibly be playing music that can compete with King Crimson? Even so, just an afternoon’s dalliance with the Kansas works of the Seventies can leave no doubts in even the harshest critic.
We’ve already examined the music on its own merits. Let’s see how Kansas stacks up against the mightiest of all prog rock bands: Yes.
For this match-up, we’ll look at their contemporaneous work – what they produced in the Seventies. (We’ll exclude Yes’s first two albums, which were recorded before they committed to progressive.)
The Yes Album (1971) Kansas (1974)
Fragile (1971) Song for America (1975)
Close to the Edge (1972) Masque (1975)
Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) Leftoverture (1976)
Relayer (1974) Point of Know Return (1977)
Going for the One (1977) Monolith (1979)
Tormato (1979)
What should we compare? Most critical appraisals of prog rock – my own included – list several key criteria:
Long-form works. Progressive rock mimics classical music in presenting musical themes, then presenting extensions of those themes – variations. Moreover, it embraces the classical practice of embedding divergent sections of music in the same work. This often leads to songs that are 7 minutes, 9 minutes, 12 minutes long, even consuming entire album sides (“2112”, “Thick as a Brick”).
Unusual time signatures. Forsaking the conventional common time (4/4) and poppy waltz time (¾) for the more adventurous 5/4 (“Living in the Past”), 7/4 (“Tom Sawyer”, “Money”), or some other odd meter is not uncommon.
Classical forms. The variation of themes mentioned above has formal structure in classical music – the sonata form, for instance. This involved the presentation of a theme, its development, and recapitulation. Exploration of forms like this is common in prog rock.
Epic themes. Prog groups go big on the music and big on the lyrical themes explored; epic stories, mythology, deep philosophical excursions – nothing is off limits.
Unusual instrumentation. Prog rock eschews the guitar-bass-drums primary colors of rock as stand-alone; keyboards are in the mix (the stranger, the better), as are actual classical instruments (Ian Anderson’s flute). Gentle Giant’s six members played 40 different instruments between them.
Virtuosity. At least one member of the band, and usually several, are virtuosi – the best of the best. Keith Emerson. David Gilmour. Neil Peart.
Let's take these one at a time.
Long-form works
Both Kansas and Yes committed to long-form songs right up front. On the band’s eponymous debut album, released in 1974, Kansas presented itself to the world in eight tracks – three of which were long-form. Each of these - “Journey from Mariabronn” (7:55), “Aperçu” (9:54) and “Death of Mother Nature Suite” (7:43) - features a lengthy pre-vocal introduction; divergent instrumental sections in the middle of the song; dramatic shifts in dynamics; and frequent hand-offs of soloing between band members.
That’s on a par with Yes, whose first progressive work, The Yes Album, was similarly heavy with long-form songs, from the kick-off “Yours is No Disgrace” (9:40); “Starship Trooper” (9:28); “I’ve Seen All Good People” (6:55); and “Perpetual Change” (8:57). The middle two weren’t just multi-sectional; they cashed in on the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” trick of stitching entirely different songs together.
Each band’s second album in series began with a long-form song that wound up being edited down into a radio single - “Roundabout” in Yes’s case, “Song for America” for Kansas. The former ran 8:29 in its album incarnation, cut down to 3:27 for the disc jockies, losing a big chunk of the intro and middle solo section, and – the biggest loss – the celestial return-to-intro dynamic drop-off at 4:57, followed by the Jon-and-Mellotron-only return to the refrain. “Song for America” lost most of its intro, hard-cutting to Walsh’s vocal entrance at only 0:09 – hard on the ear, as they are in different keys (the total loss of music just in this truncated intro is close to the length of the entire edited single; Walsh comes in at 3:02 on the album version). Almost the entirety of the instrumental section of the song is lost. Walsh’s middle-section lyric (“So the maiden lies in waiting...”) is dropped, and Steinhardt’s (“Across the sea there came a multitude...”) is all that’s left. “Roundabout” is the single edit we remember, between these two, but we can surely agree that the album versions of both songs are far superior to the single edits.
Song for America the album featured two more long-form songs - “Lamplight Symphony” (8:17) and “Incomudro - Hymn to the Atman” (12:11, the longest song in Kansas canon) - as did Fragile, with “South Side of the Sky” (7:57) and “Heart of the Sunrise (11:16).
Yes goes all in on Close to the Edge, with a title track that takes an entire album side (at 18:43). The album’s other two tracks, “And You and I” and “Siberian Khatru”, clock in at 10:12 and 8:56. Masque, the third Kansas outing, has fewer by one - “All the World” (7:11) and “The Pinnacle” (9:44).
Long-form betrays Yes at this point, as it serves up a double album – Tales from Topographic Oceans - with only four songs, each taking up an entire album side. Both fans and critics react negatively to this overindulgence. Kansas, on the other hand, delivers a grand slam: Leftoverture, the lead-off of which (“Carry On Wayward Son”) catapults them to a popular peak that Yes will never equal. Their long-form entries here are more restrained than those of their British cousins: “Miracles Out of Nowhere” (6:28), “Cheyenne Anthem” (6:55) and “Magnum Opus” (8:25).
Learning its lesson, Yes pops out an album with the exact structure of its masterpiece Close to the Edge: Relayer features a single side-length song on Side One (“The Gates of Delirium”), a pair of long-form tunes on Side Two (“Soundchaser”, “To Be Over”).
The follow-up to Leftoverture is Point of Know Return, which delivers two more huge hits for the band. It might be the band’s unexpected radio success, it might be the endless critical shaming, but they begin backing away from long-form now, offering just a couple this time out: “Closet Chronicles” and “Hopelessly Human”.
And Yes does the same: Going for the One, released the same year (1977), features only two long-form tracks - “Turn of the Century” and the splendid “Awaken”.
At this point, both bands are shying away from long-form: Monolith, the sixth Kansas album, doesn’t have a song that breaks 7 minutes, and Yes’s Tormato has only one.
Unusual time signatures
Yes was one of prog rock’s most time-bending bands, and Kansas kept up.
“Heart of the Sunrise” shifts meter between ¾ and 4/4, which is interesting enough in itself, we suppose, but gets really interesting in the middle instrumental section, where there are alternating phrases of ¾ and 5/8. “Awaken”, the last masterpiece of Yes’s classic era, goes into 11/4 in its first section.2
Kansas may even take the lead here. In “Miracles Out of Nowhere”, there are five different meter shifts in the introduction alone, 6/4 to 4/4 to 3/8 and back again.3 In the middle instrumental section of the song, the meter shifts to 7/8, then shifts again to 6/4. This middle-instrumental shifting is also very effective in “Song for America”, which goes to 9/8.
Classical forms
Yes has long been praised as the definitive exemplar of classical structures deployed in rock (though ELP is just as deserving). In particular, Yes mastered the sonata form, which includes three sections of music – an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation – exploring two or more themes.
The granddaddy of them all, of course, is “Close to the Edge”, one of rock’s true masterworks (and perhaps the finest piece of progressive rock ever produced). This incredible song is sonically rich and varied, structurally more complex than almost any other song in all of rock, and unpacks several strong themes, all of which are inventively varied and restated.
Yes is very, very good at this kind of invention, and repeats it throughout the Seventies branch of its canon. “The Revealing Science of God” and “The Remembering” are similarly structured, if not quite as bold. “And You and I” is a lighter example, too short to explore deeply but strongly framed with powerful themes, all the same.
Kansas capably tackles the form early on, notably in the neobaroque “The Wall”, with a broad development mid-song that passes exploratory chores between lead instruments.
Yes more or less specializes in sonata form, and while Kansas doesn’t use it as much, it explores a wider range of forms. The middle section of Livgren’s “Miracles Out of Nowhere”, for instance, goes into fugue; his “Death of Mother Nature Suite” is literally that, a suite – an ordered set of pieces connected by a common theme.
Epic themes
Yes goes all in, from the Siddhartha-inspired “Close to the Edge” to the Tolstoyan war suite “Gates of Delirium”, but it is probably the four-part “Tales from Topographic Oceans” that represents its greatest grab at epic content. Jon Anderson took inspiration from the Shastric Scriptures, which he discovered through reading Autobiography of a Yogi; the Shastras present treatises exploring spirituality and social existence stem to stern, covering art, health, justice, you name it. Anderson thought of it as a truth manual.
Kansas loved this sort of thing as much or more, presenting Herman Hesse on its debut album: “Journey from Mariabronn”, the band’s first progressive piece, is based on Hesse’s masterwork Narcissus and Goldmund. And you can’t get much more mythological than “Icarus (Borne on Wings of Steel)”.
Unusual instrumentation
Jon Anderson loved to pretend to play things he couldn’t - the harp, the cuatro – but it was Howe and Wakeman who really brought it, playing more instruments than they had digits. Howe routinely played pedal steel, and just as routinely pulled out instruments that only superficially resembled guitars: a Portugese Vachalia. A Spanish laúd. An electric sitar.
And Wakeman? He invented keyboard stacks. There was a Hammond organ and an electric piano on stage, but the synths ran the gamut, from the Minimoog to the Polymoog, to non-synth keyboards of the day like the Mellotron and the electric harpsichord.
Robby Steinhardt’s violin speaks for itself, of course, as definitively as Ian Anderson’s flute; it is a cornerstone, perhaps the cornerstone, of Kansas’s identity. As we saw above, the band’s early handlers saw it as something that set Kansas apart from its peers, and encouraged its elevation to the level of lead guitar.
But they didn’t settle for Robby being blazing excellent, as fiery as he was tasteful; they layered the violin into their songs’ hooks in unison with lead guitar and synth lines, creating entirely novel textures.
Even so, it has to be said that Kansas deployed its synthesizers with the same up-front melodic emphasis and structural priority that Yes did – easier for them to do than Yes, as Kansas had two keyboardists. And, often, they would layer piano and organ together – something Yes weren’t configured for.
Virtuosity
Almost no prog bands are composed entirely of virtuosi – Rush is the only incontestable example, though Gentle Giant probably qualifies. ELP? 2/3; E and P were virtuosi, L was not. But it only takes one to land a band in the upper echelon, as David Gilmour did for Pink Floyd.
The classic Yes line-up – Anderson, Squire, Howe, Wakeman, Bruford – was 4/5 virtuoso. Squire, Howe, Wakeman and Bruford are all masters of their craft; Anderson is not. He isn’t even that great a singer; he’s just unique, exceedingly distinctive. Tony Kaye and Alan White, both of whom make appearances in the albums discussed above, are fine players, but not among the world’s greatest. Pat Moraz, who sat in for Relayer and the subsequent tour, certainly is.
Put simply, Yes is at the top of the food chain when it comes to virtuosity.
Even so, Kansas – while not scoring four clear masters – outdoes bands like Genesis and Tull in the virtuosity department. Steinhardt is the hands-down winner here, but Phil Ehart shows up frequently on Top 100 Drummer lists, and Livgren (as a guitarist) and Walsh (as a vocalist) still garner steady honorable mentions.
The argument here isn’t that Kansas is the equal of Yes, though they experienced greater commercial success and have more work sitting in the Top 1,000. No progressive band is the equal of Yes. The argument here is that Kansas is fully qualified as a progressive force, rising above most of its English counterparts, and doesn’t deserve exclusion from that arena on the basis of its cornflake heritage.
But for all this, we’ve only established that Kansas is in Yes’s league; we haven’t demonstrated that Kansas is Yes-like.
Is Kansas more like Yes, than, say, ELP? Rush? Genesis? Jethro Tull?
They are. ELP and Rush, as power trios, are different-in-kind; the counterpoint and sonic layering we hear in Kansas and Yes isn’t part of the mix. Tull and Kansas seem to have a lot in common at face value, both being built around a featured orchestral instrument; but Tull’s musical foundations are Olde English folk, decidedly baroque, while both Kansas and Yes draw heavily from the Romantic composers. Tull’s themes are emphatically earthy, while both Kansas and Yes lean hard into the spiritual.
But surely Genesis is in this mix? Their Seventies musical configuration is comparable to both Kansas and Yes; they love long-form composition; they are energetic and theatrical. In Hackett, they had a virtuoso. Peter Gabriel even played an oboe once. And they loved going for big ideas. Is Kansas actually the American Genesis?
Not so much; while Genesis shares blues roots with Kansas and folk roots with Yes, its thematic focus in the Seventies leaned heavily into fantasy, even fairytale narratives, and Peter Gabriel overtly cultivated a mercurial persona. They even raided Arthur C. Clarke for inspiration. The music of Genesis, looking back, was practically an anthology series.
The identity of Yes, however, wasn’t situated in dramatic narrative. While they did deep dives into philosophical waters with regularity, it was always in the service of personal growth, not narrative. And that’s Kansas, in a nutshell; their identity was always asserted unapologetically and earnestly. Theirs was a musical quest of self-discovery and yearnings examined, the exploration of their own humanness through introspection, rather than dramatic narrative.
And that makes Kansas the American Yes.
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