------------------------------------------------------- SEPTEMBER 10, 2004 ------------------------------------------------------- Source: Boulder News http://www.bouldernews.com/bdc/boulder_at_night/article/0,1713,BDC_11136_3170073,00.html Yes celebrates 35 years with its most durable lineup By Michael Cote It's no surprise Yes guitarist Steve Howe disses his band's biggest hit: He wasn't around at the time. In 1983, the British prog-rockers made the most unlikely of comebacks with a new lineup and a slick pop sound that produced the No. 1 single "Owner of Lonely Heart" and the multiplatinum album 90125. Howe had left the band a few years before to join Asia, a supergroup that paved the way for Yes to go commercial. But for diehard fans, 90125 was hardly the Yes they knew. "Although 'Owner of a Lonely Heart' was a reasonably credible hit, it also created a desire to have more hits like that, which has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with Yes music," says Howe, who performs with Yes tonight at Red Rocks and on Saturday at the Budweiser Events Center in Loveland. "I thought, 'Well, they've thrown away the Yes badge. They've thrown away the integrity of what a band does when it doesn't want to stoop there, doesn't want the three- or four-chord song.'" Howe says this even though he knows perfectly well that Asia mined the same territory, offering such schlock as the single "Don't Cry" from its second album, Alpha, a record he says even the band didn't like. The 2004 version of Yes reunites one of the group's most popular lineups: Howe is joined by original members Jon Anderson (vocals) and Chris Squire (bass), 30-year veteran Alan White (drums) and on-again, off-again member Rick Wakeman (keyboards). "This is a more stable lineup ­ not 100 percent stable ­ but more stable than other lineups that we have had," Howe said from a recent tour stop. "We're hopeful that we can sustain it. And it seems to be the one that has the most popular vote." Howe grew up listening to American guitarists and considers jazz hero Charlie Christian and country picker Chet Atkins among his biggest influences. He joined Yes in 1971, in time for its third release, The Yes Album, which broke the band in America, thanks to radio hits, "I've Seen All Good People," "Yours Is No Disgrace" and "Starship Trooper," multi-part epics that won the band its fame. Wakeman joined the following year for Fragile, when the band hit the Top 40 with "Roundabout." On the follow-up, 1973's Close to the Edge, Yes eschewed an obvious single and offered an LP-side title suite instead. The disc remains the band's masterpiece. Howe left Yes after 1980's Drama, which the band recorded without Anderson and Wakeman, the beginning of its most volatile period of revolving lineups. Howe returned to Yes for 1990's Union ­ a compromise to settle legal disputes between two versions of Yes competing for use of the group's name. But he came back for good in the mid-'90s, when Yes attempted to recapture the magic of its classic sound on a pair of live discs and three studio albums. As far as Howe is concerned, the band has yet to reach that goal. Maybe that's why a bonus disc included with this year's 35th anniversary hits package, The Ultimate Yes, included acoustic reworkings of "Roundabout" and "South Side of the Sky," both originally from Fragile. "I think the main thing we haven't done is somehow develop the integrity of those early'70s records, the musicality and the integrity of a certain noncommercial approach to the music," Howe says. It's a quest that the British guitarist considers one of the band's most pressing issues as it plans to record new music. "To get to those things, we were all young, we were all desperate to be successful. We were different people almost, if you can imagine yourself 30 years ago," says Howe, 57. "Are you the same person? Can you do now what you could do 30 years ago the same?" Howe is certainly going to keep trying. "I look to the albums we did. There's something, I hesitate to say, magical about them," he says. "It's magical insofar as we should know how to do that, but in a way we don't. Our future records have got to be partly a rediscovery of the sort of subtleties and complexities that we added in our music, which I love very much. "I don't know what it is," Howe says, breaking out into laughter. "If I did, it would be there ... I call it integrity. There's some sort of integrity we had then that was quite marvelous. It made us go the extra mile. It made us write things like 'Turn of the Century,' like 'And You and I' ­ things that had nothing to do with even thinking vaguely about having a hit record." Close Window YesInThePress.com For site comments, inquiries, corrections, or additions, contact yitp@yesservices.com