"This is fantastic fun this tour," assures Yes bassist Chris Squire, "it really is. This is the eleventh tour, and we seem to really know how to make touring work, as a personal pleasure as well as a business thing. That's very conducive to making music. Personally, I feel it's been really good vibes this tour all around.
"If you've seen the last tour, and you see this one, even though two or three of the songs are the same, the whole thing is completely different in its presentation and projection," Squire continued.
That, of course, is what Yes fans have come to expect from the band over the years. This year though, in this Bicentennial blitzkrieg of rock & roll bands on the American public, bands are all scrambling for some new, and if possible, unique, attraction in their show, something that will distinguish their concerts from the scores of others, and build a momentum that spells sell-outs down the line.
The buzz is definitely on about the Yes tour though, and when it's all over for them at the end of August, the group will have played to over one million fans and fanatics (people who attend at least two or more shows) over a three-month period. The tour's biggest gig was held in Philadelphia's JFK Stadium, where over 100,000 Yes people turned out to see them.
"JFK was the biggest gig the band has ever done," Squire confirms. "There was about 110,000 people in JFK. It was a fantastic place to play, it really was. It's so beautifully laid out, and it was really one of the best sounds that I've ever experienced in an open-air gig.
"You just have to be adjusted to doing it, really. We had a PA that was equivalent to 14 ordinary systems, and it was on three levels on each side of the stage. It was really lovely."
Yes also crashed RFK Stadium in the nation's capitol, Roosevelt Stadium in New Jersey, and will be playing in Anaheim Stadium, in California, near the end of the tour as it grinds to a halt on the west coast. The Yes stage presentation is spectacular. The band has employed a new concept of lighting, says Squire, "where the whole thing is hung above the stage. It's a grid, and all the lighting is actually in this grid. "This grid also includes in it pod-like things that go up and down on chains and kind of vertebrae-type arms. They're a bit like the machines out of H.G. Wells' 'The War Of The Worlds', and they have lights inside them. They're basically the lighting for me, Steve, and Jon at the front of the stage, and they look quite amazing in themselves. "I think we've got the best laser show ever seen. It was something that was especially developed for us by this guy in Paris, who's been working on lasers for the last few years. He's developed some techniques that have certainly never been seen before, in a rock concert anyway."
In the last few months though, laser beams have suddenly become almost commonplace at concerts. Zeppelin, the Stones, The Who, Blue Oyster Cult, and Nektar, to name a few, have introduced lasers into their show within the last year, and now that the technology is available, all the bands have to do is find ways to make the lasers work uniquely within the context of their performance.
"If you're gonna play to a vast audience," Squire explains, "you've got to be able to turn the people on in that kind of size hall. Lasers are just so terrifically powerful, in the way that they don't die. They're as impressive in a large place as they are in a small place. The laser beam is no different from a light bulb really. It's what you do with it.
"We also have two backdrops, one is this 3-D, and then another one behind that, and things go on in between the two backdrops, like special lighting effects. I've never seen the show myself. This is only what people tell me! "
This year, the Yes set has experienced an almost total reshuffling of their music material, as the band decided to revive some of their older works, drop out other things, and also include a variety of material from the five musicians' respective solo albums. Since the beginning of the tour though, the set has again been somewhat rearranged, because with the lengthy encores the band has been forced to do, their sets have been running much too long to suit them.
"We've modified the show, and we're modifying it all the time," explains Squire. "We're still doing a bit of picking and choosing, rather than having one show that we know we're gonna play every night for the next two months. We're varying it a bit to keep us interested as well."
It was finally decided that most of the solo tunes would be the ones dropped from the set, even though at the beginning of the tour, the set was arranged so that each member would perform one of their songs with the band.
"We were, but actually we're not doing it at the moment because basically the set was running a very long time, and we weren't sure that it was making up the best kind of show doing it that way, because obviously, a lot of people don't know all the music from the solo albums anyway. So we spent the first couple of weeks really trying different things out, but in the end we kind of let the solo things slip, because in a way I think people were more into just hearing the Yes songs, and that's fair enough really, I can dig that."
At a concert in Memphis' Mid-South Coliseum, when Yes was still performing various solo material, Chris Squire got his turn with "Hold Out Your Hand," the opening track from his own "Fish Out Of Water" album, and some ten thousand people responded to the Squire tune with a standing ovation.
"We were still experimenting with the show at that stage, and we were playing different songs every night, and I think that one night we just happened to play my song," says the too-modest bassist.
Another surprise happened at the Omni, in Atlanta, where the band encored the Jimmy Carter constituency with a rousing version of the Beatles' rock classic, "I'm Down." Even the bands are being struck by the new wave of Beatlemania.
"That was pretty crazy. We may even do it again at some point, but it was spontaneous. We always try to surprise people. It was an idea we had back in England. I don't know why, it's just one of those things. We just did it one day in rehearsals as a laugh, you know, and we enjoyed it so much that we said 'Hey, we may even play that on the tour as an encore number.' But we really didn't think we would, seriously, then just one night we did it. It's a good song, that."
Still included in the show are tracks from both "Tales From Topographic Oceans" and "Relayer" and the group has reintroduced old songs from their earlier "The Yes Album" and "Fragile" albums.
"What we've done on this tour is to recycle some old songs that we haven't done for a long time, which were favorite songs that we'd dropped. We've cut other songs out, like 'Close To The Edge,' and everything is presented in a totally different way.
"We've brought back 'Heart Of The Sunrise,' which is a song we haven't played for two or three years, and Patrick Moraz never knew, and we play 'I've Seen All Good People,' that kind of early rocking-type thing."
"The day touring stopped adding a new feeling is the day I wouldn't continue, personally, but it seems to every time we come out on the road. There seems to be something even more exciting about it than the last time. I think we're still on our slow, upward curve," Squire conjectured.
The Sunhillow Saga Jon Anderson Delivers Fourth Yes Solo Album
By Peter Crescenti
October 26, 1976 Circus
"Through the mist of a million years of high energy three riders skimmed the surface of the plain of Tallowcross and raced towards a dream. Olias was to build the ship the Moorglade Mover/Ranyart was to guide the moments begotten light/ Qoquaq a leader, a fashioner of peoples of Sunhillow."
Who are these cosmic travelers? Are they bit characters from Tolkien's whimsical Hobbit world, or maybe a new team of super-heroes in the ever-expanding universe of Marvel Comics? In reality, Olias, Ranyant, and Qoquaq are the stars of Jon Anderson's musical fairytale, "Olias of Sunhillow" (Atlantic). The Yes vocalist's first solo album chronicles the mission of the super-trio to Sunhillow to rescue that world's four tribes before their planet explodes into interstellar debris. If the poetics seemed drenched in Tolkeinesque hues and the concept seems Marvelesque in its imagery and scope, it's because both were influential forces in Anderson's conception of his saga.
Anderson readily admits, "Tolkien's strongly influenced so many people over the years with the idea of fantasy and reality being a good kind of balance."
As long as a decade ago, Jon was immersing himself in the Marvel creations of author Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby. About five years ago, he devoted much of his leisure time to digesting scores of science fiction and fantasy novels and stories, becoming particularly enveloped in the adventurous worlds created by J. R. R. Tolkien in his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. The most immediate inspiration for "Sun hillow," Anderson says, is the Vera Stanley Alder novel, "The Initiation of the World."
The particular vibe that triggered Sunhillow, though, struck the singer back in 1972, when Yes recorded their fourth and probably finest record, "Fragile." The front cover painting of that LP, wonderously illustrated by Roger Dean, depicted a kind of space ark approaching a seemingly healthy and tranquil planet. The back cover, shockingly, portrayed the world discarding chunks of itself into space, as the ark (Anderson has christened it the "Moorglade Mover") hovered away from the chaos, presumably filled with the rescued inhabitants of that ill-fated sphere. From these illustrations, Anderson drew the basic skeleton plot of "Olias of Sunhillow."
Four-Cornered Plot
The planet's four tribes, the Nagrunium, Asatranius, Oractaniom, and Nordranious, are each represented by a different aspect of music in the story. "There were four definite places in the studio where everything fit," Jon recalls. "In one corner, I'd have drums. The range of drums was from Moroccan, Jamaican, American Indian, tabla, English brass band bass drum, and various other kinds of Asian drums, and a couple of zebra-skinned African drums. In another corner I had a Koto, a sitar, a Greek guitar .... Then I had a keyboard set-up. I always wanted to get into a situation where I could actually play three or four keyboards. I had a set of five keyboards." A fourth corner jangled with Anderson's collection of international bells. The story finally ends with the"Moorglade Mover" nestling on Asguard to dispatch its passengers, while the three super-beings climb to that world's highest peak and merge with the Universe.
The tale with such godly ramifications was not an overnight creation, nor was it done in seven days. Anderson labored six long months over his fantasy. "At times I'd spend a full day playing the same piece of music," he unabashedly admits, "trying to put down the first track well. One of the tracks, called 'Qoquaq en Transic,' is a very free thing. I'd already recorded it about six months earlier on a very simple tape, and found a certain kind of feeling in it. I liked the recording I had, but quality-wise it wasn't good enough for the album. So I had to reproduce that feeling, and when I tried to reproduce it I had to go back to that point in time when it was first presented. It took me a long time, but in the end, when I sat back and listened to the playback, I just couldn't stop laughing because it was there."
Moog Reflections
Another reason the production took half a year stems from Anderson's very definite philosophy concerning the potentialities of the moog synthesizer. Jon believes that the very sounds you coax out of a moog are "you," so he worked feverishly to make sure the machine accurately reflected his musical personality.
"Basically it was a question of working on the moog, because it's a very open-ended instrument. You can root and root and you'll find virtually any sound your ear wants to hear."
"Olias of Sunhillow" wafts along like the soundtrack of an ether-induced stupor, never punctuated by a solo or even a lone instrument playing. The record is a gluttonous orgy of overdubs and lost sounds, with much of the symphonic-like blanket textures produced by Anderson's collection of moogs, mellotrons, and, other keyboards. Ambitiously, Anderson also used scores of other instruments to create his dream-like, papier mache wall of sound, exotic things like a Koto, a Chinese stringed instrument, and a huge collection of bells.
"I had a couple of dreams of what sound the album was going to be. Dreams are very strange things. It's so logical that you're alive. You sleep, so you're alive. You dream you're alive. Understand?
"I started collecting instruments to use on the album about a year and a half before I actually started recording it," continues Anderson, who recorded at his home 24-track studio. "I started picking up bells here, a guitar there, a mandolin, sitar, Koto, numerous flutes and things, which I haven't really worked that well on yet. I'm still learning. At the moment, I carry a Chinese bamboo flute around with me, which is fantastic for learning how to breathe.
Still, for Anderson, the most important instrument of all was his own voice, which he used not only for shaping Iyrics, but also purely for its naked sound. Jon first began exploring that basic aspect of the voice on the "Fragile" LP, in his "We Have Heaven," which weaves layers and layers of vocals into intricate choral passages.
Shifting Vocal Patterns
"That was my first attempt to work with vocal patterns. I'm interested because (my voice) has been my main instrument, and having never really felt that I was such a good singer, I've used the idea of the voice in a different way at times, and tried to formulate the energy in a different way.
"My voice has developed over the years, and I do look forward now to finding opposites, so I'll sing very clearly at times, and then very intricately with a lot of other vocals and sounds. I think I'm gonna try to get both ends of the scale, driving my energies towards working out some sequences of vocals."
Anderson hopes to continue incorporating his ever-evolving vocal style into Yes' music, and although he has become proficient on several instruments, he has decided to submerge that new aspect of his musical personality in favor of group unity.
"My role in Yes is more as a kind of director," Jon explains. "I don't feel I'm in any position, at the moment, to take a solo with the band playing. I've always been the singer and that's my solo."
Anderson doesn't figure to record another solo record for a couple of years, and he hopes that by then his musical and technical knowledge will have increased enough so that he can avoid spending an exorbitant amount of time hidden in the studio. In so doing, he will also avoid creating potential conflicts among Yes' members.
"When I was involved in the album, I was wondering if it was ever gonna come out. When you still haven't finished after four months you think, ' Why isn't this piece of music coming to me,' and it can get on top of you. You have to say, ' I don't want to let anybody down.' I didn't want to waste the band's time."
"I finished my album just a bit later than everybody else. It didn't upset the routine of the band so much, but it did put a bit of pressure on. In a sense, I tend to lead in what's going on, and when I came out of doing my "Sunhillow" album, I realized how important my position in the band is, as everybody else's position is, and that I shouldn't forget that."
Geir Myklebust shares on his blog "My Things - Music history for those who are able to read" an interview with Rick Wakeman by John Boulton for Sounds, December 4, 1976.
Forgotten Yesterdays
Updates
Downloads
Memorabilia
Discography
Yes Statistics
About Us
Home
Yes (1976)
Overview
Reviews (3)