[contd. from a previous post : Anderson1980.1.txt ]
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Part 2

MELODY MAKER
September 27, 1980
Page 24

CONFESSIONS OF AN ASTRAL TRAVELLER

Throughout this conversation, Anderson has attempted to remain self-
effacing; anxious to let you know that his former colleagues had their
reasons for the course they followed, and they obviously thought they
were doing the right thing. He won't argue with that. He re-[new
page]tains the greatest respect for them, wishes them well.

You begin to suspect, however, that there's a much harder, more ruthless
side to the man. If that were more apparent, perhaps the reason for his
departure from Yes and the band's apparent rebellion would be more
explicable.

Bill Burford, who quit the band after "Close To The Earth", [sic] once
described Anderson in these pages as a tyrant. I asked him whether he
thought his need to dominate Yes might have precipitated the eventual
split

"Oh, I see," he replied, smiling. "Self-analysis half-hour."

He considered the implications of the question.

"I think I might occasionally have lacked tact," he said finally.
"Sometimes to get things done, you have to step in and say, right --
*that's*enough*. There has to be a final line somewhere, and someone has
to draw it. Sometimes, perhaps, I should have been more persuasive . . .
I remember reading about Puccini a long time ago. And he never got on
with *anyone*. But that's counteracted by the pleasure people have
derived from his music throughout this century, and will *continue* to
derive from it for the rest of time immortal. If you want to achieve
something, and you've got a strong will, and you're determined to see
something through, some people are going to get hurt or upset if they
stand in your way.

"Bill Bruford saw me as a tyrant, so have some other people. There are
times when I'd have to agree with that description, I think had I been
more tactful on occasions, the work I was doing might have been better.
Instead, maybe I caused resentment and the music suffered. I will admit
that there *was* a time when I was difficult. It's something that I felt
I wasn't a *musician*. I think a lot of singers'll tell you the same
thing.

"As soon as you grapple with the techniques of music and you start
hearing things musically, it's very frustrating because you can't play
them *yourself*. So you try to portray them to someone and if they're
not quick enough picking up the idea, you say, 'Look -- you're the guy
who's supposed to be able to play this instrument. How come you can't
play what I'm asking you to play?' And they say, 'Jon -- you don't
understand, that idea's too unorthodox . . .' And I'd say, 'Then *be*
unorthodox. Or is it too difficult for you, would you prefer something
*easier* to play?'

"I can imagine now how that would twist someone up. I was suppose I was
lucky to work with musicians like Yes. It was never difficult, usually,
to persuade them to attempt something different. On certain occasions,
it would turn into a bit of a boxing match. But generally, it was a
glorious exchange of ideas, except for those occasions when we'd have to
battle to find some common ground. But once we got there, it was always
worth it.

"Sometimes, it was bloody hard work. But in the end it was always worth
it."



We'd been talking for more than two hours; Anderson seemed relieved when
his wife appeared and suggested we go out for dinner. Jannis joined us
and we drove down the coast to Villefranche.

Anderson seemed to unwind a little more over the meal, started to
recount the previous night's adventures in the casino in Monte Carlo;
everyone had got riotously drunk, he said. Jenny had won on the roulette
table. It seemed wonderfully reassuring that he didn't spend all his
time with his nose in Tolkein with Sibelius on the turntable in the
background.

We got back to the villa around midnight. I turned on the Sanyo, we
started talking about the early days of Yes, the affinity between them
and groups like the Nice, then ELP, the Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull,
Genesis. They were still to be respected, he said.

"The Nice were one of our favourite bands," he said, pouring the brandy.
"We toured with them, we were often in contact with them. Same with
Genesis and Jethro Tull. We listened to their records, ran into them now
and again. There was a time when I was hoping we might all get together,
do a show, you know . . . This was just a dream of the times . . ."

"They were very idealistic times," I said, knocking back the brandy. "Do
you miss them?"

"I think the idealism's still there, you know," he replied. "It's just
unfashionable to support it, to even talk about flower power. But that
was a *great* era. Actually, I wrote a song about it last year . . ."

He composed himself, began to recite the lyric.

" 'The children of the flower time have spread their wings and begun to
fly/Those summer days are near, we breath again . . .' That's the
opening of the first verse. It's a reflection of those times, and maybe
we're going to go into those times again. A lot of people still have all
their original beliefs inside them, just waiting to flower again."

"Don't you feel embarrassed when you start talking like that?" I asked.
The brandy had obviously gone straight to my head.

"No," Anderson replied, admirably succinct.

"This *is* 1980," I reminded him.

"And it's a great time," he insisted. "A very exciting time. Things are
moving so fast, but everything has its place. Order is there all the
time. It just doesn't look like it to most people, which is why they're
cynical and hostile to ideas like that. You know, I thought it was great
when Elvis Costello did that song, 'What's So Funny About Peace, Love
And Understanding?' What *is* so funny about it? *Nothing*. That's why I
stand with it and by it and for it."

I asked him if there was any small chance of another brandy.



Anderson will maintain that Yes never lost any of their early idealism
when they emerged in the Seventies as one of the new supergroups.. I
just wondered how he'd reacted to being a personal target for the
hostility and vitriol his critics aimed at Yes, especially during the
heated outbursts of '77.

"More than anything," he replied carefully, "it strengthened my
convictions about a lot of things. Possibly, there were times when I
thought, 'Leave me alone, please. I can do without all this.' But I just
kept on, anyway, and hoped it would all work itself out. And that's what
happened basically. I remember when the only question people asked was,
'What do you think of punk?' And it wasn't easy to answer flippantly or
quickly. You couldn't brush it off. It was happening and a lot of the
music, I thought, was good and exciting, and I don't mean to sound
patronising when I say that.

"Of course, they *hated* us. I always thought we were putting on a good
show, no matter where we played. As it happened, we were playing in
large halls. We were playing to large amounts of people and we were
getting attacked for it."

Did you resent the criticism, feel above it?

"I don't think resentment came into it. There was just a bit of
confusion. You know: 'Why are they knocking us?' I thought we were just
musicians putting on a good show. We were a supergroup, yeah, but we
were still working hard. We were still learning, looking for new ideas,
new ways of presentation . . ."

Yes, I reminded him, were always criticised for being very cold and
aloof.

"Well," he said evenly, "we weren't exactly the epitome of a sweaty,
let's rock and roll group. As a group of musicians, we had a certain
talent for moving into a slightly classical mood. And because of that,
we became very well liked by certain people and extremely *dis*liked by
a lot of other people. But we didn't do anything we ever ashamed of. If
we'd followed 'Fragile' with an identical sounding record, then we'd
have no defence. You could have said that we'd become lazy or indulgent.
But we didn't -- we went off on another tangent, bot involved in large
scale pieces of music. They were all very valid too . . . Because we
became so successful, we wanted to give something back to the audience.
We wanted always to make sure that the next piece of music was even
grander and bigger and more impressive than the last one. Success, I
think dictated the direction we followed. It gave us the opportunity to
grow, to expand."

Didn't he think that Yes' music became increasingly self-regarding and
self-conscious, preoccupied with perfection?

"Yeah -- but only in the sense that we were trying damned hard to create
the best music we could. Sometimes we might have been too clinical. But
to me that was always lost when we were on stage. I think in some ways
we were a better group onstage than we ever were in the studio."

So you might agree that the records sound stifled, lack passion, sound
as if they've had the life squeezed out of them?

"I found that when we were playing *on*stage*, there were some
incredible nights. There was something special happening between us.
Then I *knew* we weren't wasting our time, as some people had suggested.
Obviously a few mistakes were made. We were treading dangerous ground,
the music was taking us into delicate areas. The pieces were getting
longer and more complicated and more ambitious. And it was painful,
agonising to work out . . ."

So why did you bother?

"Why do people climb mountains?" Anderson asked, exasperated. "Because
they're *there*. And doing those albums like 'Topographic', they took us
into other areas. Got us thinking more about presentation. We got really
involved about that time in the visual thing. Admittedly, we did run
into it like a bull in a china shop . . . first it was just slides, then
a dome over the drumkit that lit up. Then sculptures and shapes on
stage.

"At times," he said with a sincerity you could feel across the room, "it
was magical . . ."

Wasn't it also irrelevant, I argued. Didn't it suggest a lack of
confidence in the potential of the music to hold an audience's
attention?

"No. No. They worked hand-in-hand. Everything was worked out . . . It
might've been slapdash and amateurish, but we were doing our best. Even
if we were trying to give more than we'd got. Because we were successful
we were trying to give the public something bigger and better. A huge
show."

"At the same time, you had Rod Stewart and the Faces, playing football
on stage and having a great time. But they had their kind of audience,
and we had ours. I enjoyed reading about Rod Stewart and the Faces, and
I'd have loved to be like that. But you can only do what comes naturally
to you. That kind of thing never came naturally to us. What were we
supposed to do? Play cricket on stage?

"A lot of people said, 'Why don't you stick to being a rock'n'roll
group, and Jon can gyrate around in satin trousers, waving a mike
stand.' It just wouldn't have been *us*. There were already people doing
all that far better than we could have done it. We moved in certain
directions. It didn't do us any harm. Okay, maybe we didn't flower the
way everybody wanted us to and maybe we didn't come to terms with a lot
of things, but doing those albums was exciting, it was exhilerating
[sic]. A lot of fun, too . . ."

This seemed damn unlikely; and I said so.

"The fun just probably doesn't communicate itself to *you*." Anderson
argued. "But I had a lot of letters from people telling me they'd been
delighted by the music we produced. And I used to be delighted by the
reaction of people who listened to a piece of Yes music and found out
that it helped them maybe understand a few things . . . It was music
that you have to move towards, get into it and feel it. To understand
it. Some people just want music like a MacDonald's [sic] hamburger.
Instant. Cheap . . . I'm sorry, we couldn't do it like that. There are
lots of people who can: they just knock it out and stick it out . . ."

I hoped he wasn't thinking of Rockpile.

"I still stand by that music," he continued. "And there were people
besides the group who actually liked it, too. And I thought we'd
eventually win over the rest. I really thought that."



Listening again to the Yes alums, I'd been struck particularly by the
sheer vacuity of the lyrics; their pretence, their vain stabs at
profundity. They always seemed to try too hard for some mystical
connotations. At best they were hopelessly vague and muddled; at worse
fey and pretentious.

"I think those are valid points of issue," Anderson said, refusing to be
ruffled from his complacency. "But I remember some people got the point.
I remember when we released 'Relayer', someone sent me an article from
New Zealand. This guy had reviewed 'Gates of Delirium', and it was great
because he'd recognised everything in the music that I wanted people to
hear in it. He'd seen it exactly the way I saw it.

Which was what? "Gates of Delirium" had struck me as being utterly
incomprehensible.

"It was about war," Anderson explained patiently, as if I was some kind
of especially obtuse child.

I knew that much; it was just that the language he used obscured
whatever point he was trying to make.

"When I wrote it," he continued, maybe wishing he was already in bed,
"we were getting into the last throes of the Vietnam war. And in a way
it was a statement about that. It said that war is, like, this kind of
thing that happens that everybody gets sucked into . . . 'you're slaying
our people, we'll slay yours . . . and we will burn the children's
laughter . . .'

                                        continued on p35




JON ANDERSON
from page 25

And the theme of war, that was the driving force and there was a lot of
hot metal flying about. And the music got very crazy, it's like a void
and out of this void rises this form which controls war, and it's like a
demonic form. The devil, if you like. And this form has been watching
the war, glad that it's happening . . . and the music crashed at the end
and out of that rises a very gentle stream of sound and goes into a very
delicate kind of lyric. It's the kind of lyric people might cringe at,
but I thought some people might see what I mean . . .

"It starts off -- 'Soon, oh soon the light/Pass within and soothe this
endless night . . .' Like, at the end of a long tunnel, there will be
light and things will become clearer at the end. Everything will return
to peaceful ways. It's an optimistic view, but you have to go through
this violent tangle to get there."

The sentiments seemed admirable; but it seemed overwhelmingly long-
winded.

Couldn't he have written a three minute song that conveyed the same
message.

"No," he said, inevitably. "A great deal of it was said through the
*music*, through the images the music conveyed."

Could I see that?

I couldn't: as I told him, "Gates of Delirium" had struck me as a damned
unpleasant noise; when I'd listened to it the day before, I felt like
someone was tying a knot in my brain.



I suppose we maybe should've talked a little more about his new album;
but I rather thought we might end up arguing over that, too.

He agreed, though, that it was more informal that anything he'd done
with Yes over the last decade, hoped, therefore, that the audience he'd
been denied because of Yes' image would at least approach the record
without prejudice. They'd given Peter Gabriel a chance, he said, after
he left Genesis.

He didn't want to alienate his own audience, he was quick to point out.
He just wanted to play to as wide a public as possible, break down a few
barriers, open a few doors between the different factions that make up
the audience for modern rock'n'roll.


He would be intrigued, he said, to discover the reaction of Yes fans to
something as straightforward and rocking as "Heart Of The Matter" (do
Yes fans like Graham Parker? They might after this).

Jannis had told me earlier that Atlantic nearly popped a button when
they heard "Heart Of The Matter". Thought it too extreme a leap away
from the safe pastures of Yes. Anderson told them it was going on the
album anyway. Applaud him for that.


Those fans could hardly feel short-changed, though. "Song of Seven"
bristles with enough hymns to life's mysterious forces to keep them all
happy; the title track alone with have them poring over the hidden
significance of Anderson's typically abstract lyric. I'll be down the
pub, actually, but there you go.

And Anderson will probably be on the road somewhere.

Five years ago, he says, he tried to persuade Yes to return to the clubs
and smaller theatres; maybe throw in a couple of nights at the Marquee.
They wouldn't listen. Now, he's determined to keep everything in
perspective; after all, he's only got himself to argue with.

So, when he goes out, he'll play places like the Colston Hall, the Free
Trade Halls, the town halls. Nowhere you couldn't see the Clash or the
Specials.

He will, however, allow himself the luxury of playing the Albert Hall
when he comes to London.

"It's just something I've always wanted to do," he said. "And,
basically, from now on, I only want to do what *I* want to do."
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Contributed by Steven Sullivan
Transcribed by Henry Potts