Over the last few years, a lot of the musicians I’ve spoken with have uttered a simple one-word affirmative at some point in the conversation. That word is “Yes,” as in “my band is heavy into Yes” or “we wanted to be more progressive, like Yes.” In fact, recently in Crawdaddy!, even pop-rocker Matthew Sweet expressed his delight at having Yes guitarist Steve Howe come in to solo on a Yes cover he’d recorded for an upcoming installment of his Under the Covers series.

Some 40 years after they emerged from the London rock scene, Yes continues to be one of the most influential bands in rock. With so many of the new prog bands citing them as an influence, and prog rock itself the subject of newfound relevance—such as the BBC’s recent Prog Rock Britannia documentary—I found it fortuitous that original Yes drummer Bill Bruford, who recently announced his retirement on the eve of his 60th birthday, has written a detailed and witty account of his career entitled, simply, Bill Bruford: The Autobiography (Jawbone Press).

What better time, I assumed, to get his take on contemporary prog rock.

Sadly, as I discovered during a convivial and candid cross-Atlantic phone call, it turns out that Bruford is not so up on the likes of Coheed and Cambria, the Mars Volta, or even Radiohead. Not that he dismisses any of these post-proggers out of hand, it’s just that he’s been deep into jazz and outré percussion for far longer than the scant decade he spent carving his mug on the Mount Rushmore of progressive rock, having thwacked his distinctive, high-tuned snare drum not only in Yes, but in seminal progressives like King Crimson, Gong, UK, and even a short stint as the tour drummer for Genesis. 

“I’ve been sensationally into jazz for about 20 years,” Bruford confesses, right from the get-go, “and therefore my knowledge of rock music is very slim, and you’re about to find out how slim it is in a minute when you ask me about new prog groups, which I’m not going to know the names of.”

In his book, Bruford admits that even when forging the frontiers of rock music, he always found the jazz aesthetic “enormously appealing.”

“I was born and raised with jazz,” he declares. “It’s what I thought I was going to do. I loved that whole thing of finding your own voice, or a group finding its whole voice, as King Crimson defined its own kind of noise and space to play in. Much of that was modeled on the John Coltrane quartet kind of thing. And I became known as a kind of a ‘group hopper.’ I was in and out of about five bands in about what seemed like 10 years—with Yes and Gong and Genesis and UK and King Crimson. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was exhibiting the characteristics of a jazz musician, looking for other things to do, or other ways of playing close to the edge, if you like. Which is not easy, trust me.”

Charming, witty, and often self-effacing, Bruford describes his lively autobiography as part anecdotal, part confessional, part musical lesson, and part public service to the legions of local pub dwellers in the small town where he lives who frequently ask him, “Drummer, eh? So what do you do for a job, then?”

“I mean, the people around here have no idea what a drummer does,” he begins. “Ringo Starr lives in the same town as me, and everybody thinks that drumming sort of began and ended with Ringo, and they haven’t updated anything at all. So, whenever I come across people they’re always saying, ‘But what do you do in the daytime?’ I mean, the level of ignorance is phenomenal. So the book is to explain, in an over-the-shoulder kind of way, what being a modern instrumentalist is, in the broadest sense, in popular music, in the broadest sense.”

Another of Bruford’s motives for writing the book was to humanize the life and work of a rock star musician, regardless of the time and genre that mythologized them. As such, he is almost evangelical about drumming; though he never resorts to proselytizing about it.

“Part of the issue here,” he admits, “is to explain that my interest in all of this—should anybody be interested, and I quite understand if they’re not—is in the drum kit and drumming itself. Now I know that sounds weird, but I didn’t really give a monkey’s whether we were in the Summer of Love or we were in psychedelia. Had I been 10 years younger, I would have been a punk drummer, I suppose, and I would have been okay at that. I was just interested, and still am, in drumming; what drum kits can do, how they’re used in popular culture, how you can move them forward, what drummers might do tomorrow, who’s doing what. That’s my interest. I didn’t really give a fig about ‘progressive rock’ per se. It was the milieu in which I found myself, being the age I am. It was the popular music of the day. Now, having said that, it has to be said that it was a great popular music because they cared what the drummer thought! [Laughs] We were making it up on the hoof. Nobody worried too much about what the audience thought and we just got on with it, and money was everywhere, so it was great. I don’t even remember signing Yes’ recording contract. It was just a formality. I just dug it out the other day, it’s about four pages long and it just says ‘Atlantic Records gets everything and Yes gets nothing, sign here.’ [Laughs] It was easy!”

Ah, to grow up in a time when “money was everywhere.” It was surely a different time, a fact that is not lost on the pragmatic drummer. Yet, as proficient a musician as Bruford was, and still is, he is quick to admit the role of serendipity in his long and successful career.