Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  As one would imagine, the record didn’t break into the Top 50 in the U.S. (it fared better in the U.K., where it soared to number two, perhaps purely on name recognition). But the sales and support for the record just weren’t there, rendering touring impossible.

  Calling All Stations was one of the most genuinely progressive records Genesis had made in years (it sounds a bit like Marillion did at roughly the same time period). But apparently it wasn’t prog enough for older fans to be convinced that the band had shed its pop tendencies.

  “I thought the material was okay,” says D’Virgilio. “I didn’t think it was their best work, but 1 thought it was all right. I think it was safe. That’s a good word to use. With all of this stuff and the incredible jams they’d done earlier on, they weren’t doing much of that at all [on the record]. Especially with Phil having left the band, they could have taken a little bit more of a left turn. They could have gone a little more muso with it, and it may have been a bigger record. But it was a tough thing: Phil Collins was such a big part of that [band]. Tough shoes to fill.”

  “Genesis are held up to be the virtual paragon of what progressive rock tries to attain,” says the Tangent’s Andy Tillison. “I think they did some tremendous music in between Trespass and Wind & Wuthering. So basically we’re looking at 1977 as the turning point, which is what I consider to be the last of the great Genesis albums. After which they became an indisputably highly successful, sophisticated pop group.... From my perspective, they have not made a good record for thirty years, and that’s a long time not to have made a good record. Yes completely reinvented themselves, then went back to what they were before. But they still pack them in at stadiums. You can’t really knock them for that.”

  YES: CHANGES

  After a tour to support Drama and the release of a live double album, Yesshows, Yes broke up—for good, it seemed—in 1980. Hopes of a reconciliation between the members were dashed as the gang were scattered to the four corners of the musical globe: Steve Howe had found new life as a member of Asia; Rick Wakeman continued his session work and recording his critically acclaimed concept record 1984 (based on George Orwell’s novel); Jon Anderson collaborated with Greek progger Vangelis on a few projects and released his own solo recording Songs of Seven (and appeared on Wakeman’s 1984); Trevor Horn resurrected the Buggles, with some assistance and contribution from keyboardist Geoff Downes, who’d joined Howe in forming Asia.

  .. And then there were three: Genesis, 1978. Left to right: Mike Rutherford, Phil Collins, and Tony Banks.

  Meanwhile, drummer Alan White and bassist Chris Squire hadn’t given up hope of forming a stadium-rock band. Prog rock veteran and composer Dave Lawson met with Chris Squire.

  “After hearing me play on a Synclavier in the studio, Chris asked me to come out and to meet Alan White,” Lawson says. “I’ve got some recorded tracks of us playing. After I did a film called Deathwish II with Jimmy Page, I mentioned playing with Chris and Alan to Jimmy. Jimmy knew of Chris. In fact, Jimmy put some guitar tracks on the recordings we did. It appeared as though we were becoming a band, to be called XYZ [as in ex—Yes and Zeppelin.]

  “Unfortunately, the band never happened because of political reasons, and that was the end of that,” Lawson says. “But a while later, when Yes started to put the band together again, it was assumed that I would join the band. Alan White even said, ‘I’m begging you . . .’ when I said I couldn’t do it because I was so busy with sessions.”

  Enter South African guitarist/studio hound/multi-instrumentalist Trevor Rabin, who’d recorded with his band Rabbitt in the 1970s and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in the early ’80s. Since Howe had his hands full with the wildly popular Asia, Rabin was a shoo-in for a new project, dubbed Cinema, which was to be produced by former Yes singer Trevor Horn.

  “Trevor Rabin came in with a different set of fresh ideas, so, it made it all feel very new and exciting,” says Chris Squire.

  While Rabin was helping the band write new material, Trevor Horn was directing the band’s overall focus and sound. “Trevor [had] kind of had enough of the singing and realized he could use his talents to a much better degree in producing the band,” says Gary Langan, an engineer for Yes who worked with the band on 1980’s Drama and went on to find his own success with the Trevor Horn-produced studio project, the Art of Noise.

  The band needed to be reimagined, if they were to have a fighting chance in the 1980s. Moog solos were out. Twenty-minute pieces, out. Indecipherable cosmic messagings kept to a minimum. “Horn had quite firmly decided that Rick Wakeman was not going to come back into the fold,” adds Langan.

  But redefining a monster band like Yes, even if they were being labeled a dinosaur, is not an easy (or possibly even wise) decision. Who could perform with the band and yet retain some of its core values of musicianship and songwriting? If not Wakeman, then who?

  Patrick Moraz was busy with his solo album Future Memories II and, more importantly, being a keyboardist and vital part of the Moody Blues’ resurgence in the pop world with the success of the well-crafted 1981 record Long Distance Voyager. (“Although they had done the Octave album, and it was well received, it was not the kind of big comeback record the band was looking for,” says Moraz, who replaced original keyboardist Mike Pinder and made great use of keyboard technology and orchestration skills to enrich the Moodys’ sound. “When they were thinking about recording a new album, which became Long Distance Voyager, I was able to emphasis the full scope of [my] creative imagination by bringing them sounds that they were not even thinking about then,” says Moraz.)

  “Ballad of Big,” the flipside of Genesis’ breakthrough single, “Follow You, Follow Me.”

  There seemed only one logical choice—one so wild it just might work; a look back to move forward. Tony Kaye appeared, and everything took off.

  “After Tony Kaye, everything was beginning to get settled. With some shrewd talking, Jon Anderson was approached to sing for the band, which he was more than willing to do,” says Langan.

  With Anderson onboard (originally it was believed Rabin would be the singer), the name Cinema was dumped as it became apparent that the personalities that were assembled could only be called Yes. Anderson’s voice was and is too distinctive to pretend otherwise. Some still harbored doubts about the project.

  “I so hated the Drama record—it was torture for me—that when Trevor said that we’re going to do another Yes album, I said, ‘I’m not sure I can do that, mate,”’ says Langan. “Then Trevor said, ‘No, no, it is going to be different.’ I told him, ‘Trevor, if it starts to turn out like Drama, I’m going to really think about taking a backseat, because I can’t do that again.’”

  Langan, at least initially, seemed to have cause to worry. 90125 was the result of an arduous nine-month process. Kaye exited the sessions at one point due to disagreements with Horn, leaving keyboard, synth mapping, programming, and other production duties to the likes of Lawson, Langan, and Jonathan “J. J.” Jeczalik (who helped to form the Art of Noise).

  “When you have someone like Tony Kaye,” Langan says, “who is struggling to keep up with technology, you can see it in Trevor’s eyes that he’s thinking, ‘We could do this another way, and we can do it a lot quicker if I were to use so and so ...’ He’ll gently just push Tony out the way and we’ll get to work the way that Trevor wants to do it. Before you know it, you are on the sidelines and you don’t even see it coming. He can be that ruthless, but that is the way he is. The guy generates hits.

  “I also want to say that there’s nothing wrong with Tony as a keyboard player,” Langan continues. “He’s just not a programmer.”

  Said Tony Kaye in 1984: “The seven months I spent in England working on 90125 was the longest time I spent in eons.”

  “Owner of a Lonely Heart” is a microcosm showing Horn’s progressive studio approach. “All of these tracks were cut as a band to begin with,” says Langan. “It really was ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ that started out
as a bit of programming, with a set of LinnDrums in the beginning.”

  “The acoustic guitar sound for ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ was originally mapped out by me on the Synclavier and later played by Trevor Rabin,” adds Lawson.

  “The track was built from there,” says Langan. “[Squire] would put a bass track down. Then Alan would have done a drum track and then the guitars and keyboards and other samples and things. That’s how Trevor used to make his pop records—built up a layer at a time, because he did not like dealing with a live band. I think that is something Trevor has in common with Eddy Offord—they both crafted records.”

  Through Rabin’s impressive pile of material, Horn’s ever-growing production skills, quite a bit of synth programming, and a ton of multitracked instruments, the album titled 90125 (its catalog number) revitalized Yes and put Horn and Langan on the map as a production team par excellence.

  Heard over the radio at the time of its release, not only did “Owner of a Lonely Heart” not sound like classic Yes, it had a frightening sonic freshness. Between Rabin’s reverb- and harmonizer-soaked guitar solo and the interesting use of panning techniques throughout, nothing compared to the song.

  “Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic was just over the moon,” says Langan. “We had helped to revive this dinosaur band. I think the success of the record was down to the chemistry and combination of people involved. Primarily, if I’m being honest, I’ll put that down to Trevor and myself, because there is an art form that Trevor and I had in making records. We were able to impart that on this Yes album.”

  “That was my favorite Yes,” says Peter Banks. “I thought the 90125 album was fantastic. That was when I started liking the band [again] because they at least sounded different. Obviously Steve [Howe] wasn’t happy with it. But I thought that band was great. I saw them play quite a few gigs in the States.... My only complaint was the hidden keyboard player and the hidden guitar player, Billy Sherwood. I thought that was kind of stupid. Having another keyboard player underneath the stage, I thought that was . . . like circus time. Having a stunt keyboard player. What is that all about?”

  “Around the 1980s/90125 period, when samplers and sounds were needing to be loaded under the stage and stuff, there were guys doing that,” says former Yes member Billy Sherwood. “When I toured with them in the 1990s on the Talk tour, I was onstage with them and there were still guys changing disks and putting up the next synth sounds. It was more technical things they were doing down there than musical. A lot of people have the illusion that there were guys down there playing the parts for everybody, but the reality was that it was more technical. You couldn’t have Tony Kaye onstage ... changing discs and that kind of nonsense.”

  Yes were as strong—and controversial—as ever, touring both sides of the Atlantic. On the road, the band had the opportunity to play for audiences who had missed them in the 1970s, performing ’80s renditions of songs such as “Starship Trooper” and “I’ve Seen All Good People.” Anderson even dusted off “Soon,” the cathartic climax of the epic “The Gates of Delirium,” for the shows.

  The follow-up to 90125 wouldn’ t materialize until 1987 and the release of Big Generator. Yes placed themselves in the unenviable position of having to follow a hit record, and the band appeared to be putting it off.

  It’s little wonder. Big Generator got off to a rough start. For one thing, it took nearly two years after the band’s ’84 world tour in support of 90125 to get down to recording. The process began, as it had for 90125, in a slew of recording studios.

  At every turn, Big Generator stresses the need to leave behind the old ways and enter a new world. Fittingly, the song “Big Generator” refers to the power of creation in the universe (what some call “God”), and the entire song cycle of the album (in particular side two of the original LP) feels like a meditation on and a communication with this energy; a spiritual journey to enlightenment, capped off by the ecological prayer and plea for global awareness called “Holy Lamb (Song for Harmonic Convergence).”

  Big Generator is quite an extraordinary accomplishment indeed, having garnered two U.S. Top 40 hits—“Rhythm of Love” and “Love Will Find a Way,” cementing Yes’s return. The Yes saga might have ended on a peaceful note, except trouble was brewing once again. It wouldn’t be long before Anderson flew the coop and the band was split in half, opening the door to yet another supergroup.

  “It’s ironic that I wrote the song ‘Perpetual Change’ in 1970, because it really almost should be an anthem to describe Yes,” Squire says.

  MEANWHILE, GTR

  Disenchanted with Asia’s musical direction and internal strife (e.g., Wetton’s battle with personal demons), Steve Howe in the mid-1980s found himself recording with the likes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the techno-pop band Propaganda, both produced by Trevor Horn for his ZTT label.

  Back in 1982, Howe had recorded an acoustic bit for the song “Up in the Air” for the Dregs’ Industry Standard (Howe exchanged analog tapes with Dregs guitarist Steve Morse) and discovered how much he enjoyed working with another axe man.

  At the same time, former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett began to formulate ideas to put together a new band. After discussions with manager Brian Lane, contact was made with Howe, and the two met in 1984 and traded licks, and something just clicked. It was in these early days that Howe and Hackett had decided that they would front this band with two lead guitarists, who could splash the musical canvas full of sonic color using nothing but guitars and guitar synthesizers.

  Though both Howe and Hackett had the reputation of widening the bandwidth of possibilities of the guitar in the realms of electric and acoustic, crossing over into synthesizer territory seemed just as good a reason as any to form a band in the mid-1980s.

  At this point, anything the keyboards could do, guitarists felt they should be able to do as well. Using a variety of MIDI-controlled synth modules such as Roland GR-700 and GR-300 units, OSCars, Synclaviers, Fairlights, Emulators, and so on for sonic options and layering, Hackett, and Howe were able to play sound samples of pipe organs, cellos, bells, harps, calliopes, drums, or anything they wanted. They’d discover odd and unexpected ways in which stored keyboard sound samples (and other sonic textures) interface with the nuance of guitar technique.

  For prog rock fans it was a dream come true. The combined star power was undeniable even for cynics, and people would come out in droves to see these two guitar titans on the same stage for an evening. For the two iconic guitarists, it may have also been a shot at redemption; Howe could position himself as the “classic” Yes guitarist in a modern recording setting post-90125, and Hackett could grab the much-deserved spotlight. The truth was, Howe had experienced massive success with Asia, and Hackett had been charting solo records in Britain since—and during—his Genesis days. In fact, the first eight Hackett studio solo albums charted. In short, GTR was full of musical possibilities and held the promise of a true collaboration between two skilled musicians. It sounded nice on paper; living it was to be another story....

  The first step after Hackett and Howe began exchanging tapes was to establish a band around them. Ex-Marillion drummer Jonathan Mover got the gig, along with bassist Phil Spalding.

  The band was christened GTR (an abbreviation commonly used by sound engineers on their mixing boards to denote guitar inputs) and tapped Asia’s Geoff Downes as producer, in the hopes that his knowledge of keyboards and synthesizers would be beneficial for the record. The rehearsals and recording sessions were going swimmingly.

  “When the Heart Rules the Mind,” which became a Top 20 hit in the U.S., was one of the more dynamic and successful pieces on the record (sketched out early in the writing process) and features beautiful nylon-stringed acoustic guitar passages juxtaposed with layered, arena-rock guitar bigness.

  “[The main melody] was a line written on nylon guitar and a line that transplanted to the voice,” Hackett told the author in 2002. “It was changed to accommodate voices and harmonies
. There [are] some harmony parts on that track that would have done credit to the Beach Boys, I think.”

  Other songs include “You Can Still Get Through,” “Jekyll and Hyde” (the bell sounds you hear at the opening of the song were created by the attack of two guitar synths), the deceptive “Imagining” (Hackett begins the track with finger-style classical guitar as Howe floats above it with orchestral strings via guitar synth; the tune ends with Howe and Hackett trading licks in something resembling flamenco style), and two solo pieces: “Hackett to Bits” (which is a “whammy-bar extravaganza” reinterpretation of the title song from Hackett’s 1978 record Please Don’t Touch!) and Howe’s twelve-string electric showpiece “Sketches in the Sun” (highlighting Howe’s ability to play a delicate melody and rhythmic ostinato simultaneously).

  Despite the success of the tracks, some within the band felt the record held more potential than it ultimately delivered. “GTR took a long time to get going and lasted a short time after it came out,” says Mover. “It was a wonderful experience for me, because it gave me international notoriety and playing with Steve and Steve was amazing. But it was also a big disappointment, too, on some levels. The kiss of death to that was Geoffrey Downes. No offense, but Geoffrey wanted to do Asia Part II. Before GTR chose Geoffrey as a producer, we were progressive rock. You had a lot of songs in odd times and songs that were nine, ten, eleven minutes long, with different sections and breakdowns.

  “Geoffrey destroyed a lot of the record,” Mover continues. “He chopped up a lot of the odd times and made them even. He had taken out a lot of the countermelodies and rhythms that Hackett and I were kind of doing and was turning it into a pop record. Me, Mr. Mouth, like I was with Fish, I came into the studio . . . and I started listening . . . and the polyrhythms and double [kick] and ambidextrous stuff I was playing are all gone. I looked at Geoff Downes and said, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, chopping my drums up? I didn’t play that. That’s not what I would have thought of.’ Steve Howe got a little bit snippy with me, and said, ‘You have no idea. You have no experience. You’re the youngest one here. We know what we’re doing.’ I looked at Steve Howe and said, ‘You can take your fucking record and shove it up your ass.’ I quit the band. I was twenty or nineteen years old.