GUITAR SCHOOL September, 1991 ******************************************** YES - BACK FROM THE EDGE by Mike Mettler and STEVE HOWE'S TURBULENT TALES by Mike Mettler (below) ******************************************** YES - BACK FROM THE EDGE by Mike Mettler After a turbulent reawakening, the realigned YES generates onstage heat, eight men strong. STEP RIGHT UP, FOLKS, AND direct your attention to the center ring: There you can see, right before your very eyes, a '70s art-rock band merged with its '80s hitmeister counterpart. Stir in a new album, a lucrative tour, and an exhaustive box set to boot, and you have yourself an event worthy of the best Barnum & Bailey tradition. What do we call this amazing spectacle, a feast for ears and eyes alike? Why, Yes, of course. By now you've heard about the reunited supergroup times two, Yes, which has brought members of the Starship Trooper-era band (Jon Anderson, Bill Bruford, Rick Wakeman, and Steve Howe) together with the Big Generator squad (Anderson, Trevor Rabin, Tony Kaye, Chris Squire, and Alan White) to form an eight-man group that has been blasting through three-hour in-your-face, in-the-round sets on its Around The World In Eighty Days tour. Oh yeah, then there's the vinyl. Union, the smash record, sports 14 tracks, 10 from the Troopers and four from the Generators, including the big summer radio hit, Rabin's "Lift Me Up." (Note that on none of the tracks do all eight Yesmen play together.) And this fall, Atlantic unveils Yes Years, a four-disc box set that features (along with the expected master-tape classics) rare B-sides, Going For The One outtakes, a live cover of the Beatles' "I'm Down," and demos from Cinema, the outfit that evolved into the Yes that eventually made 90125. Juggling this musical juggernaut's hectic schedule could make even the most level of heads spin, but Yes has taken to the road with a hunger to prove itself a viable entity for the '90s. Observes guitar maestro Steve Howe, "Yes has had a pretty interesting history, one that we*re all quite prepared to tackle. We had to arrive at the standard of what Yes is in 1991 because we really didn't know what that was until we actually got together and did it. And after being out on the road for a while, my overall outlook is that it's turned out quite good." Howe didn't always feel that way. Back before all eight members came face-to-face for the first time, he told me that "I've learned that if you have great expectations about things you usually wind up landing flat on your face." Other band members were also a bit hesitant about this so-called Union . "I don't know how this is going to work out," Trevor Rabin told me. "We're getting roadies, but we might need referees." Bassist Chris Squire noted, "Sure, it looks good on paper - but whether it works as a whole I've yet to hear." Leave it to vocalist Jon Anderson to have a positive outlook, one that eventually won over the whole band. "There's a lot of beauty about it," he says. "The idea always was to bring it all together and co-create." If onstage camaraderie, record sales, and enthusiastic fan response are any measure of "bringing it all together," then Anderson is right on the mark. An offspring of all this togetherness is the odd hybrid album Union, a mixture of styles that functions more as a snapshot of various phases of the band rather than as a cohesive whole. Still, each faction enjoyed contributing to the project. "On the one hand," says Anderson, "the Generator band could get enormously heavy and extraordinarily powerful, but on the other hand you'd have the Trooper band getting more light-headed and whimsical. It was awe-inspiring to work with both sides." Rabin says he enjoys working again with Anderson, after a few years' layoff because of legal complications. Plus, he feels relieved of some of the pressures that surfaced while recording the previous Yes album. "I don't think there was a contrived effort to come up with an attitude or image behind these songs, like we did on Big Generator," Rabin says. "The new songs seem to work well on their own." Even so, Howe adds, "Union does represent in a strangely uncanny way the only way this Yes incarnation could come together. It was a difficult project from the outset, which was more in control of the producers than the players, and that required a lot of compromise from everybody. It may be a bit uncomfortable in spots, but that's part of the creative process that went into it." Union ïs main purpose wound up becoming the springboard that got eight accomplished musicians together to play some of their most exciting and complex music. Reservations ran high at the outset, but once the initial skepticism wore off, the band met in Los Angeles back in early March and started to rehearse. According to Howe, though, the band really started to click when it moved on to Pensacola, Florida, for a final run-through before opening night. "It was a little erratic at first," Howe concedes. "For example, 'Heart Of The Sunrise' would sound great one day, then on the next we would play it and say to ourselves, 'This isn't going to work at all.' But then we started talking about it, figuring out that no, we couldn*t have two bass drums going all night, and that's when we started working through the problems as a team." Practicing on the actual revolving .stage that was used throughout the first leg of the tour (since replaced on most of the summer dates by a straight stage) brought the band's live goals closer to fruition. "That's where we started getting our camp together and coordinating things. And the main thing we tested initially was compatibility." says Howe. With the esprit de corps in fine shape, it was then time for Howe to iron out the kinks in his own sound. "It took me about four or five shows before I decided I needed to use smaller cabinets that house two 12-inch JBLs each. I found them better than my Fender Twins because they were smaller and they could be angled back on the revolving stage . With everything falling into place, Howe the skeptic changed into Howe the satisfied. A self-admitted "rigid, Fripplike" performer, Howe finds the feel of the Yesshows so right that he can't help but "move around to get a little laugh, like miming Chuck Berry's duck-walk, or, when I'm playing my Telecaster - and I don't know quite why I do it - I touch the head of it to the floor of the stage. I'm just exercising the guitarist's option of expression. and I've got the space to do it." Besides finding his own niche, Howe had to reconcile playing with an old friend he hadn*t worked with in over a decade (Squire) and with an acquaintance he had long respected (Rabin). "I took Chris for granted," he says, "and I think he took me for granted. We just slipped into a groove immediately and started playing together almost as if we didn't have to requalify anything. Yes music is definitely our language, and one that has always commanded a sense of professionalism." Squire admits how "interesting" it is playing with Howe again, observing how he enjoys the way they "attack" the music at hand. But, he adds, he's not so concerned about the individual arrangements of songs as the others are, "because I'm the only bass player around." That leaves Howe and Rabin to work out the rhythm-and-lead particulars. Though the pair never really worked together before - Rabin notes that there was "about five minutes"back in 1981 when he was contemplating a bid to join Howe in the then-gestating Asia - Rabin didn't have many doubts about the duo working it all out. "I'm not really worried about who will be doing what; it's worked out just fine. I think what we've done has followed the adage of leaving your ego at the door and just going out there and playing the music." Howe agrees wholeheartedly. "I like it when two guitarists complement one another, like Trevor and I do. We're going beyond getting into each other's spaces and are giving each other tremendous support. We've spent a lot of time discussing guitars, touring, and our varied experiences. We're all O.K. with each other, and I take that as a pretty healthy sign." A good example of how healthy band communication has developed is when the three guitar slingers - Howe, Rabin, and Squire - meet in the middle of the stage for an extended jam. each evinces his own distinct signature style while still complementing the music at hand. What a great visual: Howe, the sprightly classicist with his axe slung at chest level; Rabin, the modern-day guitar hero who can whip off a lightning-fast run on a moment's notice; and Squire, the granite-faced anchor, coaxing more adventurous leads from the both of them. Howe himself has taken on the role of taskmaster a few times. "One night early on in the tour we had started the show and it was very good, but I felt that we were playing it all a bit too complacently. So I climbed up on the little stage in the middle and screamed, 'Let's get going here! ' That stirred things up and pushed the group to the plateau that I prefer playing at. And other times, other band members have done the exact same thing. We're all quite demanding of the group to achieve its goal of playing complex music with a high level of musicianship." Once the band kicks it into high gear, it feels pretty good - almost as if a spiritual union is taking place. "Sometimes I can feel the energy that I'm generating build up, and it's as if eight people are sitting together and joining hands. We're all kind of doing that, only we're joining the part of our minds that are devoted to music, which is something we don't fully understand - it's something that's intuitive and mysterious." For Howe, the live dates have shown evidence of something else beyond complicated passages and massive jams. "The music expresses a sense of theater to me. It's more than just playing like a choreographed dance. I realized over 20 years ago when I first went onstage in North America that a guitarist needs to focus the audience on himself, and understand that by displaying some sense of movement, the movement itself can draw the audience closer into the music. Even if nobody likes what I'm doing prancing about, I'd still do it," he says with a chuckle. "Touring is a funny kind of life," Howe concludes. "It's a peculiar working holiday from real life [Howe has a wife and four children]; one that revolves around six strings and two pickups." Photos by Ann Summa: [GTRschMag.jpg / GTRschMag2.jpg / GTRschMag3.jpg] Photo by John Atashian: [GTRschMag4.jpg] ******************************************** STEVE HOWE'S TURBULENT TALES YOU MIGHT NEED A GLOBE TO map out the directions Steve Howe takes on Turbulence, his first true solo outing since the mid '70's. When asked to compare this record to his output with Yes, Howe replies, "One's in the South Pole and the other is in the North Pole. They're completely different; absolutely, diversely poles apart." Howe didn't need a compass to guide him on his debut for Relativity Records. His main inspiration came from the freedom he had to fully explore his own ideas. "Maybe it's been a bit too easy for me to coast along within the framework of Yes, - Howe admits, "and so I wanted to be under the stress of being able to play more of the pieces that I write as well as play songs that I can't with Yes." "I like to think that what I've done on Turbulence is to try and stop this impulse I have to become 10 different things at once. Turbulence says something about me as an individual whereas Union, the Yes record, says something about me along with seven other people." The album started about the same time Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe did, in early 1989, when Howe demoed the tracks "From A Place Where Time Runs Slow" and "Sensitive Chaos." After listening to the playback, Howe was surprised to find that "I wanted to do a solo record badly." He enlisted Bill Bruford on drums and former Ultravox member Billy Currie on keyboards. Howe handles all the guitar and basswork himself - tasks he'll have to modify when he hits the road for some solo club dates this November. His often-torrential leads come from a variety of axes: a Fender Precision, a Rickenbacker, a 1970 Gibson175, and a '55 Telecaster. While a lot of the backing tracks were meticulously recorded in Currie*s studio, most of the electric jams were laid down in Howe*s home studio in England, the diminutive Langley Studios. "I can get certain things in my own studio that I can't get anywhere else," he explains. "And in your own place, it doesn't matter how you got the results; you can mess around, ham it up, or act totally unprofessional. But sometimes that messing around produces some recording flukes that are quite tremendous." Something Howe established at his home base was the definition of an identifiable sound. "It reminds me of the sounds Les Paul gets. That's not to say it sounds like Les Paul; I'm talking in respect to a sound he created that's recognized as his. I like creating the Steve Howe style, one that's not restricted to just one tone, but an evolution of different tones on different guitars." Nowhere else is this more evident than on "Running The Human Race," where Howe pulls the old switcheroo on one of the breaks by going eight bars on his Strat, followed by eight more on his Telecaster, and eight more on the pedal steel before sewing it up with the Tele. "I like switching guitars for a stronger effect, like I did on Asia's 'Only Time Will Tell.' Once I got that twangy noise on 'Human Race,' that's when I knew I had made contact with that sound and could realize what that particular guitar could sound like." Akin to any true explorer, Howe found it exhilarating to forge new territory: "It gave me a great buzz." - Mike Mettler Photo by Gary Gershoff/Retna: [GTRschMag5.jpg]