Artist: Alan White

Yes: Tempus Fugit

July 25, 2009

“Tempus Fugit” by Yes
From the 1980 album Drama

Drama is one of the most unusual entries in the extensive Yes catalog. Yes was the brainchild of two individuals who met in 1968: Jon Anderson and Chris Squire. And though the band has had almost as many personnel changes as Spinal Tap, these two have remained at the core of the group for four decades, with two exceptions. The first occurred in 1980. After some failed sessions in 1979 following 1978′s Tormato, Jon Anderson left the band, as did Rick Wakeman (again… but hardly for the last time). The second is right now: after Jon suffered acute respiratory failure last year, he stepped aside from the impending Yes world tour and was replaced by Benoit David, formerly of a Montreal-based Yes cover band. Not to be confused with jazz pianist David Benoit. Chris Squire found him on the Internet. I wish I was making this up.

Anyway… back to 1980. The remaining trio of Yes found themselves in the studio without a keyboardist or a singer. As it happened, the Buggles (who were soon to etch their permanent footnote in pop history as the first group ever to appear on MTV, back when it used to live up to its name), a keyboard-and-vocals duo, were recording in the same studio. The two bands met and became one.

Despite the oddity of the meeting, and the album’s curse never to be acknowledged by a once again Jon Anderson-led Yes, the results of this strange experiment were actually fairly interesting — certainly a lot better than Tormato, and probably better than any Yes album that would follow, with the possible exception of 1999′s The Ladder.

I could pretend I wanted to post this video so I could regale you with all of the finer minutiae of late-’70s Yes, but let’s be frank: it’s all about Alan White’s sweatbands. I guess in 1980, everyone wanted to be John McEnroe.

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Yes: Parallels

June 24, 2009

“Parallels” by Yes
From the 1977 album Going for the One

After a roughly 2-year break where each member of the band undertook the indulgent step of releasing a solo album (examples to follow in future posts), Yes reunited in 1977, bringing Rick Wakeman back into the fold, to produce what was probably their last great album, Going for the One. To help them signal a rebirth of the band, they decided to drop the surreal paintings of Roger Dean for the cover art, instead going with a characteristically ugly photo collage (butt included) by Hipgnosis. (I’m not a big fan of Hipgnosis, if you couldn’t tell.)

The cover is the worst part of the album, though. Musically it’s pretty solid. Not as great as… well… any of the albums that came before it, but better than any that would follow.

Here we see the band (minus Jon Anderson) recording the instrumental tracks for the Chris Squire-penned tune “Parallels.” Hearing this arrangement in a slightly more raw form than the somewhat over-slick production of the final album, without the vocals in the forefront, you really can hear what a great, jamming rhythm section Squire and Alan White could be when they got a groove going. Steve Howe’s rhythm guitar is tight, if a bit low in the mix, and Rick Wakeman… well now, what can one say about Rick Wakeman? Many of his organ parts on this album were played on a huge pipe organ at a church in the town where the band recorded the album in Switzerland. (I seem to recall the band was in a self-imposed exile in Switzerland to avoid heavy taxation on their income back home in the U.K.) The pipe organ is, quite frankly, utterly ridiculous, and I think the album would have been stronger if those parts had been played on a good ol’ greazy Hammond, but that’s just my taste.

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Yes: On the Silent Wings of Freedom

June 23, 2009

“On the Silent WIngs of Freedom” by Yes
From the 1978 album Tormato

Oh, where to begin? To which page in my mental encyclopedia of Yes knowledge should I turn with this one?

Well, let’s just focus on what I, with said encyclopedic knowledge, find most bizarre about it. The credits that appear at the beginning and end of this video are, for anyone who grew up in the early ’80s on a steady diet of the nascent media form known as MTV, unmistakable. Their presence here can mean only one thing: at one time, somehow, this video was aired, presumably in its nearly-nine-minute entirety, on MTV. Yes, that MTV.

At first I couldn’t see how this was possible. My own personal introduction to Yes was on MTV, in 1983, with their biggest chart hit: “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” I would be surprised, to say the least, to know any Yes songs from before 90125 had ever appeared on MTV though, because the band hand broken up before MTV went on the air, and this track in particular predates a particularly nasty turn in the band’s history, leading to their only album ever to not include Jon Anderson as the lead vocalist. Then again, the two musicians who came in to replace Anderson and Rick Wakeman on the erstwhile Yes swan song, 1980′s Drama, also happened to record on their own as a duo named The Buggles, also known as the band whose “Video Killed the Radio Star” officially launched the MTV era. So, who knows?

I’ve seen some of this footage before; much of it was used in the career retrospective documentary Yesyears that was released in the early ’90s. But I had never seen it all in this form.

The version of the song we’re hearing here is most definitely not the album version. Even though Tormato is by far my least-favorite album from the pre-Rabin incarnation of Yes, I’ve still listened to it enough times to know every nuance of this track by heart. I can’t tell, though, whether the film really isn’t of the band performing the exact version we’re hearing, or the editor was just an idiot: you can clearly see in the last segment that the audio is a quarter note off from the video — watch Alan White’s left hand. But whether the rest is just sloppily edited or is in fact mismatched takes is beyond my ability to discern. There are some parts where Jon Anderson’s singing doesn’t seem quite on with the visuals though.

At any rate — the MTV connection aside, the parts of this I enjoy most are those where the band breaks down and indulges in a little Spinal Tap-esque studio banter. In Chris Squire, especially, one can see plenty of inspiration for certain classic Nigel Tufnel lines.

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Yes: Heart of the Sunrise (in two parts)

June 8, 2009

“Heart of the Sunrise” by Yes
From the 1972 album Fragile

I would certainly not call this the “definitive” live performance of “Heart of the Sunrise”; in fact, it may be the least definitive out there. But I am still including it for two reasons: 1) “Heart of the Sunrise” is not just my favorite Yes song of all time, it is my favorite song of all time, period; and 2) this tour (the 1997–1998 Open Your Eyes tour) was the first time I ever saw Yes live. In fact, I saw them twice in one week on this tour in November 1997, in Los Angeles and San Diego, and I saw them again the next summer in Las Vegas.

I’m afraid that for the uninitiated, this uneven performance — featuring the disgraced Igor Khoroshev and the worthless (at least in this context) Billy Sherwood — is not a good indicator of just how freaking awesome this song is. But any lover of classic rock in general, and prog rock in particular, should already have Fragile in their collection. I mean, Jack Black even hands a copy of it to the keyboard wiz kid in School of Rock.

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Yes: The Gates of Delirium (excerpt)

June 8, 2009

“The Gates of Delirium” by Yes
From the 1974 album Relayer

One distinctive feature of progressive rock is the epic. Especially the side-long epic.

Children of the CD era may be asking “side-long”? What the hell does that mean? You see, there was once this thing called the LP album, a 12-inch disc of vinyl, with an audio signal etched into both sides in a spiral groove. These are played on a turntable, or phonograph, also known as a “record player.”

OK, the history lesson is over. Vinyl is making a comeback in the post-CD age, so I doubt many people honestly do not know what a vinyl LP is. But the point here is that they had two sides, and each side could hold, at an absolute upper limit, about 30 minutes of music, depending on how loud the master was. (A louder master means deeper grooves, which means more space between the grooves to prevent the needle from skipping, which means less music on one side of the LP. The longest single side of an LP I’ve ever seen is side one of Brian Eno’s Discreet Music at just a hair over 30 minutes, but it’s ambient minimalism, i.e. very quiet.)

This post is turning epic-length itself. Most LP albums contained about 35 to 50 minutes of music, which means that each side contained about 18 to 25 minutes. And inevitably, as prog rock became more grandiose, the temptation was there to write a song that filled an entire side of the LP. Hence the side-long epic was born.

Many, if not most, progressive bands recorded at least one side-long epic. As fate would have it, Yes recorded six of them (at least, in the vinyl era — I’m not counting the later epics mainly because I can’t remember them). The first was “Close to the Edge,” from the 1972 album of the same name. In early 1974 they released their next studio effort, a double album of nothing but side-long epics, Tales from Topographic Oceans. And finally, in late 1974, with their most adventurous lineup (Patrick Moraz having replaced Rick Wakeman on keys after the recording of Topographic Oceans), they released Relayer.

The side-long epic from that album was “The Gates of Delirium,” certainly their boldest statement to date. Perhaps not a complete success, but an interesting ride: it was basically an effort to set Tolstoy’s War and Peace to music.

I happen to love it (although I get a little bored with the “Soon” section at the end — it seems a bit like filler to me; somewhere Jon Anderson is shedding a tear for me saying that). I especially enjoy the portion featured in this YouTube excerpt. You see, YouTube has its own limitations: due to bandwidth concerns or… something… YouTube clips are limited to 10 minutes. I’m hoping to track down the other segments of this great live performance from 1975.

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