by Will Romano
Yes: Fragile (1972)
Rick Wakeman’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1973)
Yes: Tormato (1978)
Yes: Drama (1980)
Yes: 90125 (1983)
Yes: Union (1991)
It must be said that Moraz offered something new to the band, for good or bad, and his contributions to Relayer made it one of the strangest and perhaps most underrated records of the Yes catalog.
One story was circulating in the press that Wakeman had rejoined Yes prior to the firing of Moraz.
The band parked at Montreux, Switzerland’s Mountain Studios with an eye toward producing the new record themselves, flying without sound engineering wingman Eddy Offord. Yes had something to prove. Going for the One was a rebirth. Gone were the side-long epics so prevalent on the band’s three previous studio albums, replaced (largely) with shorter songs. (The band dropped the idea of presenting Roger Dean—like sci-fi spacescapes to represent their music, in favor of modern, photographic shapes of skyscrapers designed by Hipgnosis, featuring a kind of twentieth-century Adam, pre—original sin, lost and in these monumental technological structures, facing this new-day Eden and confronting himself in the process.)
Just as Relayer was the perfect platform for the Moraz version of Yes, it’s hard to imagine Going for the One without Wakeman.
Going for the One landed in the number-one spot in Britain, and reached the Top 10 in the U.S. But there was bad news right around the corner that even the liturgical experience of writing, playing, and recording “Awaken” couldn’t purge.
The band’s next record, Tormato, long seen as Yes’s creative low point, was the end of the band in more ways than one, with repercussions that would span two decades. Aside from “Future Times,” “Rejoice,” “Release, Release” (which almost seems like a commentary on reactionary music, such as punk), and, to a degree, “On the Silent Wings of Freedom,” most of the tracks seem limp, though not totally devoid of subtlety and complexity.
Spiritual wisdom imparted to audiences with previous releases seemed to dry up by 1978. Anderson and the band seemed to sink into New Age, semi-Druid-ish mystique (examine the original inner LP sleeve for graphic designs of sacred stone circles and “tors,” or hills, dotting the British countryside and connected by magic lei-lines).
“Arriving UFO,” for instance, takes the experience of finding answers in the vastness of the cosmos a little too literally. (And who could forget the chunks of splattered tomato splashed across the front cover—a silly and messy pun on the title? If this was an attempt at a practical joke, we didn’t get it.) Even Howe admits that the band was unfocused and that “maybe we lost our way a little bit with Tormato.”
The lyrical obfuscation that made Yes so mysterious was all but gone, no matter how well intentioned (“Don’t Kill the Whale” and the aforementioned “UFO”). Maybe it’s because Tormato doesn’t know what it wants to be: a straight-ahead rock record; a slab of faux—New Age enlightenment; a tongue-in-cheek satire; a techno rock experiment (featuring keyboard devices such as the relatively brand-new eight-track-tape-driven Birotron). In the past, fusing these concepts and different musical modes wouldn’t have been a problem. But with Tormato, something doesn’t quite gel.
By the time Yes were ready to record their next album, to be titled Drama, Wakeman and Anderson were having serious doubts about the future of the band and where the music was going. They were also feeling like hamsters in a track, gearing up for yet another record and another tour to follow it. During the sessions, Wakeman and Anderson decided to get off the ride.
The three remaining members—Howe, Squire, and White—recruited the pop duo the Buggles—Trevor Horn and keyboardist Geoff Downes, who had just scored a major hit with “Video Killed the Radio Star.”
Going for the One (1977). Yes’s return to greatness?
Some of the material, polished and reworked, from abandoned recording sessions (post-Tormato, released as The Golden Age) wound up on Drama.
“The Buggles were experimenting in their own way,” says Howe. “‘I think the song “Tempus Fugit,“’ Trevor said to me the other day, ‘was remarkable.’ You know what is remarkable about it is that we hadn’t even met Trevor and Geoff when we had recorded that. They overdubbed on top of it. At least, that’s how Trevor remembers it.”
“Tempus Fugit” may have been one of the only bright spots of the record, and Howe refers to Drama as one of the “heaviest albums Yes had done,” but a lot of it feels like patchwork.
Drama charted, and the band went on the road with Horn and Downes (who later joined Howe in the pop-prog supergroup Asia) to support the record, but Yes had wheezed its last breath. Like their prog rock comrades ELP, the Yes behemoth appeared to be dead and gone. Or so some thought....
Yes would return with a number-one U.S. hit called “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and surprise everyone, while transforming themselves from prog rock “dinosaur” to studio prog-pop band for the tech-savvy 1980s.
(Andrew Putler/Getty Images)
GENESIS
Crymes and Misdemeanors
DRAWN TOGETHER BY THEIR SHARED EXPERIENCE at Charterhouse (one of the most prestigious boarding schools in England, located in Godalming, Surrey), vocalist Peter Gabriel, East Hoathly keyboardist/pianist Anthony Banks, West London guitarist Anthony Phillips, and Guildford guitarist/bassist Michael Rutherford created their own environment: a virtual music scene, isolated from the rest of the country and most other musicians.
Two competing school bands, the Anon and the Garden Wall, joined forces and become one group that combined the talents of future Genesis members Rutherford, Phillips, Gabriel, and Banks, along with those of drummer Chris Stewart (who later became a successful travel writer). The quintet’s combined efforts produced a demo, “She Is Beautiful” (sometimes referred to as “She’s So Beautiful”) that caught the attention of producer and Charterhouse alumnus Jonathan King, who’d recently had a Top 5 British hit with “Everybody’s Gone to the Moon,” in 1965.
King heard the demo and was immediately attracted to Gabriel’s voice, in which he heard a rare soul, passion, and “smokiness,” as he describes it. He agreed to work with the band, dubbing them Genesis.
“I thought they had great talent but were too self-indulgent,” says King, who’d invited a fledgling Genesis to record more demos. “When I discovered them, they were not as good musically as they thought they were. So I used to trim and cut them down . . . and pointed them in a certain direction—more acoustic than pop, giving them Bee Gees albums to listen to and, something they don’t mention all the time, all the Crosby, Stills and Nash early stuff.”
Genesis recorded “The Silent Sun” and “A Winter’s Tale” while formulating plans for an LP, which would become the band’s 1969 debut, From Genesis to Revelation (a concept album based on stories and characters from the Bible).
Despite King’s best effort and Genesis’s enthusiasm, From Genesis to Revelation didn’t do much of anything to excite the public. Undeterred, the band continued to write new material, having been spurred on by the adventurous sounds coming from the Moody Blues and King Crimson in the late 1960s. Genesis saw the way forward: ambitious music that rocked.
When their business relationship with King had run its course, the band began to look seriously at finding a new label. They soon came to the attention of the Famous Charisma label. “We were the first band signed by Tony Stratton-Smith—everybody called him Strat—to his Charisma label,” says Mark Ashton, drummer for Rare Bird. “It was Graham Field, the organist who formed Rare Bird, and the band’s producer, John Anthony, who really introduced Genesis to Strat, who had been managing the Nice. Genesis became one of the first bands signed to Charisma, and the rest, as they say . . .”
With yet another new drummer, John Mayhew, Genesis recorded 1970’s Trespass, featuring the band’s patented organ and dual twelve-string guitar sonic tapestry (harkening back to the sound of Crosby, Stills and Nash) on material the band had b
een working on the previous year, including the menacing nine-minute track “The Knife,” the band’s first major feat as songwriters.
Trespass lives up to its title. The explosive seven-minute multidimensional opener “Looking for Someone” is followed by “White Mountain,” “Visions of Heaven,” and “Stagnation” (a song that developed from an earlier piece called “Movement”), the last of which features the band’s signature hypnotic twelve-string acoustic picking, Gabriel’s sweet flute playing, and a Banks warbling organ solo.
These were incredibly mature songs for young musicians, and Genesis were demonstrating that they could inhabit a progressive rock territory similar to that of Procol Harum, the Nice, Traffic, and even Yes and King Crimson—resting somewhere between English nineteenth-century renaissance, European folk music, American gospel, twentieth-century art music, and some as-yet-unnamed rock subgenre.
Keyboardist Banks admits that the closer (and future live favorite) “The Knife” was written with the Nice in mind.
The song also inspired LP cover illustrator Paul Whitehead, whose pen-and-ink drawings Gabriel had seen in a gallery, to complete one of his most memorable works. “When I did that cover, they had written four of the songs already,” says Whitehead. “They were all very romantic. So we came up with the idea of doing a cover with a king and queen looking out at their kingdom, and Cupid peeking at them from behind the curtain. I started working on it, I got halfway through it, and I got a call from Peter [Gabriel], who said, ‘We’re going to have to scrap that idea.’ They had decided to use a song called ‘The Knife’ on the record and said that the cover I’d done didn’t go with the song, you know? I was like, ‘No way. I’ve done all of this work and they are just going to scrap it.’ I said, ‘Can’t we find some alternatives?’ Peter said, ‘If you can think of something that works with what you’ve done, fine.’ I had all kinds of ideas, such as spilling a bottle of ink over it, burning it, and doing different things to it that would corrupt the image.”
Nothing was really working for Whitehead. But a visit to an art exhibition in London triggered an idea. “There was an Italian artist showing his work,” says Whitehead. “His thing was slashing the canvas with a razor blade. ‘Bingo.’ I said to the band, ‘Why don’t we get a knife, the knife you’re talking about, and slash the canvas and take a photograph of that.’ They said, ‘You wouldn’t slash the canvas.’ I said, ‘You’re damn right I would.’ For me, it was the solution, because I didn’t want to do the work again.”
Completed by the appropriate visual, Trespass is one of the band’s strongest packages. However, the world saw it a bit differently. Trespass didn’t connect with a mass audience in Britain, where it failed to chart, and it wasn’t even on the radar in the U.S. It soon sank without much notice.
This could have been a crushing blow for young musicians, but Genesis, along with labelmates Van der Graaf Generator, were Tony Stratton-Smith’s favorite bands, his pet projects, one might say. Regardless of the shifting winds of pop music, he was going to see to it that they did not fail, even if it pooling all his resources.
“I think our band financed Charisma, basically,” says Ashton, whose Rare Bird had scored a Top 30 hit in the U.K. with “Sympathy.” “It was a small concern for a couple of years. Strat branched out, Genesis started to do better, although it took Genesis a few albums to get on their feet.”
Genesis, 1977. Left to right: Steve Hackett, Tony Banks, Chester Thompson, Mike Rutherford, and Phil Collins. (Photo courtesy of Atco)
“I think Strat felt strongly about the serious nature of rock as an art form,” says Chris Adams, front man/guitarist/vocalist of the Scottish band String Driven Thing, also signed to Charisma. “Back then, the U.K. was like the R&D department for rock, and labels like Charisma had one aim: to break a band in the States. Apart from credibility, this meant huge financial rewards. And after Van der Graaf Generator split up [in 1972, for the first time], Genesis were definitely protected. They were the ones who could deliver that payload.”
It seems Stat was unshakably loyal in his devotion to Genesis. Charisma backed the band through thick and thin, and even as Genesis made personnel changes. Sensing their rhythm section wasn’t strong enough, the band had to make a hard decision.
Mayhew went quietly.
Enter Chiswick, London, native Phil Collins, a child drummer prodigy, who began playing when he was five years old and had played a bit part in A Hard Day’s Night.
Collins was a member of the pop rock band Flaming Youth and was certainly more aggressive and versatile than Mayhew. And Collins had confidence. Having arrived early at Gabriel’s parents’ house, he was asked to wait outside, have a swim in the pool. As he did, Collins listened to all the mistakes the other drummers were making and used them to his advantage. He aced the audition.
The second personnel change was completely shocking to the band. Largely due to his dislike of touring and general stage fright, guitarist Phillips wanted to bow out. No one saw it coming. “Ant” was so strong a musical personality and here he was, unable to continue because of an irrational phobia.
Ant was more than a guitar player—he was a friend from school. How would they replace him?
Gabriel and the band, leafing through the Melody Maker, came upon an ad placed by a musician that read, in part, “determined to strive beyond existing stagnant music forms.” The wording resonated with Genesis, and they soon called the the twenty-one-year-old London-based guitarist for an audition.
From Genesis to Revelation (1969)
That guitarist, Steve Hackett, dazzled them not only with his technical playing but, more than anything else, with his ability to manipulate sound. Through the use of Hackett’s guitar effects, Genesis heard the future, and asked him to join.
Without wasting time, the band were on the road and began to work on material for their next record, Nursery Cryme, which pushed Genesis into escapism and the world of British absurdity/fantasy.
The impact Hackett and Collins had on the band is felt immediately on Nursery Cryme: Collins demonstrates a basher’s verve and a jazzer’s dexterity, and even makes his lead singing debut on “For Absent Friends.”
Nursery Cryme (1971): Phil Collins’s and Steve Hackett’s Genesis debut.
Hackett is at once a monster and an ensemble player. The magic in Hackett’s playing has always been his natural resources: He had the chops to cut anyone’s head off if the song called for it, but his real contribution to the music was his ability to use sonic textures—Hackett would become known for his use of the Rose Morris MXR Phase 90 pedal—to converse with Banks’s organ lines and Gabriel’s melodic vocals, to help direct the band into virtually unexplored musical areas.
As such, the band recorded a tune they had been kicking around for some time, called “The Musical Box” (containing a reference to “Old King Cole,” a traditional Celtic nursery rhyme), which was shaped by the unusual way Rutherford tuned his twelve-string acoustic, with high and low strings harmonizing, lending the song its air of “carousel.”
“Seven Stones”; “Harold the Barrel” (based on an inane sequence of events leading up to the main character willfully and literally going out on a ledge); the comedic sci-fi drama about photosynthetic serial killers, “The Return of the Giant Hogweed” (the fuzzed-out guitar riffing is something akin to heavy-metal baroque, courtesy of Hackett’s string pull-offs and hammering, years before Eddie Van Halen had thought of doing something similar); and “The Fountain of Salmacis” (based on the myth of Hermaphroditus, who was transformed into a hermaphrodite) are stirring and groundbreaking.
These were some of Genesis’s most dynamic songs, not only compositionally but sonically, thanks to producer John Anthony. Whether owing to a cymbal wash that’s utterly consumed by monolithic Mellotron tones, generating aural visions of spraying waterfalls; or voices tucked into neat little corners in the mix, cropping up in unusual places, the music has depth, giving perspective to and underscoring Gabriel’s mytholo
gical lyrics.
Paul Whitehead remembers the band’s creative process for Nursery Cryme. “The record company had a house down in the country in Crowborough where the band used to go and rehearse and write and so on,” says Whitehead. “I got invited down a couple of times in the middle of the creative process. You know, ‘Come on down and stay for a couple of days and you can figure out what’s going on.’ Well, what would happen is you’d get up in morning and Peter Gabriel had written lyrics. ‘What do you think of these?’ Everybody would look at it and would write the music from that. Or vice versa: They had the music written and Peter would write the lyrics. Being a part of the process, I gave the band the titles for Trespass, Nursery Cryme, and Foxtrot. They were stuck for titles.”
One of the things Genesis understood, as did King Crimson and Yes, was the power of their LP covers’ imagery to help complete an artistic package. Gazing at Victorian illustrations and fairy-tale books with Gabriel to stir up ideas for Nursery Cryme, Whitehead came up with a concept that would represent the music and Gabriel’s unique and strange take on folk tales. “The cover was obviously Alice in Wonderland—inspired, an old English Victorian story, set on a croquet field,” says Whitehead. “But instead of croquet balls, we’d use rolling heads. ”
Nursery Cryme was a powerful work from a band that included two new members, but greater work lay ahead. This is obvious from the opening bars of the band’s next record, 1972’s Foxtrot: We are transported to a different place and time as soon as we hear the phantasmagoric Mellotron strings of “Watcher of the Skies,” streaming at us like the vivid colors of a Dario Argento horror film, capturing the “sights” and sounds of the song’s sci-fi lyrical theme.
