The yardstick I often apply to a newly written song or fragment of "memorable melody" is this: Does it sound as if it could have been by Procol Harum, Jack Bruce, or Yes? Festival is my Procol Harum song, beginning with a memorable and bombastic theme and progressing tightly through 5 or 6 dramatic sections including a very Procol Harumesque descending line for piano-bass-guitar.
I have several Yes songs, for there the standards are a bi looser - a Yes song can ramble much more, can be strung together of more diverse parts and depend less on a dramatic central theme. This is not to say that composing in the Yes manner is necessarily less rewarding or less viable than striving for the landmark successes of Procol Harum. Nonetheless, I believe that Yes' willingness to salvage nearly-successful themes with their high, sweet, harmonies (vocal) and to render a cliched grandeur to those over-long cadenzas by means of Moog and Mellotron, helps to explain why a number of groups today sound like second-rate Yes. I know of no group which sounds like Procol Harum, or ever has - for Procol Harum's music is built on simpler blocks which are harder to copy: 1. The tight structure of their songs 2. Robin Trower's bugle-like (in that it is used as an accent and not as a rhythm or filling) guitar work 3. Consistently solid, non-flashy bass playing (much to staid for my playing tastes, however much I love to hear it) 4. Haunting organ parts which are not cliched 5. magnificent production. The baking orchestral parts are never as overbearing as on Yes' Time and a Word, but like Trower's leads, begin and end deftly and timely. Procol Harum does restrained and intelligent music, solid and usually moderately paced but with striking accents and moments of greatest lucidity. Yes may be more ambitious, but its very diversity (and it's rocky tempos) is almost a mockery of itself, and Yes slips too often into cliche, bombast without dignity, and prettiness.
Unfortunately, Procol Harum since losing Robin Trower (whether that is the cause I cannot say) has become very much Gary Brooker and his Band. While still head and shoulders above most other groups, the concentration of power and responsibility in one person is quite apparent (Fisher and Trower, after all, both wrote and sang Procol Harum songs), and the result is less exciting then formerly.
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