Terry Staunton Record Collector #474 December 3, 2017
Current Yes vocalist Jon Davison, in the job since 2012, was barely two years old when the band scored their first chart-topping long player with Tales From Topographic Oceans. He was still in short trousers when the band released Drama in 1980, the album on which Trevor Horn stepped into long-serving singer Jon Anderson’s shoes.
His task here, on a 2016 US tour showcasing the latter book-ended by Sides One and Four of the former, is pretty much replicating what went before. His Anderson impersonation is extremely good (better than Horn’s ever was), but that’s all it is. Ultimately, the spotlight falls on the group’s one remaining original member, guitarist Steve Howe revisiting yesteryear’s fret intricacies with aplomb.
The attention to detail will please diehards, as will sprightly takes on “bonus” songs Roundabout and Starship Trooper; were it not for the presence of Howe, though, the entire affair would have the ring of an accomplished tribute act. Highlighting two albums released seven years apart is an odd idea, by any stretch of the imagination, though it works well enough without too many fans scratching their heads.
Critics think that the genre was an embarrassing dead end. So why do fans and musicians still love it?
New Yorker By Kelefa Sanneh June 12, 2017
In April, 1971, Rolling Stone reviewed the début album by a band with a name better suited to a law firm: Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The reviewer liked what he heard, although he couldn’t quite define it. “I suppose that your local newspaper might call it ‘jazz-influenced classical-rock,’ ” he wrote. In fact, a term was being adopted for this hybrid of highbrow and lowbrow. People called it progressive rock, or prog rock: a genre intent on proving that rock and roll didn’t have to be simple and silly—it could be complicated and silly instead. In the early nineteen-seventies, E.L.P., alongside several more or less like-minded British groups—King Crimson, Yes, and Genesis, as well as Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd—went, in the space of a few years, from curiosities to rock stars. This was especially true in America, where arenas filled up with crowds shouting for more, which was precisely what these bands were designed to deliver. The prog-rock pioneers embraced extravagance: odd instruments and fantastical lyrics, complex compositions and abstruse concept albums, flashy solos and flashier live shows. Concertgoers could savor a new electronic keyboard called a Mellotron, a singer dressed as a batlike alien commander, an allusion to a John Keats poem, and a philosophical allegory about humankind’s demise—all in a single song (“Watcher of the Skies,” by Genesis). In place of a guitarist, E.L.P. had Keith Emerson, a keyboard virtuoso who liked to wrestle with his customized Hammond organ onstage, and didn’t always win: during one particularly energetic performance, he was pinned beneath the massive instrument, and had to be rescued by roadies. Perhaps this, too, was an allegory.
Most of these musicians took seriously the “progressive” in “progressive rock,” and believed that they were helping to hurry along an ineluctable process: the development of rock music into what Jon Anderson, of Yes, once called “a higher art form.” Even more than most musicians, the prog rockers aimed for immortality. “We want our albums to last,” Robert Fripp, the austere guitar scientist behind King Crimson, said. In a literal sense, he got his wish: although the progressive-rock boom was effectively over by the end of the seventies, it left behind a vast quantity of surplus LPs, which filled the bins in used-record stores for decades. (Many people who have never heard this music would nonetheless recognize some of the album covers.) Progressive rock was repudiated by what came next: disco, punk, and the disco-punk genre known as New Wave. Unlike prog rock, this music was, respectively, danceable, concise, and catchy. In the story of popular music, as conventionally told, progressive rock was at best a dead end, and at worst an embarrassment, and a warning to future musical generations: don’t get carried away.
The genre’s bad reputation has been remarkably durable, even though its musical legacy keeps growing. Twenty years ago, Radiohead released “OK Computer,” a landmark album that was profoundly prog: grand and dystopian, with a lead single that was more than six minutes long. But when a reporter asked one of the members whether Radiohead had been influenced by Genesis and Pink Floyd, the answer was swift and categorical: “No. We all hate progressive rock music.”
It is common to read about some band that worked in obscurity, only to be discovered decades later. In the case of progressive rock, the sequence has unfolded in reverse: these bands were once celebrated, and then people began to reconsider. The collapse of prog helped reaffirm the dominant narrative of rock and roll: that pretension was the enemy; that virtuosity could be an impediment to honest self-expression; that “self-taught” was generally preferable to “classically trained.”
In the past twenty years, though, a number of critics and historians have argued that prog rock was more interesting and more thoughtful than the caricature would suggest. The latest is David Weigel, a savvy political reporter for the Washington Post who also happens to be an unabashed fan—or, more accurately, a semi-abashed fan. His new history of prog rock is called “The Show That Never Ends,” and it begins with its author embarking on a cruise for fans, starring some of the great prog-rock bands of yore, or what remains of them. “We are the most uncool people in Miami,” Weigel writes, “and we can hardly control our bliss.”
Almost no one hated progressive rock as much, or as memorably, as Lester Bangs, the dyspeptic critic who saw himself as a rock-and-roll warrior, doing battle against the forces of fussiness and phoniness. In 1974, he took in an E.L.P. performance and came away appalled by the arsenal of instruments (including “two Arthurian-table-sized gongs” and “the world’s first synthesized drum kits”), by Emerson’s preening performance, and by the band’s apparent determination to smarten up rock and roll by borrowing from more respectable sources. E.L.P. had reached the Top Ten, in both Britain and America, with a live album based on its bombastic rendition of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Bangs wanted to believe that the band members thought of themselves as vandals, gleefully desecrating the classics. Instead, Carl Palmer, the drummer, told him, “We hope, if anything, we’re encouraging the kids to listen to music that has more quality”—and “quality” was precisely the quality that Bangs loathed. He reported that the members of E.L.P. were soulless sellouts, participating in “the insidious befoulment of all that was gutter pure in rock.” Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed “dean of American rock critics,” was, if anything, more dismissive: “These guys are as stupid as their most pretentious fans.”
The story of this reviled genre starts, though, with the most acclaimed popular music ever made. “If you don’t like progressive rock, blame it on the Beatles,” a philosophy professor named Bill Martin wrote, in his 1998 book, “Listening to the Future,” a wonderfully argumentative defense of the genre. Martin is, in his own estimation, “somewhat Marxist,” and he saw progressive rock as an “emancipatory and utopian” movement—not a betrayal of the sixties counterculture but an extension of it. Martin identified a musical “turning point” in 1966 and 1967, when the Beach Boys released “Pet Sounds” and the Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which together inspired a generation of bands to create albums that were more unified in theme but more diverse in sound. Using orchestration and studio trickery, these albums summoned the immersive pleasure of watching a movie, rather than the kicky thrill of listening to the radio.
When bands set out to make hit albums, rather than hit singles, some of them abandoned short, sharp love songs and began to experiment with intricate compositions and mythopoetic lyrics. By the dawn of the seventies, the term “progressive rock” was being applied to a cohort of rock-and-roll groups that thought they might be outgrowing rock and roll. In 1973, Columbia Records released a double-album compilation called “The Progressives.” The liner notes informed listeners that “the boundaries between styles and categories continue to blur and disappear.”
But this inclusive musical movement was also, as Weigel emphasizes, a parochial one. “American and British youth music had grown together from the moment the Beatles landed at J.F.K.,” he writes. “In 1969, the two sounds finally started to grow apart.” Weigel quotes an interview with Lee Jackson, the lead singer of a British rock band called the Nice—Keith Emerson’s previous band. “The basic policy of the group is that we’re a European group,” Jackson said. “We’re not American Negroes, so we can’t really improvise and feel the way they can.” (Ironically, the Nice’s biggest hit was an instrumental version of Leonard Bernstein’s “America.”) In a thoughtful 2009 autobiography, Bill Bruford, a drummer who was central to the development of prog rock, noted that many of the music’s pioneers were “nice middle-class English boys,” singing songs that were “self-consciously British.” Genesis, for instance, was formed at Charterhouse, a venerable boarding school in Surrey; the band’s album “Selling England by the Pound” was an arch and whimsical meditation on national identity. Bruford pointed out that even Pink Floyd, known for free-form jam sessions and, later, cosmic rock epics, found time to record songs like “Grantchester Meadows,” a gentle ode to the East Anglian countryside.
In 1969, King Crimson, the most rigorous and avant-garde of the major prog bands, released what is now considered the genre’s first great album, a strange and menacing début called “In the Court of the Crimson King.” The album used precise dissonance and off-kilter rhythms to evoke in listeners a thrilling sensation of ignorance: you got the feeling that the musicians understood something you didn’t. At a career-making concert in Hyde Park, opening for the Rolling Stones, King Crimson played a ferocious set that ended with an acknowledgment of England’s musical heritage: a rendition of “Mars, the Bringer of War,” by the English composer Gustav Holst.
From the start, King Crimson was the kind of band that musicians love—as opposed, that is, to the kind of band that non-musicians love. (King Crimson never had a hit single, although “21st Century Schizoid Man,” the first song from its first album, served, in 2010, as the basis for “Power,” by Kanye West.) Bill Bruford, the drummer, was astonished by an early King Crimson performance, and resolved to make equally ambitious music with his own band, a sweetly melodic group called Yes. In its own way, Yes, too, was profoundly English—Jon Anderson, the lead singer, generally eschewed faux-American bluesiness, and the band instead deployed pleasing multipart harmonies that recall the choral tradition of the Anglican Church.
In 1971, Yes released an album called “Fragile,” which included a hummable—and very progressive—song called “Roundabout.” On the album, it lasted more than eight minutes, but unsentimental record executives trimmed it to three and a half, and the edited version found a home on U.S. radio stations. This music, so self-consciously English, sounded different in America, where its rather nerdy creators were greeted as exotic rock stars. That summer, Yes played its first U.S. concert, at an arena in Seattle. A fan who approached Jon Anderson before the show remembered that Anderson was nervous. “I don’t know what is going to happen,” the singer told him. “I’ve never been in a place like this.”
When Anderson sang, “I’ll be the roundabout,” most American listeners surely had no idea that he was referring to the kind of intersection known less euphoniously, in the U.S., as a traffic circle. (The song was inspired by the view from a van window.) Why, then, did this music seduce so many Americans? In 1997, a musician and scholar named Edward Macan published “Rocking the Classics,” in which he offered a provocative explanation. Noting that this artsy music seemed to attract “a greater proportion of blue-collar listeners” in the U.S. than it had in Britain, he proposed that the genre’s Britishness “provided a kind of surrogate ethnic identity to its young white audience”: white music for white people, at a time of growing white anxiety. Bill Martin, the quasi-Marxist, found Macan’s argument “troubling.” In his view, the kids in the bleachers were revolutionaries, drawn to the music because its sensibility, based on “radical spiritual traditions,” offered an alternative to “Western politics, economics, religion, and culture.”
The genre’s primary appeal, though, was not spiritual but technical. The musicians presented themselves as virtuosos, which made it easy for fans to feel like connoisseurs; this was avant-garde music that anyone could appreciate. (Pink Floyd might be the most popular prog-rock band of all time, but Martin argued that, because the members lacked sufficient “technical proficiency,” Pink Floyd was not really prog at all.) In some ways, E.L.P. was the quintessential prog band, dominated by Emerson’s ostentatious technique—he played as fast as he could, and sometimes, it seemed, faster—and given to grand, goofy gestures, like “Tarkus,” a twenty-minute suite that recounted the saga of a giant, weaponized armadillo. The members of E.L.P. betrayed no particular interest in songwriting; the group’s big hit, “Lucky Man,” was a fluke, based on something that Greg Lake wrote when he was twelve. It concluded with a wild electronic solo, played on a state-of-the-art Moog synthesizer, that Emerson considered embarrassingly primitive. An engineer had recorded Emerson warming up, and the rest of the band had to convince him not to replace his squiggles with something more precise—more impressive. In the effortful world of prog, there was not much room for charming naïveté or happy accidents; improvised solos were generally less important than composed instrumental passages.
The genre’s primary appeal, though, was not spiritual but technical. The musicians presented themselves as virtuosos, which made it easy for fans to feel like connoisseurs; this was avant-garde music that anyone could appreciate. (Pink Floyd might be the most popular prog-rock band of all time, but Martin argued that, because the members lacked sufficient “technical proficiency,” Pink Floyd was not really prog at all.) In some ways, E.L.P. was the quintessential prog band, dominated by Emerson’s ostentatious technique—he played as fast as he could, and sometimes, it seemed, faster—and given to grand, goofy gestures, like “Tarkus,” a twenty-minute suite that recounted the saga of a giant, weaponized armadillo. The members of E.L.P. betrayed no particular interest in songwriting; the group’s big hit, “Lucky Man,” was a fluke, based on something that Greg Lake wrote when he was twelve. It concluded with a wild electronic solo, played on a state-of-the-art Moog synthesizer, that Emerson considered embarrassingly primitive. An engineer had recorded Emerson warming up, and the rest of the band had to convince him not to replace his squiggles with something more precise—more impressive. In the effortful world of prog, there was not much room for charming naïveté or happy accidents; improvised solos were generally less important than composed instrumental passages.
Weigel’s book has an unlikely flaw, given its subject: it is too short. Wary, perhaps, of taxing readers’ patience, he finishes his tour in three hundred pages, resisting what must have been an overwhelming urge to interrupt the narrative with disco-graphical digressions. Martin, less diffident, included in his book a list of sixty-two “essential” progressive-rock albums—partly to provide a shopping list for newcomers, and partly, one suspects, because he liked the idea of outraging hard-core fans with his omissions.
So what is the greatest progressive-rock album of all time? One perennial and deserving candidate is “Close to the Edge,” by Yes, from 1972, which consists of three long songs that are, by turns, gently pastoral and gloriously futuristic, responding to the genre’s contradictory impulses: to explore musical history and to leave it behind. Earlier this year, Will Romano published “Close to the Edge: How Yes’s Masterpiece Defined Prog Rock,” a frankly obsessive study that makes no pretense of levelheadedness. Romano notes that he listened to the album “easily over a thousand times” while working on the book, and, when he wonders about a “low pulse that pervades entire sections” of the title track, it seems possible that he has begun to hallucinate. He embarks upon a brave attempt to decode Anderson’s inane lyrics, provides an astute technical description of the way Steve Howe seems to play lead and rhythm guitar at the same time, and identifies the pivotal moment when Rick Wakeman, the keyboard player, met Denise Gandrup, a designer of sparkly capes, which became his signature.
Romano ends with a note of defiance, pointing out that Yes still hadn’t been accepted by the cultural élitists in charge of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. This spring, not long after the book’s publication, Yes was finally inducted—more than two decades after it became eligible. And yet Romano is right: there is something inspiring about the indigestibility of prog, which still hasn’t quite been absorbed into the canon of critically beloved rock and roll, and which therefore retains some of its outsider appeal. Often, we celebrate bygone bands for being influential, hearing in them the seeds of the new; the best prog provides, instead, the shock of the old.
Listeners who wonder what they have been missing should probably ignore E.L.P. entirely and head straight for “Close to the Edge”—or, if they want something a bit more bruising, “Red,” an austere album that a new version of King Crimson (including Bruford) released in 1974. One of the most underappreciated progressive-rock groups was Gentle Giant, but there was a reason for this neglect: none of the band members happened to be a great singer. So they used interlocking instrumental lines, shifting time signatures, and close harmonies to construct songs that seemed to occupy some phantom limb of music’s evolutionary tree.
Gentle Giant was one of the bands featured on “The Progressives,” the Columbia Records compilation, which turned out to have a hidden agenda: it was, in large part, a jazz album, seemingly designed to help prog fans develop a taste for Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and Mahavishnu Orchestra. Jazz played an important but disputed role in the story of progressive rock. While some British bands were trying to turn inward, away from American influences, others were finding ways to forge new ties between rock and jazz. Indeed, Mahavishnu Orchestra, a jazz-fusion group led by the English guitarist John McLaughlin (who previously played with Miles Davis), is sometimes considered an honorary prog band—at the time, the distinctions between these genres could be hazy. And in Canterbury, in the southeast of England, a cluster of interconnected bands created their own jazz-inflected hybrids: Soft Machine, Matching Mole, Hatfield & the North. These are the bands most likely to charm—and perhaps convert—listeners who think that they hate progressive rock. Unlike the swashbucklers who conquered arenas, the Canterburians were cheerfully unheroic, pairing adventurous playing with shrugging, self-deprecating lyrics about nothing much. (One Hatfield & the North song goes, “Thank all the mothers who made cups of tea. / If they didn’t care for us, we wouldn’t be / here to sing our songs and entertain. / Plug us in and turn on the mains!”) This is music animated by a spirit of playful exploration—recognizably progressive, you might say, though not terribly prog.
The question of progress bedevilled many of the prog bands: the ethos, which implied constant transformation, was at odds with the sound, which was identifiable, and therefore stuck. Robert Fripp solved this problem by disbanding King Crimson just as “Red” was being released. “The band ceased to exist in 1974, which was when all English bands in that genre should have ceased to exist,” he said later. Once some album-side-long songs had been recorded, and some snippets of classical music appropriated, it was not obvious how further progress might be made, especially since the bands now had big crowds to please. In 1978, E.L.P. released an infamous album called “Love Beach,” which was recorded in the Bahamas, and whose cover depicted something less enticing than a battle-ready armadillo: the three grinning band members, displaying white teeth and varying amounts of chest hair.
Progressive rock was a stubborn genre, and yet a number of its adepts proved to be surprisingly flexible; it turned out that their considerable musical skill could be put to new uses. In 1980, Steve Howe, the guitarist from Yes, told the Los Angeles Times that his band had been “modernized” and simplified. “Whatever’s been leveled at us in the past, we want to be re-judged,” he said. This kind of desperate ploy isn’t supposed to work, but it did: in 1983, Yes topped the American pop chart with “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” which barely sounded like it had come from the same band. A new group called Asia, made up of refugees from Yes, King Crimson, and E.L.P., released an album that reached No. 1 on the American chart. Genesis did something even more impressive, transforming into a Top Forty band while spawning three successful solo careers. The singer, Peter Gabriel, became a pop star, and so did the drummer, Phil Collins, and the bassist, Mike Rutherford, who led Mike + the Mechanics. For a few of the genre’s biggest stars, the music industry offered an attractive bargain: leave prog behind and you can be bigger than ever.
Some true believers remained, of course. In the seventies, prog-inspired American bands like Kansas and Styx had conquered arenas, and by the end of the decade there was Rush, a Yes-obsessed trio of Canadians who received even worse reviews than their British forebears. One reason was their avowed love of Ayn Rand; an influential and absurd review in New Musical Express, a British magazine, accused them of preaching “proto-fascism.” Another reason was that, by the late seventies, progressive rock was about the most unhip music in existence. “The fans showing up to hear Rush were the wrong kind of fans—the mockable ones, with mockable taste in music,” Weigel writes, holding up this judgment for ridicule without quite dissenting from it. (No doubt he was sorely tempted to use the term “deplorables.”) By the time Rush emerged, progressive rock had entered its never-ending defensive phase; uncoolness is now part of the genre’s identity, and even a devoted fan like Weigel may not be entirely sure whether he wants that to change.
Progressive rock, broadly defined, can never disappear, because there will always be musicians who want to experiment with long songs, big concepts, complex structures, and fantastical lyrics. You can hear a trace of the genre in the fearless compositions of Joanna Newsom or, equally, in “Pyramids,” an epic Frank Ocean slow jam that blends Afrocentric mythology with a narrative about sex work. At Coachella this year, one of the breakout stars was Hans Zimmer, the German composer, who performed excerpts from his film scores with an orchestra and a rock band. (Anyone who cheered him on has forever lost the right to make snarky jokes about bands like Yes.) Plenty of revivalist bands play what might, paradoxically, be called retro-prog. And there have been latter-day innovators. Tool emerged, a quarter century ago, as an awesome new kind of prog band: precise but unremittingly heavy, all rumbles and hums. In Sweden, Meshuggah, in the nineties, built roaring, ferocious songs atop fiendish riffs in prime-number time signatures; Opeth, in the aughts, found a connection between death-metal fury and Pink Floydian reverie.
What can disappear—what long ago disappeared, in fact, at least among rock bands—is the ideology of progress in pop music: the optimistic sense, shared by all those early-seventies pioneers, that the form was evolving and improving, and that prog rock offered a sneak peek at our future. The bands thought that the arc of the musical universe bent toward keyboard solos. This is part of what drove Lester Bangs crazy—he couldn’t understand why these musicians thought they had improved upon old-fashioned rock and roll. But contemporary listeners might find the genre’s optimistic spirit more exotic, and therefore more endearing, than it once seemed. Of course, prog rock was not the future—at least, not more than anything else was. Nowadays, it seems clear that rock history is not linear but cyclical. There is no grand evolution, just an endless process of rediscovery and reappraisal, as various styles and poses go in and out of fashion. We no longer, many of us, believe in the idea of musical progress. All the more reason, perhaps, to savor the music of those who did. ♦
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Kelefa Sanneh has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008. He is the author of “Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.”
Goldmine congratulates YES on their induction into the Rock Hall with an exclusive interview with drummer Alan White.
Goldmine‘s May issue features YES on the cover. The issue congratulates YES on their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In an exclusive interview with drummer Alan White, the history of the classic lineup is discussed in detail...
Drummer Alan White on Yes finally getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and other ongoing activities.
Lee Zimmerman Jun 11, 2017
By Lee Zimmerman
Most folks would agreethat when it comes to prog rock, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has been extremely slow in recognizing the contributions of artists that have ventured onto more experimental realms. All one has to do is look at the bands that have been passed over through the years — The Moody Blues, King Crimson, ELP et al. — to realize there’s been a certain deficiency in acknowledging those of that particular genre.
Consequently, the announcement that Yes was about to be inducted may have helped bring some long overdue recognition to that segment of the musical community. And one could hardly think of a better band to help steer that belated appreciation than Yes themselves. Formed in 1968, the band subsequently released a series of albums — “Time and a Word,” “The Yes Album,” “Fragile,” “Tales From Topographic Oceans” and the like — that defined progressive rock for the ages and made them a prominent presence and multi-million sellers for the decades to come.
Ironically, while Yes boasts longtime members Steve Howe (guitar) and Alan White (drums) — along with Geoff Downes (keyboards), Jon Davison (vocals), and Billy Sherwood (who returned to the fold to replace the band’s late founder Chris Squire after his passing in 2015) — no original members remain in the current line-up. It hardly matters though. The various musicians who have come and gone from the roster have all remained faithful to Yes’ spirit of adventure and exploration, keeping a certain consistency in that ongoing progressive posture.
Goldmine recently spoke with Alan White from his home in Seattle and asked him about his reaction to getting the nod from the Hall of Fame, as well as about other items on their current agenda.
GOLDMINE: So how does it feel to finally get inducted?
ALAN WHITE: This is our third nomination. You have to be 25 years in the business to be eligible, and it’s been at least 25 years since we’ve been considered. But it’s a pleasure and it should be a lot of fun going to the induction ceremony.
GM: Do you expect many of the former Yes members to show up for a big onstage reunion?
AW: When I think about how many musicians have been in Yes over the years, I don’t think there’s a big enough stage to hold all of them. But at the same time, I think what it turns out to be is that the Hall of Fame people want you to stick to a certain plan. In ’91, we did the Union tour, so I have a feeling that the people that were involved in that will be part of the line-up.
GM: It’s reasonable to expect that Jon Anderson will be there, right? AW: Oh yes, I’m pretty sure that he will be.
GM: Having talked with him in the past, he gives the impression that there are no hard feelings between him and the band. And despite the fact that so many people have come and gone, everything seems fairly amiable.
AW: I would hope so. We have to get to that point. (chuckles) We’ve been carrying on touring as Yes, and Jon and Trevor Rabin and Rick Wakeman have this other band as well. I’m still friends with everybody, so at least we can talk.
GM: Then you have to decide who takes part in the big jam session at the end.
AW: Yeah, well... I don’t know. They want us to play three numbers. That’s all I’ve heard so far... we have time to decide.
GM: Up until now, it seems the Hall of Fame has been reticent to recognize bands of a certain progressive stature.
AW: Yes, that and folk music. That doesn’t seem to go over so well. It’s strange how it goes in circles. For instance, I went the time that Rush got inducted, and the guys in Rush said to me, “We don’t understand how Yes isn’t in the Hall of Fame, because we nicked some of our music from you.”
GM: How do you see Yes’ place in the whole rock pantheon. Obviously you injected a progressive kind of posture, but how do you view your contributions overall?
AW: The band’s very seasoned and we’ve all been doing it for a long time. Everybody is very proficient on their instrument. You have to be to be in Yes. So all the musicians — me and Steve and the others in the current line-up — put on a great show with great music. As far as longevity, I realized last July I had been in the band for 45 years. Who would have thought that? When I joined the band in ’72, I thought, it ought to be good for the next two years, the next five years at most. It’s been a long road, but it’s been very enjoyable to be with the band all those years. We not only tour America these days, but also South America, Australia... pretty much worldwide.
GM: So how do you account for this ongoing popularity?
AW: I think there’s one good answer for that, and it’s the music. I think quite a lot of Yes music is timeless. Right now we’re playing live onstage side one and side four of “Topographic Oceans.” A lot of people think of that album now as a classical piece of music, akin to Bach or Beethoven. Someone asked me the other day, “Do you think the band will ever get to the point where there’s no (classic) members?” And I said, perhaps, because it’s the music that makes it all worthwhile. There are a few Yes tribute bands out there, but not as many as other tribute bands because the music is quite hard to play.
GM: How difficult has it been to integrate new musicians into the fold?
AW: Obviously they have to be very proficient to play this material. I have my own band in Seattle called the White band and everybody’s excellent. They play quite a bit of Yes music and do it very, very well.
GM: So how did you come to join Yes? Did they seek you out? Were you familiar with the band’s music at the time?
AW: I was on the road with Joe Cocker and finishing up a European tour. I was in Rome when I got a call from my manager saying Yes wanted me to join the band. I went, “Wow!” He said to hop on a plane because they’ve set up a meeting with Chris Squire and Jon Anderson. So I flew back to London and I met with Chris and Jon. Bill Bruford had left to join King Crimson and they told me they had seen me play with Joe Cocker and admired my capabilities and that sort of thing. So they offered me a place in the band. I suggested we try it out to see if it all works. And then as they were walking out the door, they said, “Oh, by the way, we have a gig in three day’s time in Dallas, Texas, so please go ahead and learn the music.” I thought, you’ve got to be joking. But I rose to the occasion. I don’t think I even had a full day’s rehearsal. I got my head into the music over the weekend and then Monday morning I jumped on a plane; and the next thing I knew, I was onstage.
GM: That sounds similar to the situation you found yourself in when John Lennon asked you to play with him and Eric Clapton at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival in September 1969. You had to rehearse the songs on the flight over.
AW: It was pretty much a similar thing. Maybe if I ever do a book — which I hope to do very soon — I’ll call it “Jumping in the Deep End.”
GM: Indeed! It’s very interesting, because Joe Cocker’s music and Yes’ music were very, very different.
AW: That’s very true, but for many years I had my own band in England that was in a progressive type style. Some of it was similar to Yes. It might have been a bit more jazzy, but it still had that rock ‘n’ roll feel to it.
GM: Which band was that?
AW: It was called Griffin.
GM: So did you have a chance to talk with Bill Bruford during the transition and get his input?
AW: No, not really. He just took off. They had just finished “Close to the Edge,” so I had to go on the road and promote it. But since I hadn’t played on it, it was kind of interesting in that respect.
GM: It must have been interesting also from the point of view that you were essentially a support musician for Cocker, but with Yes, you were an equal. One fifth of a whole.
AW: With Yes everyone is an individual virtuoso, and we’ve all had solo albums. So the band was really proficient, and individually we were were all quite capable as well.
GM: Speaking of which, you did a solo album back in the day. Do you have plans to do another?
AW: I did one with the White band, doing some of the music I played prior to Yes. So it is a possibility and we’re talking about doing another.
GM: You could take your band out on tour supporting Yes.
AW: (Laughs) That would make a long evening for me. It’s kind of long enough as it is. We did a tour maybe eight or 10 years ago where Geoff Downes, who plays keyboards for Yes, was also playing with Asia, which opened up for us. So he played the whole night. And Steve as well. They also got paid twice, which isn’t bad.
GM: How is new music first presented to the band? Does one person come up with the idea? It’s so complex and goes off on so many different tangents, so how do you all work it up initially?
AW: Everybody has ideas and develops songs. Once you get the basic idea for a song, it tends to take hold and then everybody contributes different pieces of music and certain lyrics and things like that. Things are tossed around quite a bit while we’re creating it. It’s something that just sort of falls together because of the people in the band.
GM: How do the demos work? If someone comes in with a new song, does he then present it to the band?
AW: Usually the demos are a one person kind of thing. But when you throw it out there, everybody’s creative juices get involved.
GM: Does the classic Yes music set a high bar in terms of your expectations and the sense that going forward, you had to sort of reach a certain standard? When you prepare a new album, are you comparing the new material to what you’ve done in the past?
AW: You do reflect on some of the past accomplishments when you go into the studio. But you just do what is necessary for the piece of music. Sometimes it involves a really complex rhythm section, and sometimes it has a pretty straight forward approach. We’re pretty versatile to go wherever the music leads us.
GM: Considering all the band’s accomplished, and your own accomplishments as well, are you a nostalgic type of individual? Do you look back fondly on those early achievements? Do any particular episodes stand out?
AW: (Chuckles) Oh yes, there are plenty of those. I remember, just like Spinal Tap, us getting lost backstage once and trying to find our way to the stage, because the tour manager was missing. We call those our Spinal Tap moments. It was kind of funny, but it really wasn’t funny because the introductory music was playing and we were wandering about under the pipes that were under the stage somewhere.
GM: But what about all the great musical moments — all these highlights where things did go right — are there any that take you back from time to time?
AW: The last few years we’ve been playing the Albert Hall. That’s kind of a spectacle in itself. And selling out Madison Square Garden eight nights in a row. We held the record at one time. Those are magical moments that you just don’t forget.
GM: And of course you personally had the opportunity to work with John Lennon. That had to be memorable.
AW: Absolutely. I got a call from him and I thought it was a prank phone call from a friend of mine. So I put the phone down and he called me back and said, “No really. This is John Lennon!” At which point I just dropped everything around me. He said, “I saw you playing in a club the other night. Would you want to do a show with me? We’ll send a car for you tomorrow.” And I said, sure! (chuckles) The next thing I know we’re rehearsing on the airplane and then I’m onstage with John Lennon. It was quite an interesting 48 hours.
GM: And of course your drum part on Lennon’s “Instant Karma!” is inscribed in immortality.
AW: I’ve done a few of those rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camps with Mark Hudson, and every time I see him, he says, “C’mon, let’s do the drum break from ‘Instant Karma!’ I was actually playing it with the other counselors, he said, “Let’s begin it with the drum break and we’ll finish it with the drum break.” And I said, “You can’t do that!” Every time we do the song, he just looks back to me and shakes his head. He’s a funny, funny guy.
GM: So what’s next for the band? Is there the possibility of a new album anytime soon?
AW: Maybe after this cycle of touring we can reconvene in the studio. We’re doing a summer tour, and we may be going to South America at the end of the year. After that, maybe we’ll put pen to paper and see what we come up with.
--
By Lee Zimmerman
Lee Zimmerman is an accomplished writer, blogger and reviewer. A proud resident of Maryville Tennessee, he contributes to several publications, both locally and nationally. He has written the definitive book on Americana music — Americana Music: Voices, Visionaries & Pioneers of an Honest Sound — sold in the Goldmine Store and published by Texas A&M University Press, .
The Politics of Prog: Billy Sherwood on Yes, Asia and World Trade
Joel Gausten
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
Singer and multi-instrumentalist Billy Sherwood might just be the busiest man in music.
At the time of my call to him late last month, he was just beginning his latest round of rehearsals with Yes, the band he first played with in the ’90s as a guitarist and rejoined in 2015 to fill the full-time shoes of late bassist Chris Squire. The night before our chat, he wrapped up a tour fronting Asia – filling the bassist/vocalist role left by the early 2017 passing of the legendary John Wetton – that saw them perform a series of dates with Journey. Additionally, his enormously full plate includes promoting Unify, the third album (and first in 22 years) by his band World Trade.
Released on August 4 by Frontiers Music, Unify is an exceptional collection of AOR magic that finds World Trade’s original lineup (Sherwood, guitarist Bruce Gowdy, keyboardist Guy Allison and drummer Mark T. Williams – son of legendary composer John Williams and brother of Toto singer Joseph Williams) recording new music together for the first time since their eponymous 1989 debut album. (Gowdy and Allison also currently play with reunited ’90s rockers Unruly Child, who will be the subject of a feature on this website in the very near future.) Last year, Sherwood reconnected with his longtime collaborator, original Yes keyboardist Tony Kaye, to release Valley Of The Windmill, the latest album from their project, Circa. On top of all of that, he also works as an in-demand producer/engineer – a role perhaps most notable to Hard Rock/Metal fans for his time spent cleaning up the notorious original mix of Queensrÿche’s 2013 album, Frequency Unknown.
Sherwood’s first stint in Yes can be heard on the albums Open Your Eyes (1997), The Ladder (1999) and House Of Yes: Live From House Of Blues (2000). His current work with the band comes at an interesting time in their storied career. As of this writing, two versions of the group exist: One version (billed as Yes) features Sherwood, guitarist Steve Howe, keyboardist Geoff Downes, singer Jon Davison and drummers Alan White and Dylan Howe; the other features original singer Jon Anderson, on-again/off-again keyboard master Rick Wakeman and mid ’80s – mid ’90s guitarist Trevor Rabin under the unsurprising moniker “YES Featuring Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin, Rick Wakeman.” (Last spring, Yes issued the following statement on the matter: “While Jon Anderson has rights to use the name as one of the co-owners of the trademark, Yes’ position is that every effort should be made by promoters, ticket agencies and all involved to respect Yes’ magnificent and loyal fan base and minimize confusion regarding the use of YES Featuring Anderson, Rabin, Wakeman.”) We discuss this peculiar situation – and much more – in the following interview.
It’s been a long time since we’ve heard new music from World Trade. What brought about the reconvening of the band to go ahead and do this new record?
It was really a matter of the label stepping up and asking [us] to do it. I was doing records for Frontiers, who I work for quite a bit, and they are the ones who proposed the concept [and asked], ‘Could you get the original cast together again and make a record?’ I phoned everybody, and it just so happened that our schedules sort of worked out and we were free to be able to do it. Everybody in World Trade’s pretty busy doing stuff, myself included, so timing was an issue. But it just worked out where it was like, ‘Yeah, we can do this right now. Let’s go for it!’
Your history with Guy and Bruce obviously goes back to the ’80s. How would you say the musical connection the three of you share has evolved over the years?
It’s funny, because it really just feels like it’s never stopped. We’re good friends on that level. When the idea came around, I went over to Bruce’s to listen to stuff, and he was inspired and played me some musical pieces that he had. It sounded just like what I was used to hearing from Bruce with his writing for World Trade before. Nothing really ever changed there; everybody’s still doing what they do in the way that they do it, and it’s a familiarity thing that’s nice to have when you’re working on that kind of stuff. It’s the same with Guy, really, in his playing and his skills and stuff. He’s phenomenal. Once it came time to do the solos and stuff and getting the ear candy going, he just really rose to the occasion.
You released a new Circa album with Tony Kaye last year. What are the current plans for that project at this point in time?
Circa is really like a studio-record project at this point, mostly because getting out and touring is very difficult to do in the first place. My life has become completely complex and busy doing both Asia and Yes now. I’ve been out on tour with Asia for months; literally as of today, I’m switching gears and joining the Yes camp. The schedule on the calendar makes it such that it’s kind of hard to pull that off, but Tony and I love working together on that Circa project. We’ve had many albums now out at this point, and we always talk about making more. I think Circa will still exist in a sense of making records, but I don’t know if we’ll ever be really touring or not. I wish we were, because it’s fun to play that music live; we’ve done it on a few occasions. But as it happens now with this new Asia situation in my lap, I doubt we’ll be able to pull it off in terms of getting the calendar together.
Asia is a band that has a wealth of amazing work and material to draw from, and there are all these great moments that John brought to that band over the years. Now that you’ve had some experience in that role and have performed that material, which Asia songs in particular resonate most for your now?
I really enjoyed performing ‘Wildest Dreams,’ ‘Sole Survivor’ – the stuff from the first album, which was my favorite of all the records. [I also enjoy] the song ‘Ride Easy,’ which was a B-side of [‘Heat Of The Moment’]; it wasn’t actually on the record, but that’s one of my favorite Asia song. We got to perform that a few times at some gigs we did alone without Journey. I love that the first album is loaded for bear with a lot of great material; it’s always good to play. That said, it’s all great music to play and a lot of fun. The history of the band is an amazing thing to be a part of. I’m honored to do it. In the same way Chris asked me to do Yes [before he passed away], John wanted me to do Asia. The whole thing is just a surreal, mind-blowing kind of trip.
Your current career is based around performing with bands that have lengthy histories in this business. Having been in Yes and Asia and been around the Journey camp, what do you think it is about acts of that level that they’re still able to tour successfully 40-plus years into it and maintain considerable careers in an industry that’s not really known to foster those anymore?
Well, they were established a long time ago with some serious foundation [with] the music. I think the music has resonated with people for decades; it’s in their hearts, and they took it in at an early age and really enjoyed it. They tend to want to keep hearing those things. We’re all creatures of habit in our way in terms of what we listen to musically, and I think that stuff just stands the test of time. It resonates with people, and they turn it on to their kids and so on, and it keeps growing. I met young people on this Asia tour; there were 11-year-old kids coming up and telling me how much they love Asia. It’s a trip; it keeps perpetuating itself mostly by the music and songwriting that’s there to be listened to.
It’s been 20 years now since the release of Open Your Eyes –
Wow!
Looking back at that particular point, what are your thoughts on the album now in terms of its material and ultimate place in the history of Yes?
I like the record. Of course, I’m partial because I helped write it and was there, but I think there’s a lot of strong material on there. It’s got an attitude about it, that record. If you take it at face value, I think it’s a very enjoyable record to listen to. ‘New State Of Mind’ is a real kick-ass song; the vocals are great. ‘Fortune Seller’ has amazing bass parts, great moments and guitar flailing around. ‘The Solution’…‘Universal Garden’ is a beautiful song. I think it’s really good. I know people who didn’t like it at first and then 10 years later, decided, ‘This isn’t so bad!’ (laughs) Maybe it’s just a slow grower; I don’t know. I’m happy to have been involved with it and very proud of it. It’s not Close To The Edge, but it wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to try to get Yes back on the radio, if you will. There was still radio in that era, and we wrote those songs geared more towards that sort of commercial format. To that end, we had success; [the title track] ‘Open Your Eyes’ did really well at radio, and then they followed it up with ‘New State Of Mind’ and ‘No Way We Can Lose.’ They were just simpler kind of Yes songs, but they still have complexity and depth inside them. Whenever I post one of the songs [from that album] on the page and have a listen – because I don’t listen to the stuff [regularly] – it’s quite good.
Clearly, Yes has had many different eras, shapes and tones over the years. What is your favorite era of Yes music?
Oh, God! I can’t put my finger on one or the other, because there are so many eras that mean a lot to me in terms of what I was thinking and hearing musically growing up. I love the classic Yes lineup, and I also like the 90125 lineup, with whom I had the pleasure of touring in ’94. But I guess an easier answer to that is [to mention] my all-time favorite Yes album. I love them all, but Tales From Topographic Oceans really hits a chord for me. In terms of a piece of art, that’s an album that I think is just phenomenal. There’s nothing else like it out there.
There are two incarnations of Yes touring and doing things. I’m curious how that has impacted the band in terms of what you’re doing on the road, the reaction from fans about what’s been going on and ultimately how that situation has been working.
It’s interesting and strange at the same time. I haven’t really been paying too much attention to it because we keep staying on our track and going down [that]. As I’ve said before in other interviews, I’m happy to hear as much Yes music in 2017 [as possible] from the participants thereof and see the music thriving. There’s the obvious political push and pull that goes on in Yes; it’s always been that way and will always be that way. But for me, when Chris asked me to step in and do this and I said, ‘Yes,’ I was serving under the Yes banner. So that’s where my loyalty remains, and I’m happy to be a part of it despite whatever the chaos at the moment is. With Yes, there’s always much chaos and many moments to have it. (laughs) It’s really not surprising that we’re in this current state of affairs, but we go forward as Yes doing what we do. I really have nothing but love for the band and want to keep it going. That was the mission statement, and that’s what Chris and I spoke about – keeping it going. So that’s what we’re doing.
Obviously, you’re following in the footsteps of a musical giant here. In your mind, what is Chris Squire’s greatest legacy in the history of music?
It’s multi-pronged. Some of the greatest bass lines in Progressive Rock, for openers – on a composition level, not just chops. That’s what always intrigued me and drew me to Chris’ playing over everyone else. It was not so much the flash and the speed or the dexterity of things, but it was this idea of coming at the bass as a part of an orchestra within Rock ‘n’ Roll and really making the bass sing and have its own place inside of the music. Chris was so, so good at doing that. Going back to Tales, playing ‘Ritual/Nous Sommes du Soleil’ on the last tour was really an amazing thing, because it’s one of my all-time favorite Chris compositions. It’s just built on so many great parts and so much musicality. I would say that’s the main thing about Chris that drew me in. Another component would be his voice; I loved his texture and his style of singing – that same application of harmony being not the classic thirds, fifths or whatever you would do if you were just thinking harmony, but finding those unique notes and that texture that made the chord just all the more beautiful. Chris was a master of that as well. He knew I was hip to both of those components and loved it, and I think that’s why we had the kind of relationship we had. If you listen to the first World Trade album, there’s so much harmony on there; there’s so much melody going on. That’s when we first met; he was intrigued by what I was doing as well. I think we kind of shared that thing, and he knew that I had a deep love and respect for those components. Those are the two things, and then obviously his presence on stage was just always entertaining as hell to watch. (laughs) You put those three together, and do you have a monster figure up there. It was a bit intimidating to stand in his spot on the first tour; it was extremely emotional and all of the above, but it gave me strength to do it knowing this was what he wanted to happen. What an amazing honor that is.
I’ve been following your work for a long time, and I’ve always been impressed by the fact that you have remained working – and in very eclectic ways. For you, what has been the key to maintaining an active career in this industry to where you’re quite literally bouncing from one tour to the next and keeping the ball in the air in that way?
I’ve always followed my own path and done what I really want to do – which sounds kind of selfish, but in a weird way, that’s what has been the sustaining factor for me. Not only working in bands and playing and signing and writing, but I became a producer/engineer very early on in my career; that also afforded me opportunities to think about projects I wanted to do and pitch them to labels. If they wanted to jump in with a budget, then off we went. I’ve had good relationships with various labels over the years and continue to, so it just propagates the whole thing. A lot of these labels that I’ve worked with trust what I do and how I do it, so they want to jump in. I just had my solo album Citizen out on Frontiers and invited all these great artists on board. Because of that, [Frontiers] asked me about Circa, and we did Valley Of The Windmill and what we’re talking about here today with World Trade. For me, it’s just been [about] focusing on what I really want to do in music and just stay tuned in with that and not try to do something that doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. It’s a blessing that it has worked out and led to some unique places in my career – the most obvious being the fact that I’ve replaced Chris and John in these two huge bands. I think that’s just a bi-product of doing what I want to do and staying focused. That genre and style of music is where I really want to be; all roads kind of led to the same place here. But perseverance is a big factor – and not really paying too much attention to some of the trolls who are online. If you did that, you’d stop immediately! (laughs) Part of it is defiance; it’s like, ‘Oh, really? Okay, well, I’m going to do this more then to piss you off!’ (laughs) That would be it.
* Portions of the above interview were edited for space and clarity.
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