Tonight I walked into Times Square through a pleasant sea of people and warm spring air to BB King’s music club, where I went to see Jon Anderson in concert. Anderson was the singer of Yes, a legendary and influential English art-rock band.

Showing up a few minutes before start time, I was surprised to find the club utterly packed, and had to settle for squeezing into a space next to the bar at the back of the club, leaning left and right around shoulders and heads to glimpse Anderson 100 feet or so away, and sometimes had to content myself with watching one of the two video screens to either side of the stage.

The crowd was what you might expect of those who are wild about music that began as 1970s progressive rock: heavily male and white, 40- and 50-somethings. (I sometimes feel like Yes and Rush concerts are reunions for guys and some women who all grew up under the same psycho-social roof in the 70s and 80s: a little nerdy, a little brainy, not at home in the prevailing social orders of youth but much more at home in the world of fantasy and nature mysticism. And when I see guys with jean jackets or still proudly sporting mullets, I think to myself, “You are my people!”)

Such associations are far from incidental to the comprehension of a Jon Anderson concert, because so much of the evening had to do with recollection of music that spoke from the times of fans’ adolescence or young adulthood, framing those years in a now-pantheistic, now-panentheistic, wash of hermetic images that fit multiple moods and frames of mind while also referring them to a mysterious beyond, sung by the elfin Anderson and his unusual pop voice (which sounded in warmly clear and generous shape tonight).

I was surprised by my own emotional-spiritual surge of recognition when Anderson began singing “Starship Trooper”:

“Sister bluebird, flying high above / shine your wings forward to the sun / Hide the mysteries of life on your way / Though you’ve seen them, please don’t say a word / What you don’t know, I have never heard”

and later in the song, in one of my favorite rock invocations of all time:

“Mother life, hold firmly on to me / Catch my knowledge higher than the day / Lose as much as only you can show / Though you’ve seen them, please don’t say a word / What I don’t know, I have never shared”

Anderson seems as released as ever for his own self-realization, and he urged the audience to remember “the light inside” each person that joins us, and saying that he believes more than ever that “souls live forever,” which (it is hard to imagine this happening for such a statement from any other major rock singer) got a wave of affirming hollers and handclaps. (It is here that I feel obliged to mention that I wrote at R&T about meeting Anderson on the train in 2004 here.)

Much of his solo material over the past two decades takes the form of paeans to love: of family, of downtrodden, of animals, of cosmos. (A recent interview with Anderson can be found here.) He is like a sage of rock, mellow in being well-wornly grounded and also slightly floaty from so many years up and down the mountain to receive his musical revelations, conjuring a credible other world from within the love of this incredible one. When he sang “Wonderous Stories,” and most of the crowd sang it out proudly with him, it was as if we were consenting to the story presented in the song, to the story of our relationships to this music, and to the wonderous story that we each are and that the music helps confect in our awareness.

Tom Beaudoin
New York City, USA

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