by David Weigel
By the time Exposure hit shops, Fripp seemed to do more than transcend the old progressive rock. He had outlasted it. Emerson, Lake & Palmer went on hiatus, the wreckage of the orchestra tour never fully cleared. Yes, seemingly revivified at the height of punk, had lost Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman. The need for King Crimson music was seemingly sated by U.K., a collaboration between John Wetton and Bill Bruford alongside the Roxy Music and Curved Air virtuoso Eddie Jobson and the progressive jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth.
Fripp, meanwhile, was announcing his album as the start of a personal revolution: “a Drive to 1981.” The meaning was gnostic. “This Drive to 1981 commits me, for two and a half years, to be working substantially in the marketplace, in positions of public access and accessibility,” Fripp told the interview series Boffomundo. “The details will be filled in as the drive continues.” It had been years since the exit from Gurdjieff, but the self-denial and ritualism he’d learned there still defined him. “There’s a little story of a Sufi master who says: ‘Choice, choice? Freedom? I have no choice. I can only do the will of God,’ ” said Fripp. “This is freedom. Now, from one point of view, I would view this Drive to 1981 as being a personal discipline.”87
9
DEATH KNELL
This is getting to be a bit of a habit with us,” said Mike Rutherford. “Isn’t it?” Genesis’s bassist was at his Notting Hill home, suffering through an interview with a Melody Maker reporter who wanted to know how the band could keep playing. It was October 1977, and Steve Hackett had followed Peter Gabriel out the door, into a solo career that followed more of the patterns of progressive music.
“His decision to go freed up the band,” Tony Stratton-Smith would say, “especially once Mike had decided to handle the guitars, because a three-man unit is a much easier relationship to make work. It opened the door to a new way of writing in which Phil could participate more.”1
That left Rutherford with more playing duties, and he was too honest to pretend he was as adroit as Hackett. Genesis was a three-piece now. “The new album’s definitely going to be a lot different,” Rutherford told Sounds reporter Hugh Fielder. “Whereas in the past a song could have been seven minutes long we now said we can say it in five minutes just as well, and you end up with more variety.”2
Rutherford’s musings appeared next to ads for new singles from Ian Dury and the Damned. Genesis would end up topping some of the reader polls at year’s end, but 1977 had been the year of punk, of DIY, and of a rock press coming with pitchforks at ELP. Phil Collins was spending downtime playing with the jazz fusion band Brand X, and using whatever time was left trying to rescue his marriage.
“We had dropped down to a three-piece, which might have been a drawback,” Tony Banks admitted. “Punk music was coming in and was supposed to be doing away with groups like us. But at exactly that moment we had our first hit single, and so the first of our albums that sold in any quantity.”3 The song was “Follow You Follow Me,” a trifle that came together when Rutherford found a simple ascending riff, Banks added chords, and Collins decided on a soft beat. Rutherford estimated that it took him five minutes to come up with the lyrics.
Rutherford’s piece was placed at the end of . . . And Then There Were Three . . ., the trio’s first album, with a title that began as a joke to the music press. No member of Genesis thought it was their best. Yet the single reached into the American top ten. Banks was quite honest about the track. “If Genesis had never released ‘Follow You Follow Me,’ ” he said, “if we’d split up before it came out, most people would never have heard of the group.”4
Critics welcomed the new sound, and the new appeal, with a raspberry. Rolling Stone accused the band of losing itself “in a pea-soup fog of electronics” and gimmickry. “The melodies have never been less substantial, while the songs revel in pettiness and two-bit theatricality. In short, this contemptible opus is but the palest shadow of the group’s earlier accomplishments.”5
Was it fair? Genesis’s songwriting had been simplified. There were eleven songs on the new record, and none of them were particularly fantastical. The longest composition, “Burning Rope,” was extended by a meandering guitar solo and some optimistic block chords from Tony Banks. Block chords were everywhere, as were inspirational or glancingly introspective lyrics; “Undertow,” the most driving ballad on the record, was basically a sheet of inspirational advice for anyone feeling defeated. “Stand up to the blow that fate has struck upon you.”
Genesis was becoming a pop group, as it had been in the Charterhouse days. The difference was in a decade-plus of adult gravitas, and heartbreak. “Until then eighty percent of our audience had consisted of earnest spotty young men,” said Stratton-Smith. “Suddenly we had this hit single and girls started turning up.”6
THE DOWNFALL OF PROGRESSIVE ROCK happened quickly, with an entire critical establishment seemingly rooting for its demise. In just a year, bands like Yes and Jethro Tull—winners of reader polls for the whole of the 1970s—became soft punch lines for music writers. Band after band moved away from the complicated songwriting that had defined them. More important, the labels were dumping progressive music as fast as they could. “Bands were getting six-figure advances and years to make records,” producer Tom Newman later told the author Paul Stump. “The accountants moved in. They make things work, but at the same time they spell the death knell for up-and-coming creative and progressive stuff.”7
The number crunchers saw no other choice. According to the Record Industry Association of America, record sales doubled from 1973 to 1978, then tumbled, not to reach a new peak until 1984. The doom year was 1979; the music historian Simon Frith tracked the decline of sales as twenty percent in Britain and eleven percent in the United States.8 That accelerated the decline of bands that were being waylaid by trends.
In 1980, as he toured Jethro Tull’s formless album A, Ian Anderson explained to an interviewer that the flight of investment was killing creative music. “Ten years ago, there was a great deal more flexibility and freedom both in radio programming and in terms of the record company policy, as to what they would take a chance on,” he said. “The profit margins were higher—simple as that. There wasn’t quite the same desperate competition that existed between artists, between record companies, for a limited number of dollars. . . . what gets most programming, in terms of radio play, is that sort of top forty-ish kind of format, or MOR sort of format. You don’t get the same absurd extremes occurring, which were very beneficial to music as a whole.”9
When Anderson said that, Tull’s era of experimentation had already ended. Other bands were smoothing out their sounds. In 1978, Gentle Giant completed its move away from renaissance influences and into pop tones with Giant for a Day!—ten driving rock songs, none longer than five minutes, designed for a hit. “We certainly weren’t driven to be a commercial pop band,” said singer Derek Shulman. “We tried things. It was an experiment. Some things kicked off well, and some sounded terrible. It wasn’t three-chord silly songs that sounded like anyone else. Yeah, they were a little less intricate. They were a bit more pop—which is a horrible word. But they were good songs. Apparently our fans were not that thrilled by it.”10
Gentle Giant would produce one more album, Civilian, and then call it quits. From hiatus, Greg Lake was finding new collaborators, and stewing over the biases and distortions that had displaced his sort of music. “The punks were standing in the King’s Road in London, dressed in kilts, with their hair greased into spikes,” remembered Lake. “They had nothing going for them, they had no motivation. They were rebelling against nothing. Look, if you want to talk about punk bands, let’s talk about the Who. That’s a real punk band. There’s nothing new about the Sex Pistols. What’s new about them? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. There was nothing new about punk, except it was crap. It should have been called crap really, because that would have been more honest.”11
“None of those genres had any musical or cultural or intellectual foundati
on,” continued Lake. “They were all propositions of the media or record-company-stroke-media conspiracies. They were invented by music magazines and record companies talking together—you know, how can we whip up a storm? It was good for both of those entities. It was good for the record company, and it was good for the newspapers, the music press.”12
THE LAST YES TOUR of the 1970s had ended in disaster. The Tormato tour had not. The venues still sold out. Pranks aside, the Yes-in-the-Round setup came off as intended. The critics, though fully committed to punk’s rise, had saved their brickbats. Still, when the tour ended, the band found the old energies spent. They started recording new songs in Paris, getting nowhere. After Alan White injured his ankle roller-skating, Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman found themselves bonding over their shared desire to flee. “After Tormato everything started to go horribly wrong because punk was hitting big time and Yes was out of fashion,” Wakeman recalled. “Jon and I got paralytic on Calvados in the bar and left. . . . We began crying on each others’ shoulders. Jon was saying, ‘This isn’t the band I loved.’ ”13
Wakeman was bored. Anderson was simply exhausted. Atlantic had laid on hands to change the band’s sound, assigning producer Roy Thomas Baker to the Paris sessions. Baker had twirled the knobs for Queen’s first four albums; more relevant, he had produced a massive new-wave hit in the eponymous debut album from the Cars. In his hands, Yes’s new music continued the stylistic slide from Tormato. “Dancing through the Light,” one of a handful of tracks from the sessions, sounded almost nothing like the band—all processed vocals with Wakeman limited to a light, plinking melody. “Groups like The Cars and Foreigner were having big records with sales of eight million,” Wakeman said. “The record company said, ‘This is what you’ve got to do.’ They put us with Roy Thomas Baker as the producer and that was a complete disaster.”14
Chris Squire understood why the sound was changing. “Punk rock had come in while we were doing our mega tours of America,” he told author Chris Welch. “It was a good thing for the evolution of music as a whole but it wasn’t the best thing that could have happened to us at that point.”15
Yet there was no saving Yes. In March 1980, the split was official. Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman were no longer part of Yes, but there would be no talk of hiatus. Chris Squire had discovered replacement musicians in the studio next door. The Buggles were a young new-wave band, consisting of Trevor Horn on vocals and strings and Geoff Downes on everything else. Just months earlier, they’d had a transcontinental hit with the nostalgic, metallic single “Video Killed the Radio Star.”
No one would have associated the band with Yes, until Yes up and did so. “It just so happened that Geoff Downes and Trevor Horn had come to Brian Lane and asked him to represent them for management, so they were in our office,” Chris Squire told Welch. “We said, ‘Why not get together with us, then?’ Trevor Horn kept saying to me, ‘I can’t possibly fill Jon Anderson’s shoes.’ I used to keep telling him, ‘Yes you can, yes you can!’ I’d tell him to go away and sleep on it, and then he’d come back to me and say, ‘You know, you’re wrong. I can’t do this!’ ”16
Before joining Yes, Horn had taken pains to explain why the Buggles were not just another new-wave group. “Our records have an intelligence layer in them—they’re not just pop pulp,” he told Smash Hits that winter. “You can take them on a superficial level but there’s another layer too. That’s something that’s been the hallmark of most successful bands, right from the Beatles. And though we have got this synthetic, arranged sound, it still doesn’t really come out as total synthesiser music.”17
Horn had also been a fan of Yes, ever since he’d combined an opportune LSD trip with a listen to a local cover band. He heard “I’ve Seen All Good People” and was spellbound. “I said to the girl I was with, ‘That’s fantastic. What a brilliant song.’ The girl said, ‘That’s by a group called Yes. You’d like them. They’ve got a good bass player.’ On Monday I went out and bought The Yes Album and more or less played it non-stop for months. It just blew me away. . . . I had started out in dance bands, but I’d never heard a group that was as musical as Yes.”18
Years later, Horn would play Tales from Topographic Oceans to get a feel for the sound in a studio. And like the rest of Yes, he had been left cold by Tormato. “Don’t Kill the Whale—dig it, dig it? No, I didn’t get that. Times were changing, and at that point in time I thought, ‘well, that’s the end of them.’ ”19
The “Buggle-ized” Yes, as the Los Angeles Times called it, was announced in May 1980, and it was strange enough to pique new interest in the band. It was stranger for Downes and Horn. They collaborated instantly with the rest of the band, churning out songs that advanced the style of Yes. Downes was not a virtuoso, like Wakeman, but he had a crisp command of melody. His Fairlight keyboard never noodled; it only provided hooks or countermelodies. Horn’s voice, which lacked some of Anderson’s high end, was a close-enough simulacrum to avoid any real disruption to the sound. It was the lyrics that changed the most. “White Car,” a short almost-instrumental that was sandwiched between two of the band’s anthems, had nothing in common with Anderson’s old tales of enlightenment. It was about the synthpop star Gary Numan driving a white Stingray. “Trevor saw him driving along one day and he wrote the song about it.”20
The Buggles-Yes hybrid finished its album, Drama, in the spring, at a sprint. Horn, who’d committed himself fully to the project, got married, then drove back to the studio to keep recording. Atlantic gave the album a Roger Dean cover and a worldwide release date of August 18. Eleven days later, the new-old band was headlining in Toronto—to a sold-out stadium crowd. Everything seemed to be in its right place.
“Brian Lane, in his wise way, said, ‘Don’t tell anyone we’ve changed the singer and the keyboard player!’ ” Squire remembered years later, and with no small amount of wryness. “So we just showed up and there were like two different people in the band, and the audiences were saying, ‘What’s going on?’ ”21
The fan who showed up to hear this iteration of Yes usually heard the entirety of Drama, alongside a mélange of hits. Horn and Downes did not change their style at all; instead of Jon Anderson floating around the stage in a kaftan, there was the man from the Buggles, complete with goggle glasses and suit, scaling to play the right notes. During keyboard intermissions, Downes would sprinkle in the hooks from “Video Killed the Radio Star.”
On the tour’s first leg, the whole thing seemed to jell. Even the snark from critics was tinged with respect. “One tends to think of rock institutions like Yes as unchanging monoliths, and to a considerable extent such groups are trapped by the expectations of their audiences, who come to concerts expecting to relive special moments spent with the band’s music,” wrote a critic for the New York Times. “But since Mr. Downes and Mr. Horn joined Yes, the group’s corporately composed music has shown signs of getting more simple structurally and more direct rhythmically.”22
The band cooperated with the narrative. “I’d say we’re more concise and clear now,” Steve Howe told one reporter, who naturally was trying to understand the survival of a dinosaur in the era of punk. “The top-line guitar and keyboard concept has changed quite radically, been modernized. Instead of padding and thickening agents, we’ve gone back to lines much, much more. We’re using the orchestral side of Yes much more selectively, limiting the gloss, you might say. Whatever’s been leveled at us in the past, we want to be re-judged. We’re saying to everybody, ‘Yes might have been this, and might have been that, and you might have loved us or hated us, but now we’re re-presenting ourselves to you.’ ”23
Rolling Stone was harsher. “Visions of Jon Anderson in his silken sugarplum-fairy robes surely danced in the heads of the 20,000-plus faithful gathered here when Horn—looking pitifully alone on a raised platform in the center of the circular, revolving stage—hit several horribly flat notes during the old Yes song ‘Yours Is No Disgrace,’ ” wrote David Fricke. “In Wakeman,
rock’s answer to Liberace, Downes had an even tougher act to follow. But he didn’t try very hard, playing familiar lines from such Yes hits as ‘And You And I’ and ‘Roundabout’ as if he were reading them from an exercise book. His only acknowledgement of the Buggles’ success was a snippet of their hit ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ in his otherwise inconsequential solo keyboard spot.”24
Years later, without renouncing the music, Howe would admit the problems with Buggle-ization. They became starker when the American dates ended and the band toured the UK. “The two failings in that version of Yes were that when we came on stage people were quite disappointed that the Jon Anderson larynx wasn’t there and that old twiddly fingers Wakeman wasn’t there,” he said. “We walked in everywhere and seemed to slay them. We did three days at Madison Square Garden in New York with this hodge-podge version of Yes . . . meanwhile, the audiences in England were shouting out ‘Jon Anderson—we want Jon!’ And then they shouted ‘We want Rick!’ usually at the most crucial moment. They really did it to us on that tour.”25
The band knew how this was weighing on Horn. Before one of the band’s three-night Newcastle shows, Howe told the singer, “Just imagine this is your dream come true—you are playing and singing in Yes. Just go on and enjoy yourself.” Horn was not moved. “Don’t you think I’ve tried everything to make it work for those people?” he asked Howe.26
No one was more aware of the limitations—of the unanswerable expectations—than Horn. Chris Squire kept trying to convince him that he sounded exactly like Jon Anderson, but Horn wasn’t buying it. “He’s got a much higher voice than me, at least three tones higher than mine,” said Horn. “The idea of sticking somebody who was a second rate singer, who was really a producer, up front in a band like Yes and sending them out on a 44-date tour of America playing every song in the original key was ludicrous. . . . The opening note in the set was a B, and the highest note I can sing is a B.”27