Yesobit: Chris Squire

Chris Squire, bassist with Yes, has died.

The band released an official statement:

It’s with the heaviest of hearts and unbearable sadness that we must inform you of the passing of our dear friend and Yes co-founder, Chris Squire.

Chris peacefully passed away last night (27 June 2015) in Phoenix, Arizona.

We will have more information for you soon.

Thankyou for all your heartfelt tributes on Facebook and Twitter.

Talking to For Bass Players Only in 2013, Squire explained that his interest in music was actually divine intervention:

[My musical upbringing] was mainly in the Church of England, at my local church, where I was in the choir. I got very good musical training there because we had a very good choirmaster. He was very enthusiastic about music and he was young, so he made it really interesting for me and the other guys in the choir. By the time I became 15 and the Beatles broke, that shifted my reality from that kind of music to another kind of music! That’s when my rock & roll education started.

Equally, he credited some of his success to dodgy wiring:

Yeah, the headphone output I had was very tinny sounding. It didn’t have much low end on it. So the engineer at the time was surprised when the producer was saying, “I need to hear more bass, I need more bass,” because he wasn’t getting much bass on his headphones. He had decided to mix the album on headphones and that a lot to do with my general success, I think, because of that weak headphone socket. [Laughs]

Squire was generous and humorous in ascribing a lot of his (and the band's) success to luck and chance. Talking to Ultimate Classic Rock, he suggested that luck was an element even in the artistic freedom the band enjoyed:

I think we were just lucky that we were in a time when record company executives were more open to the artist’s approach and it wasn’t so reliant upon a producer, at least not in our case anyway. So we just were lucky to be in a niche I think and especially of course, Ahmet Ertegun had signed us personally to Atlantic Records, so he liked our vision and our experimentation that we were up to. There was nobody really on our case at the record company saying that we should be doing something like this or something like that. With the Roger Dean artwork and everything playing into the image of Yes [including] the triple live album Yessongs with the huge gatefold cover, we [also] had Ahmet’s support on all of that. It was pretty hassle-free as far as being told by the record company anything.

Luck? Or trust that came from being a band that knew what it was doing?

Chris Squire was 67. He died Saturday.