The band Yes taps keyboardist’s son, tribute artist

By Joe Brown

Thursday, June 25, 2009 | 2 a.m.

PUBLICITY PHOTO

Oliver Wakeman of Yes

When the progressive rock band Yes comes to the Thomas & Mack Center on Saturday, three members of the classic lineup — guitarist Steve Howe, bass player Chris Squire, drummer Alan White — will take the stage with two new Yes-men.

Oliver Wakeman will sit in for his dad, keyboard player Rick Wakeman, who was, in the band’s ’70s heyday, as famous for his wizardly capes as for his synthesizer squiggles and mountains of keyboards.

And standing in for seemingly irreplaceable high-pitched vocalist Jon Anderson is sound-alike and look-alike Benoit David, 43, a Canadian who had been the lead singer for a Yes tribute band called Close to the Edge — Squire found David on YouTube.

So yeah, this is a qualified Yes — more like Maybe.

Anderson was sidelined last year when acute respiratory failure canceled the band’s 40th anniversary tour; he begins a solo tour Tuesday in Europe. Rick Wakeman is sitting this one out.

“(Yes) asked Dad if he had anybody he recommended, and he recommended me, which is very nice,” says Oliver Wakeman, 37, who was born the same year one of the most popular Yes albums, “Close to the Edge,” was released, so he grew up with prog rock.

“I’ve always been a fan of that style of music anyway,” says Wakeman, who has put out eight albums with his own prog band, and toured with Strawbs, another classic prog outfit, this year. Four decades after prog’s heyday of triple albums and fantastic album covers, prog rock not only survives but thrives, in an underground kind of way.

“I do distinctly remember being 9 or 10 and having a record player in my room,” Wakeman says. “And the records I had were records that Dad had left behind when he moved out. I remember to this day, there were ‘Six Wives of Henry VIII,’ ‘Tales of Topographic Oceans’ and Styx’s ‘The Grand Illusion,’ and I thought they were great.”

The teenage Wakeman would go with friends to the local record shop, and while they would pick up the latest Duran Duran record, he would buy albums by Rush and Gong. “Which to us as young kids was pretty weird stuff. But I found that I really had a particular love for this stuff.”

Rick Wakeman’s keyboard solos and arrangements on the Yes albums are famously complex — and with multitrack recording and songs that stretched past the 15-minute mark, they were daunting to re-create, especially with Yes fans being sticklers for precision.

Wakeman didn’t turn to his father for advice on re-creating his iconic sounds and solos.

“He wouldn’t tell me and I wouldn’t ask,” he says. “We never really talk about music, to be honest with you. I just went to the job as if I was any other keyboard player that had gotten the job.”

He went back to the original studio albums.

“It was like working through a huge jigsaw puzzle,” Wakeman says. “I spent hours picking my way through them. When I listened to the live records, I noticed that one of Dad’s great strengths is his improvisational skills. He makes up his parts and writes new parts all the time. But I didn’t feel that I could come into the band and start making up parts. Dad has earned that right, but I haven’t.”

For this tour, Wakeman has a rig of about seven or eight keyboards. “We’re very close with a lot of the sounds; they’re pretty authentic. I have a Mellotron sampler, and I use a new Moog (synthesizer) rather than one of the old ones, because the new ones have auto-tuners and things like that that keep them a lot more stable.”

Vegas is the second stop on Yes’ 26-city U.S. tour, which begins tonight in Indio, Calif. Sharing the billing will be Asia, a Yes spinoff that became a supergroup in its own right. Guitarist Steve Howe, a cornerstone member of both groups, is performing with both bands, joining original Asia members John Wetton (guitar, ex-King Crimson), Geoff Downes (keyboards) and Carl Palmer (drums, ex-Emerson, Lake & Palmer).

Wakeman says Yes fans have been very accepting and enthusiastic, and he gives the new Yes singer, Benoit David, high marks. And he says it’s nice having a contemporary around, as the other Yes patriarchs are in their 60s.

“He sings really well, he’s good fun,” Wakeman says. “And in some respects, we probably got on very well because we’re both the new boys.”