The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  England was where the structure finally fell apart. The hecklers were only one problem; they had bought tickets, after all. It was with the newly booked concerts, the ones where Horn and Downes were promised as part of the band, that the sales dropped off. “We got away with it in places where the dates were sold out,” said Brian Lane. “Such was the strength of the Yes cult. . . . But when we got to places where they knew about the changes, whereas before we were used to playing to 20,000 people, only 3,000 people showed up.”28

  At the end of 1980, when the tour sputtered out, the five members of Yes huddled and came to a conclusion. They brought Brian Lane forward to break the news. “We’ve all had a meeting,” said Squire. “We’ve decided that enough is enough, and we’ve decided to fire you as the manager of Yes.”29

  In Squire’s memory, Lane was bristling, unapologetic, and final. “Fine, if that’s the way it is,” he said. “Yes have peaked so it’s a good time to get off the boat. But let me give you some advice. If you are going to continue as Yes, can I suggest that you get down on your hands and knees, kiss Jon Anderson’s feet, and beg him to return to the band.” Horn interjected. “What am I supposed to do?” “Why don’t you become a fucking record producer?” snapped Lane. “Making dumb remarks like that is one of the reasons we’re firing you,” said Squire.30

  Lane was out. Yes was effectively finished. But the erstwhile producer would remember how right he was. “Steve Howe and Geoff Downes must have agreed with my thoughts, because a few weeks later they were back in the office with John Wetton and we formed the embryo of Asia,” he said. “Carl Palmer joined the band and suddenly I had the first corporate rock band of the Eighties.”31

  AFTER ROBERT FRIPP terminated King Crimson, John Wetton and Bill Bruford walked into the welcoming arms of several other groups. Bruford joined Genesis on tour, freeing up the limbs of Phil Collins as the new singer roamed the stage. Wetton played with Roxy Music; in 1976, when the band went on hiatus, he backed up Bryan Ferry. “People were just coming out of the woodwork,” remembered Wetton, “and journalists and people were asking: ‘What happened to King Crimson?’ ”32

  Wetton and Bruford were not cold to the idea. Near the end of 1976, the two of them collaborated with Rick Wakeman—then just about to re-join Yes—on new, progressive music. The project never jelled, and Wakeman walked. “We spent six weeks of our lives doing it, and even had photographs done on the set of a James Bond movie,” Wetton recalled.33 “Mercifully,” said Bruford, “A&M Records was unwilling to let its ‘star,’ Wakeman, walk off with a used, slightly soiled King Crimson rhythm section, and the idea folded.”34

  Wetton, undeterred, suggested that the band bring on a fellow late-stage veteran of Roxy Music. Eddie Jobson, who was still just twenty-two years old, had been playing with Frank Zappa after the Roxy hiatus. Bruford dropped another name: Allan Holdsworth. Bruford had collaborated with the progressive jazz guitarist in 1977, when recording his first solo album, and after Holdsworth had recorded with the umpteenth iteration of Gong. “I didn’t speak French and they were always arguing in French, so I never knew what the hell they were arguing about,” Holdsworth said. “I think the band had a lot of potential; it was just never reached.”35

  Everyone in the Bruford band—which included bassist Jeff Berlin and Canterbury veteran Dave Stewart—spoke English. “The sounds in his [Stewart’s] head were hard to realize pre-synthesis, but when the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 appeared toward the end of the 70s, it was the answer to his prayers,” said Bruford—who himself was saving money on drums by using a new pair of RotoToms.36

  “Allan brought forward this heavy armament, more commonly found in classical composition, as source material for improvisation in rock and jazz groups,” Bruford said. “Many was the night you could find Allan, soldering iron in hand, five minutes before the audience was let into the hall, wiring together three complaining amplifiers, their guts spilling out onto the stage.”37

  Wetton greeted the new guitarist with awe: “When he gets onstage in front of 3,000 people he’ll destroy the place.”38 The band set to work on material that could fill arenas, without repeating any previous work. “Collaboration” was not quite the word to describe it. Bruford portrayed the band’s writing style as “like four writers all trying to write the same novel simultaneously, with only the barest common understanding of the plot.” The recording strategy was “lock the rehearsal room door and . . . fight for what you believe in.”39

  Holdsworth and Bruford were inclined to write experimental, jazz-influenced music. Wetton was not. “From my perspective, it was more of a puzzle than a fight,” said Jobson. “We had maybe forty or fifty musical ideas, like jigsaw pieces, and the trick was to piece them all together to make one sonic picture and a cohesive album. John was on the mainstream right, and Allan was on the dissonant left, so they perhaps had to work harder to get their compositional identities voiced. I was lucky in that my compositional style met with the most consensus, most easily.”40

  The music that survived the process was a hybrid—strong melodic hooks, sharing space with long periods of improvisation. U.K., the self-titled debut, began with a three-song suite, titled “In the Dead of Night,” that had two recurring themes. In 7/4 time, Wetton laid down a steady bass line. Jobson joined him with fast block chords from the synthesizer. When Holdsworth joined in, gaining power as the song lurched toward his solos, Bruford found places to add percussion flourishes. “The little hole in the bass line was crying out for a rachet,” Bruford said.41

  U.K.’s music thrived on that tension. It was no sequel to King Crimson; it was, as Wetton would reflect, like two bands of equal power fighting for control. And it could not last. After limited touring, and after Wetton considered splitting the band in two, Bruford and the introverted Holdsworth simply left. Wetton recruited new musicians, touring U.K. as a pop-oriented group, but by 1980 it had faded. “Not a nice experience,” Holdsworth recalled years later. “Nice chaps and everything. But a very miserable experience.”42

  Wetton followed the U.K. breakup with a solo album, Caught in the Crossfire. He was consciously finding a new sound for the 1980s; doing that meant moving even further from the tropes of progressive rock. “In the 1970s the tradition was to take 4 minutes from something I had brought in for King Crimson or UK, take those 3 or 4 minutes and turn them into a complete song,” he would say. “Starless is a perfect example: I brought in the first three minutes of the song, and they extended it into 12 minutes. A very similar thing was happening with UK. What I did with ‘Caught in the Crossfire’—I cut down 8 minutes of the additional stuff, and just gave you 4 minutes of the song.”43

  The album did not sell, and in early 1981, Wetton met with his manager, John Kalodner, about setting up a new band and began a round of speed dating with musicians who might complement his style. A South African guitarist named Trevor Rabin, whose own solo career was sputtering, didn’t click with Wetton. Geoff Downes, now free from the ersatz Yes, was another story. “I saw a great deal of potential in his approach to the keyboard, which was less of a virtuoso,” said Wetton, “but more into the textures and quite modern sounds with computers.”44

  Wetton had also been talking with Brian Lane, spitballing with him about the next project. What Lane had in mind was a “supergroup,” like U.K.—a designation coined by the press, then irksomely unshakable. His initial vision was for a five-man combo. Atlantic and David Geffen wanted the same thing. “Brian Lane wasn’t quite sure that I could cut it, and he was always used to a band having someone who sang and didn’t do anything else,” claimed Wetton. “His new Yes.”45

  Wetton worked his way into command, but the band came together in pieces. Guitarists would audition, then Geoff and John would leave in their separate roadsters. They’d pull up alongside each other at traffic lights and give the thumbs down on whoever had auditioned—until Steve Howe came in. Yes’s erstwhile guitarist signed up, and then came Carl Palmer, two years free of ELP and looki
ng for something else to do.

  The name was decided by committee, after Brian Lane pitched a series of powerful words. “Asia” just clicked. “It looked right,” said Wetton. “Four letters, four people; a very symmetrical looking word.”46 Lane fretted over the choice only when he discovered the existence of a small American band that had obviously used the name first.

  Lane, according to Wetton, was confident that he was about to launch “the biggest band in the world,” and to protect that, he arranged a photo of the four members and a full-page ad in Melody Maker. There, among the stories about the new, young, DIY stars of British music, appeared a shot of four progressive rock warhorses, all approaching forty. “This is Asia,” read the text. That was it. “It gave us a bit of security, but that’s when the ‘supergroup’ tag started happening,” Wetton recalled. “I felt uncomfortable with it. It made me cringe.”47

  The musical direction of the group came from Wetton and Downes, who steered everything toward hooks and melody. The technique of Howe and Palmer, two of the greatest players of their era, was spotlighted without allowing the music to slow down. Of the songs written for the debut album, only a few stretched for more than six minutes. Each was a self-contained pop symphony, in and out, with some time for solos but no structural inventions. “David Geffen was keen on having great musicians playing some commercial music and some prog rock pieces, but obviously a lot shorter,” Palmer said. “Asia had exactly that.”48

  Downes was crafting simple, powerful hooks out of his Fairlight. Wetton was conspicuously writing his most personal lyrics ever. “Heat of the Moment,” which would become the album’s lead single, began in 7/4 time and moved to 4/4 at the chorus. Both Downes and Howe claimed bars as chances to play solos. The lyrics, though, were all nostalgia and romance. Instead of writing for the tropes of progressive rock, Wetton was writing like a folksinger. “Before then, I hadn’t been really touched by Joni Mitchell,” he would explain. “Everything she does is first person. Up until then, I’d been groping about with abstract stuff. Suddenly, Joni Mitchell hit me right between the eyes and said, ‘No, come on. This is your pain. You write about it.’ By the time Asia came out, I was writing all first-person lyrics. My transformation was complete. I was the butterfly.”49

  Even with the packaging they took no chances. Roger Dean was commissioned for the cover, and produced a painting of a dragon reeling out of an angry sea, contemplating a magic sphere. “Bless them, John and Geoff really did take the bull by the horns and started writing endless songs,” Howe said. “But we could have done it with a few less of them and a few more songs that didn’t rest on the keyboard direction.”50

  Critics had already bludgeoned progressive rock with a rusted shovel, and buried it deep under the dirt. In 1982, when Asia’s album dropped, the same critics blasted it with all available ammo. “The sound of Asia is as homogeneous and inoffensive as Cream of Wheat,” wrote Boo Browning in the Washington Post. “Asia is nothing less than a turning-in upon itself of late-’70s commercial cynicism, spawned by the very ‘progressive’ musicians that initiated rock’s backslide. It is the autotelic summation of binge/purge radio rock—a winking man’s Toto.”51

  The album was critic-proof. “Heat of the Moment” went to number one—the first song to do that in any of the band members’ careers. Its video, which interspersed quick shots of the band with on-the-nose illustrations of the lyrics, went into heavy rotation on the nascent MTV. The video revolution was not supposed to elevate the survivors of the 1970s, and yet that’s what it was doing. When Asia went on tour, the bricks kept flying.

  “In Yes, early King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Asia’s members played music full of technical hurdles and symphonic pomp,” wrote Jon Pareles in the New York Times. “Soon groups like Kansas and Styx picked up on the pomp, minus any experiments. Asia imitates the imitators, inflating conventional pop songs with pseudosymphonic grandeur. While Geoff Downes plays churchy keyboard chords and John Wetton sings in a heavily echoed, humorless tenor, Steve Howe adds the upper-register guitar runs that he brought to Yes. Occasionally, they insert a fast unison passage to remind listeners that they’re virtuosos.”52

  “Everyone assumes it’s easy to get a hit single,” said Wetton, “and, my God, it’s possibly one of the most difficult things to do.”53

  IT WAS NOT EASY—not necessarily, as Steve Hackett was learning. He had recorded one solo album, Voyage of the Acolyte, before leaving Genesis. When he walked out, Charisma kept him on, and went on releasing his work for the better part of a decade. Please Don’t Touch came in May 1978, with a cover by Hackett’s future wife, the artist Kim Poor. It showed toys coming off a shelf to attack an understandably surprised couple.

  Vocal duties went to Steve Walsh from Kansas, whose voice one expected to hear with this sort of music. But there was also Richie Havens, as well as Randy Crawford, a soul singer from Georgia who turned an already-soulful song, “Hoping Love Will Last,” into a pure love ballad. That sat next to a title track that liner notes warned, cheekily, was “not to be played to people with heart conditions or those in severely hallucinogenic states of mind.”

  “Voyage was a bit elitist,” Hackett told Sounds. “I’ve really gone anti-concept. I keep thinking that concept albums require an explanation sheet with them. You should ideally be able to just enjoy a piece of music when you’re doing the washing-up or buying a shirt somewhere or in a restaurant or whatever.”54

  The album did not make much of a commercial impact. “Narnia,” an obvious single, ran afoul of Kansas’s label, which didn’t want Walsh playing out of school. (The cover art fared better, and according to Poor, it inspired a scene in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, in which android toys spring into violent action.) Charisma kept backing Hackett, but he knew he wasn’t writing commercial music. “Record companies were getting away from album sensibility and moving more towards singles,” he said later.55

  The three-man version of Genesis was having no problems with that. “Follow You Follow Me” had broken the band in the US, finally, and put new pressure on the trio to record and tour. The songs that would make up Duke, their first album of the 1980s, swerved even further into pop. Ambitious music was still there, and Banks took the lead on a suite of “duke”-themed compositions that opened and closed the album. Collins, however, wrote another hit, “Misunderstanding,” and an even more searching song of heartbreak titled “Please Don’t Ask.”

  That music had its origins in the collapse of Collins’s family life. “My first wife just didn’t understand what I needed to do to be happy, which is work,” he would explain.56 During the late ’70s, that meant he was away from England for months, which tested a marriage that had started to fray. While Genesis toured, Collin’s wife Andrea had an affair with a man doing renovations on their home. “I had an awful lot of songs that were not really Genesis-ey, and songs that if I brought into Genesis would not end up sounding like I wanted them to,” Collins told Melody Maker. “I played them ‘In the Air Tonight’ and ‘If Leaving Me Is Easy’ but it was kind of too simple for the band.”57

  Collins appeared on Top of the Pops to promote “In the Air Tonight,” sitting behind his keyboard, nearly alone on stage. That framing made an odd stage decoration stick out even more: a splattered paint can, with a brush sticking out. The TV audience got no explanation. Andrea knew what she was seeing: the father of her children shaming her for the affair. “That hurt me more than anything, caused me a lot of pain,” Andrea told Collins’s biographer, Ray Coleman. “I spoke to him many times about those kinds of comments and he just basically said: ‘I’m allowed to do whatever I want. It’s artistic license.’ ”58 (It was thirty-five years before Andrea finally came out and said that she had not had an affair with the decorator and that the marriage had broken up for other reasons, most of which had to do with Collins himself.59 And in his own 2016 memoir, Collins denied that the paint can had been placed to convey a message.)

  Collins me
ant nothing by it. In his memoir, three decades later, he bemoaned how a random staging decision had come to haunt him. But it haunted, and hurt, because of what he was quickly becoming. Phil Collins was a pop star.

  “Our most difficult moment could have been when Face Value [Collins’s first solo album] was such a massive success,” Tony Banks told Mojo. “We were all writing Abacab at the time. Face Value goes in at 29 and Mike and I think, ‘Pretty good.’ The next week it’s Number Two and you think, ‘Oh shit!’ No matter how strong your friendship, there is rivalry too. You feel he’s transcended the band and you wonder what effect it’s going to have. But I think we could take it because we were 30-ish by then. Anyway we carried on joking about how short he is, and that defused it completely.”60

  Hackett became more of a cult figure. The full extent of Hackett’s new persona was evident on TV in early 1983, when he appeared on a music show hosted by Rick Wakeman, another virtuoso whose old band was reaching new commercial heights without him. After a jam session, the two of them sat to talk about how they were doing just fine, really. “You went ’round areas in Europe, in eastern Europe, and you broke areas whereas before nobody had ever broken,” Wakeman said, helpfully. “I’m always pleased that I can go into a territory where it hasn’t been done by Genesis,” said Hackett, “and I can walk in there and people say, ‘Oh, yes, that’s it, yeah. We know this guy; he plays, he sings, you know. It’s like, we’re not sort of totally concerned with his past.’ ”61

  Wakeman knew the feeling. “Do you feel sometimes annoyed that people in this country don’t realize that in fact you are bigger in certain eastern European areas than in fact most other bands . . . are at the moment?” he asked. “Um, I dunno,” said Hackett. “I’ve always got the feeling that however a record does, you know, you kinda go out and play in front of people and that’s the affirmation of it.”62