By: Robert Cavuoto
During the encore the band promises to debut material off a long awaited new CD, Heaven and Earth, due out July 8th , just in time for the tour.
Yes was founded in 1968 and throughout their career they have created some of the most important and influential music in rock history, such as iconic pieces “Roundabout,” “Close to the Edge,” “I’ve Seen All Good People,” “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” and countless others. Having sold over 50 million records over its 46 year career, Yes continues creating masterful music that inspires fans and musicians from around the world.
I had the pleasure of speaking with the guitar legend Steve Howe about the new tour, the upcoming new CD and how his playing and the band have evolved over nearly five decades!
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Robert Cavuoto: I’m excited to hear that Yes is going out to play two of the fan’s favorite albums.
Steve Howe: We’re doing Fragile and Close to the Edge. We’ve dropped Going for the One from last summer and replaced it with a selection of songs and a new song from our new CD, Heaven and Earth. We think two albums and a selection of songs is going to work better for the summer than three albums. It just gives it a little more flexibility in the way of introducing a song from the new album.
Robert: At what point in your career did you realize the significance of these two albums and the band’s unique sound?
Steve Howe: There was an instant realization, because of their success. Fragile was just enormous; that was our first really big album and soon we started delivering records that Atlantic said went gold on release. We obviously realized we were doing something right and weren’t doing too many things wrong. When I formed Asia after a 10-year run with Yes, I got to a point where I didn’t want to keep replacing members. I’d done that for 10 years with keeping Yes together and it didn’t hold any interest for me.
That fell apart reasonably rapidly, due to the usual thing that comes into play with bands, certainly when they’ve been successful, a bit of over indulgence and craziness. I thought I’d form GTR, and we did. But when Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe [ABWH] happened, I realized that although Chris wasn’t there, and we had the wonderful Tony Levin, that was the first chance for me to take stock of what Yes was about and look at the music retrospectively.
We played Philadelphia on the ABWH tour in ’89. We played “And You and I,” and something amazing happened when we finished the song, and they didn’t stop clapping for nearly 15 minutes. I used to leave the stage at that point and take a break for somebody else to do a solo spot. I couldn’t leave the stage. I was glued to the floor as these people roared and cheered. I realized that even without Chris, bless him, at that point, there can be a combination of people who can go on and play a song that totally cause the show to stop. The show stopped in its tracks, and that’s when I think I got a perspective, which I hadn’t had during my period with Asia and GTR. So you kind of have to go back to it to re-evaluate it.
Robert: I imagine the way that these songs were recorded 40 plus years ago have evolved as you play them live for so long. Do you find that’s to be the case or do you play them note for note?
Steve Howe: Let’s just loosely go through the plot. We make a recording; we go out in the 70s and played those recordings and we’re quite unaware of how much we rocked up everything. It was faster; there was more distortion; there was not the level of detail in the way that we’re interested in doing the songs now. Once Union came along and I rejoined Yes in 1995 that’s when detail became a new issue; “Hang on; we’re not playing that like the record.”
So when you come forward to now, when we’re doing the album we seem more fanatical about things, we try to take out the bits that aren’t in the record. We still allow each other a certain amount of freedom though. I know there’s something around the middle of Close to the Edge that Chris plays that’s not on the record. I could say, “That’s not on the record; don’t play it Chris,” but we give each other a bit of head room to do some of those things, without it being an issue.
So, in fact, we’ve brought back detail when we weren’t even aware we lost it. We’ve reinvented the level of detail that we expect, but it’s not 100%; it’s never gonna be. There are some things that even one key change we will never do the same, because nobody can ever sing it the way we recorded it. But there are certain things – like this ending – you have to have an ending to a song. [laughter] It’s no joke that we’ve taken it as far as we enjoy taking it, and, in a way, we don’t want to take it any further. But it’s quite a considerable amount of detail, certainly more than any other cover band or any member of Yes, who goes out and plays Yes songs has ever balked at?. We are the detail specialists, without doubt.
Robert: You talked a little bit about how the songs have evolved, how has the band changed since the ‘70s? How has the tone, the mood, the strength, the energy of the band changed?
Steve Howe: It’s not easy. [Laughter] The band is a makeup of [A.] many different personalities and [B.] the music. It’s run in a whole different way. That, in a way, does inspire a different sense of freedom within the band, because there may have been people in the band, and I say may have been people in the band who thought they were the leaders, but there is no single leader to Yes.
We don’t take orders from one person, and we won’t. We refuse to, because we are a shared – not totally democratic – but along the lines of a democratic idea. There are people who’ve got a lot of ideas and some members have fewer ideas. Those people with fewer ideas are happy to agree to whatever the best ideas come forward from other members.
So we’re all weak at times and we’re all strong at times. I think that’s what’s different about the band; we openly acknowledge that. There is no room for the kind of egos that might have flowered like in the ‘70s – almost to strangle the group. That happened later on and throughout our career. So the group is a lot more controlled and the way we run it with our manager/tour manager. And we’re lucky to not need a whole office load of people to run this group.
We don’t run a small empire running like Apple did with the Beatles, like many groups have when they’re with a big agent or manager. They’ve got all this office staff; we don’t have any of that. It’s a very streamlined, sensible operation, but internally, its a million miles away from anything it was before. I’m glad of that because if anything, it would be absolutely tedious if it was the same.
We have some of the same issues, the same problems of how the group runs, how it makes decisions of what we do. Those are our constant problems. But that’s the same for any business, and after all, our business is music and you’re not supposed to use the word “business” in the same sentence. But it is a business and we are determined to survive through it. We don’t do anything else.
I was in Asia and I do solo jobs and the trio, but, basically, Yes has been a big part of my career. It’s the reason why I’m successful. That requires me to give a certain amount; but it also requires me to take a certain amount. As long as that give-and-take is a good thing; but it’s nothing like the band. It’s not so crazy or bent out of shape but it can have problems and almost grind to a halt. So things haven’t changed beyond recognition, but it’s a different animal.
Robert: Are there any songs that you look forward to performing live off these two albums?
Steve Howe: Well, Close to the Edge is a very powerful record. There’s nothing on there I don’t like playing and there’s only three songs. [Laughter] That makes it easier.
Fragile – “The South Side of the Sky” was one of the last songs we added to that album. We did most of it in the studio. We didn’t really rehearse that song, and yet, that’s got a lot of charm about it. I like the way that it’s kind of a black and white song. It’s got a rock part, but the other part is very, very pretty and a kind of gentle piece. I think that’s what we do in Yes. We marry 
different styles together, and if we didn’t, it would be quite boring. So, I’m glad on “South Side” we did that. It’s quite expansive; it can take improvisation. It’s also got structures from my pre-Yes life.
I don’t know if you knew but some of that came from a song called “The Ghost of Never Street,” which many people don’t know anything about. The group folded, and the tapes were lost and buried. Then, due to certain events, I re-released them in ’78, because I wanted to pay tribute to what that band was about. That was called The Bodast Tapes.
So, there was an element of that on Fragile too. There were some bits of music and guitar riffs that came from an earlier incarnation that I thought was never going to come out. I think it’s a wealthy record in musicality. Fragile is something that if you put on headphones, it really is something to listen to. Most probably the high spot is really “Roundabout.” It’s a song we played as an encore for years, and then I started saying, “Please, don’t let’s play this like an encore.” If we play at the encore we try to play it with the precision it needs and not just burn it away, not just rock it away. That took some bringing back detail.
Robert: You’re a legendary guitarist from playing with Yes to Asia to GTR. How do you evolve and grow as a player yet consistently maintain your unique style?
Steve Howe: I don’t know, really, I don’t necessarily think about it on that level. I think of it as one long thing going right the way through it all – which is just me as a guitarist. Whether it’s Yes, or Asia, or the trio, or solo, I’m backing partly the same thing but I’m always looking to not be stylistically similar. I don’t have to work at that very hard. It comes to natural to me. When I’ve written songs I think of them in terms of whether they might run with Yes or whether it might be a trio piece, or whether, in fact, I’d prefer to play it as a solo guitar piece. I’ve got that choice, which is really the thing that drives my sensation, the freedom in my life; I couldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t a free person.
People like my wife have helped to make me feel free, even though we love each other, we’re married, and we’ve had kids together, I still feel free. I think my wife understands why that is or how that is, or how she’s helped to make me feel free. It’s because I need that spirit in my music. That means when I pick up a guitar and I’m doing a solo show, I know what to do. It is the same with Yes.
When I’m recording with Yes, I know I need a batch of guitars. I can walk in the studio with no idea what I’m going to play, plug in and start playing. That’s partly because I think I’ve never really learned to play music, in an academic sense, so I can improvise. That’s the key to my whole love of music, even though a lot of things I like aren’t improvised, I do feed off the improvisational ability I have. But also that helps me to structure music, because I start by improvising, then I structure the improvisation.
It’s not one thing or the other; I wouldn’t be here, talking to you today if I didn’t see both polarities as being a bit like Heaven and Earth. The one is a very practical, realistic, “Oh, I play the guitar; I’ve got fingers this long and this many guitars with six strings. That’s earthbound, because it’s all about physical restrictions or possibilities.
Heaven is like freedom. It’s like the yin and yang of life, something that we don’t even know if it exists. It isn’t necessarily in one place. It might be all over the universe. I’m not just a musician. I have interests and some of them lie with cars or models or quantum physics. I’m interested in stuff that not everybody is interested in, thank God. I m not a conformist; I’m a revolutionary. That’s the way I like to think of myself, as an inventor, not necessarily of objects, but of possibilities in music. One of my great inspirations recently has been Vladimir Ashkenazy, who plays Bach on the piano. I heard it and said, “This is it; this is it.” It is the most ultimate music you can possibly hear. I don’t know whether it goes further than this, but hopefully it does.
Robert: You said you were going to be putting out a new Yes CD. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Steve Howe: Heaven and Earth is a very fresh and collaborative record. We only started it in January. We spent quite a while preparing the material. I was trying to put the brakes on everyone saying, “We’ve just not ready to start; let’s get ready. Let’s have a lot of material.”
In the end we had plenty of material; we had more than we needed, which was really what I wanted. There are songs written by Jon and me, Chris and Jon, and Geoff and Jon. There are songs by us individually as well. Basically, we didn’t know what the album would be like. The title is quite a visionary title because of the two plains – the one of physical reality or restrictions of what you can do or the limits within which you work. But the emotional or spiritual experience has nothing to do with physical.
It’s not such a predictable album, “Oh, yeah, they did an album like that.” It’s not like that. It’s quite representative of the way that Yes has been evolving. It gives Jon Davison a chance to feed off the idea he had in his mind. His hope was that he would visit all of us, which he did, and collaborate in different degrees with different members. So I hope it’s going to be quite an enjoyed album. I hope it can also mainly satisfy the people who already like us. I’m not one of those dreamers who imagines that everybody 18-years-old is going to go out and buy the new Yes album. They’ve got their own interests, but, hopefully, this record isn’t irrelevant. And we’d like it to be heard more than Fly From Here, even though it did very well and was a strong record. We hope, that we might make an impression on the music business in some way with our particular recipe which has been reinvented. I think it’s unlike a Yes record, but carries enough trademarks to be recognized.
