A few rambling words about YES in honor of their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and in reaction to Rolling Stone’s funny but sloppy history of the band’s lineup changes

So… YES, one of my favorite bands of all time, are finally getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tonight.

They’re also frequently the butt of jokes for their numerous, tumultuous lineup changes. The one true real life Spinal Tap, I say. Today Rolling Stone released a short video chronicling, with good (snarky) humor but a bit of carelessness, these changes.


A friend shared this on Facebook, and of course tagged me. I enjoyed the video, but could not abide its omissions, so I went on a bit of a rant, which I share below, unedited.

I’m sorry… they glossed over some HUGE drama in the band between 1973 and 1979. Rick Wakeman left over “Tales from Topographic Oceans” which according to this video “SUCKS”. (It doesn’t suck; it’s just hard to get into an album that consists of four 20-minute songs.) Patrick Moraz came in and played on one album, then the band took a break and in 1975 each of them released a solo album (before KISS tried this stunt!), and in 1977 they came back together, but Moraz was out and Wakeman was back. They released one album which was their last really good album, followed by another that was — at the time — their worst. THEN you’re up to 1979 when the band was in the middle of recording an album that never got released, and Anderson and Wakeman left. (And that’s as far as I’ve watched so far… I’m sure I’ll have a Yes-grade epic rant about later errors and omissions too.)

And then, after I’d watched the rest…

Some more glossing over as it goes (like how the ’80s lineup got back together after Union fell apart and recorded one more album in 1994), but I am really glad they had the bit at the end about Anderson Rabin Wakeman and how they’re more Yes than the current Yes lineup, and now the guys from that hideous Union/Onion thing are coming back together (tonight!) for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. It’s all too much to take. My head used to spin over these lineup changes when I first got into the band in high school, and that was just before Union. It’s gotten so much crazier since then.

Oh, and they also didn’t even mention how Benoit David was kicked out in 2011 and replaced by ANOTHER Yes tribute band singer, Jon Davison. (Whose name always kills me… it’s like a mashup of Jon Anderson and Benoit David.)

And they ALSO didn’t mention the infamous Russian keyboardist Igor Khoroshev, who played with the band in the late ’90s until he got kicked out for molesting some fans.

And they ALSO ALSO didn’t mention Billy Sherwood, the guy who replaced Chris Squire on bass, who happened to have been one of those unnamed session musicians on Union and was for some reason added as a 6th member for a while in the late ’90s on guitar and keyboards (and yes, now he plays bass).

Then there’s Jay Schellen, who’s been playing drums with them recently because Alan White had back surgery, and Tom Breslin who briefly toured on keyboards in 2004-ish because the band didn’t have a keyboardist and had recorded an album with an orchestra.

Somewhere in the midst of those inane changes, the band recorded several albums that were worse than the one that came out in 1978, but up to that point, it was the worst.

OK, I’m done.

But I wasn’t done. One last thing was stuck in my craw. Trevor “Ray-BEEN”? That’s not how I’d ever imagined it was pronounced. I assumed it was “RAY-bin”. And, if the man himself is a trustworthy source, I’m right:

S-Town, Maps, and the Passage of Time

SPOILER ALERT: If you’re considering or are just starting to listen to S-Town, don’t read further unless you’ve listened to at least as far as the very end of the second episode.

I mean it.

OK, here we go.

Like John B. McLemore, the man at the center of the S-Town podcast, I’m obsessed with time. Well, maybe not as obsessed with it as he is. But I’m always thinking about it.

Another obsession I have, that we have not, at least by mid-episode 3, heard is (or, rather, was — there’s the first spoiler) shared by John B., is with maps.

(I’m calling him “John B.” rather than just “John” because that’s what the people who were close to him call him. I’m not sure if he liked that or not, but I’ll assume he was OK with it.)

I had already read enough in a review, not to mention on the S-Town website itself, to know that someone else in the story actually dies, and that this most likely would be revealed at the end of episode 2. And, with the heavy foreshadowing early in that episode, it was not much of a surprise to me when it happened — who, or how. (Yes, even the method, which is revealed early in episode 3. That’s foreshadowed too.)

This is a true story of a real person’s life, so I am not trying to make light of it. I felt a genuine loss, and I’ve only known about this person for a few hours.

But let’s go back in time a bit.

I listened to episode 1, and the first 15 minutes of episode 2, when I was out running. I ended up listening to the rest of episode 2 in bed last night, finishing it well after midnight. But before I listened to that final half hour, I spent at least as long looking at satellite views of Woodstock, Alabama in the Apple Maps app on my iPhone… hunting for John B.’s hedge maze. I knew I was close when I spotted the South 40 trailer park that had been mentioned in episode 1.

I might have saved myself some time by searching on the latitude and longitude coordinates rattled off in episode 1 — curiously specific, I thought, even though producer Brian Reed had edited out the last bit, to respect John B.’s privacy. That struck me as odd right away… and also seemed to be a bit of foreshadowing, that maybe John B.’s privacy didn’t really matter so much now.

As I was saying, I might have saved myself some time, but I didn’t feel like going back and hunting for the exact spot in episode 1 where the coordinates were named. More fun to just explore the satellite images until I spotted a circular hedge maze in the woods.

But that wasn’t the first thing I spotted. First I spotted John B.’s school buses… the ones Brian Reed said he was using to age lumber. There were three now, not two. I panned a bit to the west and saw the house, then north and there it was… the hedge maze.

John B.’s house, school buses and hedge maze, from Apple Maps satellite view.

Excited by my discovery, I took to social media. Then I decided to see if anyone else on Twitter had possibly found the maze as well. Of course they had.

Except… wow. That looks a lot different. At first I was second guessing that maybe @RASEC29 had found the wrong maze… or that I had.

John B.’s property as seen in Google Maps.

I mean… where were the school buses? And the house… it looks… so overgrown.

That’s when I knew.

The satellite images in map apps aren’t dated (although I think that may be changing), so I have no idea exactly when these different images were taken. I don’t know if John B. was still alive in the Apple one, or if it’s just that the buses hadn’t yet been cleared away, the maze abandoned, the yard overgrown. And in the light of day, with a better view on my computer, the land doesn’t seem quite as devastated in the later photo as it did when I saw it at around midnight, on my iPhone screen. It’s a different time of year, and a different time of day. Things are brown instead of green, shadows fall in a different direction.

But clearly, time has passed, things have changed, John B.’s world has decayed, much as he obsessed over.

I have so many more things I would like to say, but… time. Also, I’m not even halfway through the series yet, so there is much I still don’t know that is yet to be revealed. Or not.

So I’ll leave it at this. As the quote on John B.’s astrolabe reads, life is “tedious, and brief.” I’m sorry John B. never made it out of his Shit Town, if that’s what he really wanted to do, but I’m glad he shared his story. And I hope he’s wrong about, you know, everything being doomed.

Update: Several other people have now replied to @RASEC29, including @tifotter, who has posted dated images from Google Earth:

How to win when you lose: unbalanced representation in the U.S. government

I haven’t talked politics here much lately. Frankly it’s all been too demoralizing. I mean, how do you talk about someone who is so patently unqualified, not to mention arguably legally disqualified, not only “winning” an election (courtesy of archaic undemocratic rules), but receiving nearly full-throated support from the cynical opportunists of a political party who only a few months ago were decrying his very presence on the scene?

Well, enough on that. Others are fighting that fight better than I ever could, so I’m going to move into the realm where I flourish: geeky data analysis.

Specifically, I want to look at three ways in which the U.S. government — Congress and the presidency — are inherently imbalanced, plus one additional way that they’re being made more so through the shameful tactics of one party whose power depends on exploiting those imbalances to their fullest extent. (Take a guess which one I’m talking about.)

The three ways are: 1) House district apportionment (specifically, “Gerrymandering”), 2) the two-per-state structure of the U.S. Senate, and 3) the Electoral College. Full disclosure: I am not a history scholar. I’m relying mostly on things I actually — gasp — remember learning in public schools in the 1980s.

I’m going to just jump to my thesis here, since the perspective it provides is going to come up in a few places in the rest of the post: In the present day, the values of most Democratic voters favor living in more densely populated areas, whereas the values of most Republican voters favor living in more sparsely populated areas. And since these three aspects of the American electoral process were specifically designed to benefit less-populous states (to get them to go along with the Revolution in the first place), the Republicans today are in a position of power far beyond their actual support amongst the electorate as a whole.

Whew. OK, let’s begin.

Gerrymandering in House seat apportionment

Ah, Elbridge Gerry. Over 200 years later, his name is still applied to the sadly still too common practice of redrawing congressional districts in absurd shapes to deliver the maximum number of House seats to a favored political party. Both parties have been guilty of doing this, but as the Republicans have been in a position of outsized influence at the state level (see my main thesis), the majority of questionable district apportionments in modern times have been to the benefit of the Republican Party.

Beyond the unscrupulous tactics of Gerrymandering, there is still an inherent imbalance in the House, which becomes even greater when we talk about the Senate: because the total number of seats in the House is fixed at 435 (due to the Reapportionment Act of 1929), and because each state has to have at least one representative, low-population states have much higher per-resident representation than larger ones.

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at the numbers. Here’s a table (source: Wikipedia) that breaks down state populations and representation both in the House and Electoral College.

Rank State Population House
Seats		 Elect.
Votes		 Pop. per
House
Seat		 Pop. per
Elect.
Vote		 Pop. per
Senate
Seat
1 California 38,802,500 53 55 717,763 691,662 19,401,250
2 Texas 26,956,958 36 38 723,867 685,769 13,478,479
3 Florida 19,893,297 27 29 715,465 666,123 9,946,649
4 New York 19,746,227 27 29 724,824 674,837 9,873,114
5 Illinois 12,880,580 18 20 715,292 643,763 6,440,290
6 Pennsylvania 12,787,209 18 20 709,085 638,177 6,393,605
7 Ohio 11,594,163 16 18 721,514 641,346 5,797,082
8 Georgia 10,097,343 14 16 708,568 619,997 5,048,672
9 North Carolina 9,943,964 13 15 750,159 650,138 4,971,982
10 Michigan 9,909,877 14 16 705,954 617,710 4,954,939
11 New Jersey 8,938,175 12 14 738,716 633,185 4,469,088
12 Virginia 8,326,289 11 13 744,170 629,682 4,163,145
13 Washington 7,061,530 10 12 689,701 574,751 3,530,765
14 Massachusetts 6,745,408 9 11 738,460 604,195 3,372,704
15 Arizona 6,731,484 9 11 728,139 595,750 3,365,742
16 Indiana 6,596,855 9 11 726,370 594,303 3,298,428
17 Tennessee 6,549,352 9 11 717,360 586,931 3,274,676
18 Missouri 6,063,589 8 10 752,749 602,199 3,031,795
19 Maryland 5,976,407 8 10 735,570 588,456 2,988,204
20 Wisconsin 5,757,564 8 10 715,800 572,640 2,878,782
21 Minnesota 5,457,173 8 10 672,392 537,914 2,728,587
22 Colorado 5,355,856 7 9 741,083 576,398 2,677,928
23 Alabama 4,849,377 7 9 688,860 535,780 2,424,689
24 South Carolina 4,832,482 7 9 674,818 524,858 2,416,241
25 Louisiana 4,649,676 6 8 766,982 575,237 2,324,838
26 Kentucky 4,413,457 6 8 730,069 547,552 2,206,729
27 Oregon 3,970,239 5 7 779,871 557,050 1,985,120
28 Oklahoma 3,878,051 5 7 762,964 544,974 1,939,026
29 Connecticut 3,596,677 5 7 718,059 512,907 1,798,339
30 Iowa 3,107,126 4 6 768,547 513,364 1,553,563
31 Arkansas 2,994,079 4 6 737,283 491,522 1,497,040
32 Mississippi 2,984,926 4 6 746,232 497,488 1,492,463
33 Utah 2,942,902 4 6 713,822 475,881 1,471,451
34 Kansas 2,904,021 4 6 721,476 480,984 1,452,011
35 Nevada 2,839,099 4 6 689,733 459,822 1,419,550
36 New Mexico 2,085,572 3 5 695,179 417,108 1,042,786
37 Nebraska 1,881,503 3 5 618,508 371,105 940,752
38 West Virginia 1,850,326 3 5 618,471 371,083 925,163
39 Idaho 1,634,464 2 4 797,864 398,932 817,232
40 Hawaii 1,419,561 2 4 696,157 348,078 709,781
41 Maine 1,330,089 2 4 664,596 332,298 665,045
42 New Hampshire 1,326,813 2 4 660,359 330,180 663,407
43 Rhode Island 1,055,173 2 4 525,146 262,273 527,587
44 Montana 1,023,579 1 3 1,005,141 335,047 511,790
45 Delaware 935,614 1 3 917,092 305,697 467,807
46 South Dakota 853,175 1 3 833,354 277,785 426,588
47 North Dakota 739,482 1 3 699,628 233,209 369,741
48 Alaska 737,732 1 3 736,732 243,816 368,866
49 Vermont 626,011 1 3 626,562 208,670 313,006
50 Wyoming 584,153 1 3 576,412 192,137 292,077

If you study the numbers carefully, you see it’s a bit of a mixed bag at the House level. Wyoming, the least populous state, carries more weight per seat than California, the most populous, but in between there are variations. Conservative Montana, the most populous state with only one seat, is under-represented compared to liberal Rhode Island, the least populous state with two seats. But one thing that this table doesn’t show is the representation by party for each of those 435 house seats. If we factor that in, and look at the aggregate, we see that the Republican majority in the House doesn’t come close to representing a majority of the American public at large:

Top 5 Albums of 2016

As I noted earlier when I posted the contenders for this list, 2016 is a year I’d just as soon forget. And I suspect it’s possible this year and the next three (or seven, or the rest of my natural life) may also fall into that category. In other words, I’m not extremely excited about dwelling on any details of 2016, even my favorite music from the year.

But it’s my tradition to produce these lists. And so, I present my ranked top 5 albums for 2016, this time without commentary, which I may or may not add at a future date when I am less demoralized by the world we’re living in.

5. King Crimson • Radical Action to Unseat the Hold of Monkey Mind
4. David Bowie • Blackstar
3. Radiohead • A Moon Shaped Pool
2. Solange • A Seat at the Table
1. Tycho • Epoch