Some people, believe it or not, wouldn’t want to be in Yes. Not Patrick Moraz. And it’s not like he has no alternatives. For starters he could be a talking French poodle on the Ed Sullivan Show. No joke. Let me explain.

I’ve been talking to drummer Alan White for a good hour, trying to figure out how he can “love raggedy music,” put out such a downright rock ‘n’ roll solo album as his Ramshackled and still play with a classi-rock, high-pitched squiggle band like Yes. I mean this was the guy who punched it out like Ringowith-a-temper on the John Lennon/ Plastic Ono Band raunch ‘n’ roll classic Live Peace! Well, with all sorts of genuine humility befitting one of the nicest guys in the biz, Alan explains that he likes Yes’s music too and that playing in the band and working with all sorts of weird time signatures has improved his abilities as a drummer considerably. At the same time, he does allow that his more solid approach to the skins may help root the band better than before. Blah, blah, blah. In other words, you love Alan White, and suddenly, in spite of yourself, your opinions about Yes and how arch they are begin to disintegrate.

Then. In walks the Poodle. He’s one of those French poodles whose master is some old lady who expends all her affection on her dog in the form of doggie perfume and outlandish doggie costumes with lots of rhinestones and elaborate doggie haircuts and lots and lots of people food. Until there it sits, a glittering, smelly overstuffed ball of fluff.

But here it sits. Only this one’s six foot two and plays keyboards for Yes! Still you want to shoo the bugger off the nice upholstery. No dog of mine ever got to lay around on the couch!

OK. So I’m staring in amazement at this zoological wonder when from behind the luxurious black and grey curls that frame his stout face to the point of obscuring it, he delivers ... oh, shall we call it... the coup de grace? He speaks. And damned if he doesn’t have a French accent! I wrestle with a laugh which I am able to subdue to a grin. He grins back.

"I know that outside the band everybody's guessing when are Yes going to split up. But that's not going to happen. I don't think so."

As it turns out, Patrick Moraz (as interesting a name for a dog as any I’ve heard) comes from Switzerland where his first language is French. To be clinically correct, one would have to say that he’s actually a Swiss poodle who is passing. Then again, when was Ed Sullivan ever clinically correct? No question about it: If he didn’t want to be in Yes, he could be on Sullivan.

Except Sullivan’s dead. No problem, I soon discover. The dog act isn’t all that Patrick has up his sweater. He’s got all sorts of angles, in fact. Turns out the man is deep. The man is versatile. And the man is clean. Dig.

“I had a very late musical vocation,” he informs me, “because I was the parent of an import-export firm. I had studied economics and politics and it was a very successful company. But I decided to go to creativity and really find my own language of expression. I thought music was the language I needed. So I had learned music anyways when I did my studies. And I wrote about thirty scores of films and I had a band I ran a band. My company was on a government level, so we used to deal with governments, which was a very important way to get in politics, a very good way to start. But it could be a very bad way to end. It was getting very involved in politics, and I’m a pacifist, you know. Music to me is very good. I’m a pacifist and the business of arms and weapons . . . with a business that deals with wars and governments, you can kill a lot of people and you can’t really be a pacifist.”

Profound insights aside, from all this I glean that our poodle started out wanting to be a politician and actually was on his way. Yet another career alternative! The first talking French poodle politician (I think he’d be the first)! Maybe even top dog in Switzerland! Think of the awesome possibilities: He could have controlled Aerosmith’s numbered Swiss bank account, maybe even forced them to go disco!

Back to the point. If you’re keeping track, this is how Pat’s job possibilities go:

1) Ed Sullivan

2) Politics

But wait! He continues: “I’ve been selling carpets.” (By which he means, translated loosely: “I used to sell carpets.”) “I used to go around with my carpets in my car and sell my carpets. And it’s very interesting. I discovered I could not do that all my life. And then I got my company which was also very interesting because I could sell the making of a plastic factory in Africa or pharmaceutical project or a pipeline in the Sahara or delivery of planes to certain states.” Now you can add:

3) Carpet salesman

4) Controller of the world’s oil supply

5) Gun runner

But he heard a synthesizer calling (Dummy!).

“I’ve always been interested in music. More so with the album and the rock business and all these groups and electronic music and electric music and PA systems (!) and big mass communications. Because, in fact, that’s where contemporary music is at these days. Contemporary music is not what it’s claimed to be ... You know, like music played in concert in front of fifty people. Contemporary music today is the rock and jazz and jazz-rock and music which explodes. Like at the time 200 years ago it was the Beethovens and Mozarts.

“I thought I’d take ten years to see if I could succeed at it because I’m an optimist and positive ... a winner. I want to win. I don’t want to stay in the shadow all the time.”

No shadow, no cry. OK. But how did he get involved with 6) Member of the world-famous, rock-squiggly music band called Yes?

“Yes went to see my band in a small town in Switzerland,” Pat responds, looking up from under his leg where he has been licking himself (not really). “At the time they were very small. They were just starting, and they listened to us a whole afternoon. I went and saw their concert that night, and our music was very similar at the time and I had never heard of them before. When I saw the band I was struck. I thought, ‘Wow! That’s a band which is going to make it!’”

Alas, it was to be years before they all, hooked up. First, Pat’s Swiss band Mainhorse would break up and he would find himself touring Japan as the keyboard man for a Brazilian dance company. Second, he would journey to faraway England where, after missing a plane out of the hinterlands where he had gone to see a Nice concert, he would meet Keith Emerson. “After missing my plane, I asked the taxi driver to take me to a hotel where they took credit cards, and the only hotel was where the Nice were staying. They were having a reception and I didn’t know any of them. Keith came in and was playing the piano.” (Loosely translated, Pat is saying: “Keith came in and was playing the piano.”)

"I think Yes is kind of interesting ... It's a kind of a school."

“After he played,” Pat continues, “I sat down and played exactly what he had played just for joke. And we got to know each other and jammed for two hours and also I got to know Lee Jackson with whom I formed Refugee two years later when he had split from the Nice.” Which sort of brings us around to how he hooked up finally and joyfully and, most of all, fruitfully with Yes.

“When I came back from Japan with the dance company, I finished some film music commitments I had and Lee Jackson and I formed Refugee. I moved to England for eight months and after these eight months Refugee was not getting the promotion and attention it deserved and I was unhappy with the way the company was promoting it as a rebirth of the Nice. I didn’t want that.

“Also I was requiring lot of things from Brian and Lee which I did not get. Brian was a very good musician, though probably too indulgent with himself . . . Lee as well, you know.”

“Also I was requiring a lot of things from Brian and Lee which I did not get. Brian was a very good musician, though probably too indulgent, with himself . . . Lee as well, you know.” Uh-huh. “So I asked them permission to split the group and go to Yes when Yes asked me to join. Yes manager Brian Lane had called me up one day and asked me if I wanted to go into rehearsal. And they made the decision in five minutes, although they couldn’t find anybody in two months. It clicked very well.” (Actually, Patrick is trying to say: “It squiggled, and at high-pitches.”) Pat goes on to say that yes, he was a Yes fan before he said yes to Yes, yes? “I’d always admired the way they constructed their music, and I like Jon Anderson’s writing especially.”

Back to the point again. So far we’ve placed Pat in jobs 1-6, not including side trips into those bands before Yes and any Brazilian-dance-company-inJapan work he may have done or his film scoring work. Now isn’t there something we’re overlooking? Think about it. Do you really believe that a man this vepsatile, or even a dog this versatile, is gonna want to stop at just 6) (i.e. squiggly-high-pitch rock adjunct)? And why has he just released a solo album? More than that, why is it about a hotel? A cosmic hotel at that! YES! No, not Yes . . . YES! (or yes, more appropriately) . You’ve got it! There has to be more. He will not stop now. Add these to your list:

TURN TO PAGE 66.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 50.

7) Hotel management

8) Solo career divorced from current squiggly-famous rock band, though not divorced from squiggly sound (I mean, he used to like the Nice. And you should check out the solo LP for squiggliness).

BIG QUESTION: “Do you see your solo album as a step towards a solo career?” (I mean, really. These Yes-men having been lying suspiciously low for the past eighteen months, doing only solo albums. And what with the monstrously high rate of attrition among these big time rock bands . . .)

ANSWER (spoken diplomatically but not as subtle as it could be due to faulty command of English language and nuances thereof): “You see, this is actually a very interesting question. But I can’t say. Although I know I could do it, I don’t think I would do it. Because first, I think Yes is very interesting . . . It’s a kind of a school. Yes is an institution and providing we’ve got the time like we did with our solo ventures, I don't see why there would be a need to destroy the situation, which is very interesting at the moment, very healthy, probably on all kinds of levels . . . material as well.

“Also I’m quite happy with the way things are turning out. I mean we’re all very happy within the band because now there’s a communion between the members of the band. Of course, it was an accident as such, in brackets . . . But you never know.” And now listen to this, break-up fans: ‘I mean I could be prepared at any minute to go and do a solo career, of course. ” (Author’s italics.)

“But I’m not considering it at all.” (Boo! A likely story, you sly dog.) “Not at the moment anyway.” (Yaaay!) “Because also since we’ve done our solo albums we’ve been more together. I mean we’ve been very together since I joined the band. I think Yes, as a band, has been very, very together, which they were not before.

“I mean there are the odd problems now and again, but not as heavy as anyone could imagine. I know that outside the band everybody’s guessing when is Yes going to split up. But that’s not going to happen. I don’t think so. I don’t know why it should.”

Me? I’m just a reporter, don’t know nothin’ ’bout religion . . . none of that stuff. The future of Yes? Talk to that poodle over there, the one with the long list of job possibilities.

“I think Yes will always carry on. It’s a big machine. It’s a rockophonic [untranslatable word, referring obliquely to horsemeat] kind of movement. But that’? irrelevant.” We all are, sister, in the Big Scheme. “Things happen, you know,” he barks at me. “And I don’t think whether Yes has a future is an important question to ask me. It probably makes a difference, but I think it’s irrelevant.”

OK. What do you think of busing as a means to achieving racial equality and peace on earth? Do you know any Arabs? Would you have them to dinner? No, no, no. I mean, Yes (not yes yes). Is Yes a good vehicle for expressing yourself?

“Ummmmm, no. [WOW!] Frankly, it’s not. But it’s a completely different situation with Yes. My position is to be the orchestra behind the band, to be the cushions of sound, to contribute to the whole thing. I’m not expressing myself in Yes. I’m expressing Yes. I’m contributing to Yes as a group, as a community of people.”

At this point in the conversation either Pat stopped talking or the tape recorder stopped taping. I prefer to think that he reached his back leg up to his ear, scratched vigorously for a moment, and then got up to look for a mailman to bite. I don’t know if that happened. But the next day the headline in the Daily News screamed: “Poodle Eats Boy, 13; Mother Gries Out In Anguish—‘Was It Rabid? Oh, I Dofi’t Really Care. The Boy’s Dead, Isn’t He?’ ” What I do know and what I think I’ve presented to you here is that Pat is hot to trot. That he’s a real pragmatist and an opportunist. That if there’s a ray of daylight in his solo future and he sees it, he’ll make the big run. (Though how far will he get with 35 synthesizers and an album about a hotel on his back . . .? Unless he can find a blacksmith ...) It’ll be: PATRICK MORAZ, NO LONGER OF YES BUT BIGGER THAN YOU COULD EVER IMAGINE, BIGGER THAN HE COULD HAVE BEEN IN JOBS 1 THROUGH 6. AND HE DIDN'T HAVE TO GO ON SULLIVAN AFTER ALL. And you know what that would mean? That would mean Yes might be finis, as in over, as in kaput. Then again, they might just find another keyboard player and go on making oodles of money.