Chris Squire 1977

Chris Squire 1977, hand-drawn at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland with his 1964 Rickenbacker 4001S/RM1999(Rose Morris import) in 1977, age 29.

Squire’s main instrument was a 1964 Rickenbacker bass which he bought and began playing in 1965.
Although generally referred to as having been a 4001 model, it was actually from the RM1999 series, a British export version of the 4001 (Squire’s had the serial number DC127).

Squire was an English musician, singer and songwriter best known as the bassist and backing vocalist of the progressive rock band Yes.
He was the longest-serving original member, having remained in the band until his death and appearing on every studio album released from 1969 to 2014.

Yes were an English progressive rock band formed in London in 1968 by lead singer and frontman Jon Anderson, bassist Chris Squire, guitarist Peter Banks, keyboardist Tony Kaye and drummer Bill Bruford.
After their first two albums, the band changed musical direction in 1970 which led to a series of successful progressive rock albums, with four consecutive U.S. platinum or multi-platinum sellers in The Yes Album (1971), Fragile (1971), Close to the Edge (1972), and the live album Yessongs (1973). Further albums, Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973), Relayer (1974), Going for the One (1977), and Tormato (1978), were also commercially successful.
Yes toured as a major rock act that earned the band a reputation for their elaborate stage sets, light displays, and album covers designed by Roger Dean.

The success of “Roundabout”, the single from Fragile, cemented their popularity across the decade and beyond.
Anderson and Squire remained with the group throughout the 1970s, with Banks, Kaye, and Bruford all departing across 1970–1972, and being replaced by Howe, Rick Wakeman, and Alan White respectively.

In a 1973 interview for Guitar Player magazine, Squire recalled how he had obtained his distinctive tone at the time by rewiring his Rickenbacker RM1999 into stereo (even before Rickenbacker introduced the Rick-O-Sound feature) and sending the bass and treble pick-ups each into a separate amplifier.
By splitting the signal from his bass into dual high and low frequency outputs and then sending the low frequency output to a conventional bass amplifier and the high-frequency output to a separate lead guitar amplifier, Squire produced a tonal “sandwich” that added a growling, overdrive edge to the sound while retaining the Rickenbacker’s powerful bass response.

Squire was widely regarded as the dominant bassist among the English progressive rock bands, influencing peers and later generations of bassists with his incisive sound and elaborately contoured, melodic bass lines.

In May 2015, Yes announced that Squire had been diagnosed with acute erythroid leukemia.
In the late evening of June 27, 2015, Squire died from the illness, aged 67, while receiving treatment in his adopted hometown of Phoenix, Arizona.

In April 2017, Yes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which chose to induct current and former members Anderson, Squire, Bruford, Kaye, Howe, Wakeman, White, and Rabin.

#ChrisSquire, #Yes, #Rickenbacker4001, #ProgRock, #MusicArt, #PaulKing, #PaulKingArtwerks, PaulKingArt.com