----------------------------------------------------- FEBRUARY 1973 ----------------------------------------------------- Source: Guitar Magazine Steve Howe Interview - Part I By Ken Achard KA: You're interested in jazz, you're interested in classical music, you're interested in every facet of guitar playing. Your classical playing, is it something you've drifted into, or is it something you've always been involved in? SH:: Well, after about four years of playing I became aware that guitar was playing in every field of music. I wanted to be able to go through them and to spend time, as I encountered each kind of guitar music. Originally there was more intelligent music to listen to, but that's gone circle upon circle; every time I come back to rock and roll --and I mean that -- and then I might grow my fingernails and I'm off again, you know, it just depends on what I'm called upon to do. If somebody came and wanted me to work with a musical group in a direction I haven't played in yet, which might be more improvisation, then I would be glad to encounter that. I've done a little bit, a taste of it here and there, yet I haven't really played for a while in that vein, you know. It's something I'd like to do. KA: You say that you move from vein to vein; if something crops up you move into it. Do you think your position in Yes is transient inasmuch as you'll go on to something else, or are you there as a semi-permanent thing? SH: I'm there, yes. Semi-permanent? Permanently -- and I think Yes moves in the same way as I do, you know; we guide each other a lot, and there's a lot of giving and taking musically. Jon had a fad where he would play a lot of symphonic music, and I would be playing a lot of concertos -- that was one comparison where we would link music up, we would realise that everybody was broadening their wings a lot and listening. So yes, I think we'll become more versatile in the way it pulls out of different veins of music from the past, putting them together, trying to conjure up something new. Possibly we'll step into that a lot in the future, musically, because we have done a few things that we wanted to do. So we are opening up, looking for new things. KA: In the position you're in at the moment, everybody in the band is what I would call a virtuoso on their respective instruments, which is nice. Do you think technique is going to suffer when people plug their guitars into synthesizers? SH: Through experience I've learned that the synthesizer as a sound, adapting it with an instrument, can put you on some funny tracks. You start using it, as a sound, but very few people have been able to play Moog just as an instrument. It's rather like the sitar guitar and the relations I've had with that. I thought I was going to play sitar guitar all the way through 'Close to the Edge', our new album. That was the instrument I wanted to project, you see, but when it actually came down to it I couldn't play as spontaneously with improvisation as I could on a full scale stereo guitar where I could really move around. But it wasn't as if that guitar was difficult to play; it was the sound, the things it did to me. I had to use it in moderation. So we've come a little way, ourselves, with the synthesized instruments. As far as I'm concerned the guitar was the first instrument that people said 'Let's play into this, put it into this, do this' -- you know. It was an adaptable instrument. The keyboards, of course, made on wind instruments, the guitar and keyboards are the forerunners of the change. KA: I'm just wondering if a guitarist of not very great technical ability is going to plug into the synthesizer and play half a dozen notes and let the machine do the rest. Can you visualise this happening? SH: Yeah, it's bound to happen. It's reasonably healthy as long as the people listening to it don't take it too seriously. It's only when I let myself be deluded that, seriously, I find people misusing instruments.  It can be a bit too much. KA: I was listening to 'Close to the Edge' the other night. There's so much arrangement there. Do you go into the studio and do it there, or is the spade work done beforehand? SH: Most of it's done beforehand. We usually get in and work out exactly how we're going to go about doing the idea that we have mediocrely performed in the rehearsal studio. So most of the arrangements are done. We might expand things a little, you know, just open an idea up a bit more, because there's a great deal we learn about our music when we're actually playing it, you know. We tighten it all up and tidy it up a lot. KA: Do you not feel stifled by the rigid arrangement of the band ? SH: Not really, no. I play a lot on my own, and I get a lot of recording, you know. I record a lot at home on a Revox, and when I'm away I've always got a cassette going, recording while I'm playing. It's something I really like doing. I go through a lot of changes in the music, you know, I play a lot of different things. I could improvise more. People have said, is there enough improvisation, but we've opened that up quite a lot now. In the first song we do, I have a section at the end where it's pretty free. I can play for 15 minutes, it's a quite interesting sequence, and then on the last song I have a kind of a stop where things are completely open. I might start off a solo. I let a lot of things out. All the songs have bits I can change. I might put a bit in, or I might not put it in. KA: You have some really interesting things going with Chris. He must be a nice bass player to play with. SH: He's very good, an excellent bass player. A fifth of the group's talent is without a doubt in Chris.  I should think the hardest thing is to get… well, we've wangled around with balances on the stage to try and get so we can hear everybody. Obviously once you've heard everybody you're playing well together. And that's not always as easy as it sounds, especially when you've got several keyboards over there and you want to hear each one of them at a set volume at the right time. It's hard enough for Rick sometimes, you know, but it doesn't really cause a problem, it's just different heights of perfection really. KA: That album was profoundly involved with nature. Does that reflect in you? SH: Yeah. That's come to us all ready. Jon, about personal experiences. I think he found that he could write much more; he was writing much more wordy things because his life was not necessarily settled, it had a direction he was going in, as we all were. We stopped eating meat, most of us, and we went vegetarian and started liking organic things and not eating any chemicals or anything. I think it's coming out in our music. KA: With your Spanish guitar playing and the electric and acoustic too, are you pretty well rounded off as far as musical fulfillment goes? SH: Yeah! Now I'm starting on steel guitar, and I've been playing for about nine months now. I only play Hawaiian at the moment, but the pedal steel idea interests me greatly. KA: Why? SH: Because it opens up new doors. Like I tried to play flute and I tried to play other woodwinds, and I can't play them, so the frustration I feel there sets me off on to other kinds of stringed instruments. I find the steel guitar very satisfying, and fun to play. It's got new angles on a guitar. What I've been doing recently is playing electric guitar at home, which I've never really done before. I always get back from a tour and put all my electrics away, and my picks away, and I'd be off on my Martin or my bass guitar. But more recently I've been home and I've plugged in, you know, and I've been off, really testing the sound of my guitars, recording them, and kind of categorising them. Now I'm getting to know what I can get out of guitar so that I'll be able to use the right kind of guitar for the particular piece I'm playing. Of course, lots of guitars sound the same. A couple of my Gibsons sound alike. My 175 sounds quite like my Les Paul in tone, but with my Switchmaster it's again something else. There's other things I want to do. I have a lot to learn on classical guitar. I'm not a classical guitarist of any sort, you know; I'm more taken with the style than the instrument, and play what comes out of me on it. Whether I'm going to move into wanting to learn classical pieces is something else. I don't know how strong my conviction is yet. I might want to take lessons to learn lute pieces, because they're very hard to work out off records. I've had really unsuccessful attempts. Some pieces I'd love to play, the old masters in guitar works. They hold new things for every guitarist. I wonder about the balance of power of music like that, you know. This strict classical music. My main fear is that in learning music, I would force a power in me to lie down. KA: You mean the improvisatory side? SH: I want that to flourish as much as everything else. So I'm looking for somebody to convince me to read music in a very adaptable kind of way. Because people who play classical music can't improvise.  If they changed, if they threw away their music and tried to work on rock and roll, they might be able to play it but lose the fluency of reading. I can't relate to notes on pages. My fingers don't go together at the moment. It might take me a while to learn. But at the same time, something else rewards me with the fact that out of frustration I write music which is more identifiable with me than anybody else. It keeps me happy, really. KA: When you write music, how do you get it down? SH: Improvisation. Quite often on to a tape. Developing some things I've had around. I might come up with the germ of a theme and then spend a few weeks sitting around trying to enlarge upon it, taking it into another piece of music, taking it further on. Finding how you can repeat it in a new mode or in a new way. KA: But how do you communicate this if it is not written? SH: I remember it. 'Close to the Edge' was all done totally from memory. We'd sit around and we'd have song ideas. Jon and I got together and we'd have lots of ideas about the way a song would go. We wanted to improvise. I was going to play anything, that was the beginning of the song. We needed a base, a stable thing, and then I came up with a tune. And immediately we started to get ideas together. It could have turned out very differently had we spent longer on it. Basically we were happy because we liked the overall sound, and we just ploughed on. And then before we knew it we had twenty minutes of music. Bang, we started playing and it lasted twenty minutes, and we found we'd ended the song! We won't necessarily do twenty-minute pieces all the time, but no doubt another one will come up. So that's an example of putting ideas together, because there's ideas from everybody. KA: Looking back on your career so far, do you think you were lucky? Have you had any special breaks along the way, or was it just hard work and talent? SH: I've thrown a few breaks away. I've let them slip by, which I think one has to do before you realise what would help you to project yourself and be successful. There's no formula or anything, but in my experience I could learn a certain amount and I had to waste a certain amount of time to build up the strength of examination to find the right people to play with. It takes a lot of understanding for five people to get together and do some really extraordinary music. It needs a lot of human understanding from each of us, to compromise and break the ego barriers and do all these things. While I see some good playing, I can very often say Ah, they've got to break all those barriers, they've got to go through the change, possibly they've got to have a few hard years, you know. Not many people know a great deal about my history, but I had a couple of years when I didn't have any money and didn't have anywhere to live, and all these kind of problems. KA: What were you doing on the guitar at that time? SH: I was playing with friends. We were trying to get a group together, but it wasn't coming. KA: Lots of practice? SH: We were practising quite a lot, but not enough. I was playing a lot on my own. At that time I'd been writing music for a couple of years. I didn't really care what happened to me. I think this isn't really a very good attitude. I felt slightly fatalistic about it, that things would work out in the end if I just kept on writing my songs. And this is all I did. Through the confusion of getting a group together, that was all slightly secondary to me. Actually, what came out of writing music was the most important thing. KA: When you say writing, you mean onto a tape? SH: Well, yeah. Often it's been on a tape. Often I've played something and thought, how am I going to remember that tomorrow? If I could record it on the tiny little cassette I've got, I'd think, ah, I've got it! And I could carry on playing something else. KA: It almost takes the place of writing down music. Do you do tablature? SH: No. KA: What did you want to be when you were at school? I mean, did you want to be a guitar player? SH: Yes, I did. When I left primary school I began to get an ambition to play. When I was twelve I got a guitar. I wasn't really interested in performing anywhere. Everybody around me was very ambitious with guitars and wanted to get out and play, and I was sitting at home practising a lot. Then I did play somewhere and I didn't like it. I didn't like this performing because everything was so 'shambolic' -- it was, in those days. I was going to wait awhile, but then I met some friends and we started to play together. When I was 14 or 15, at school, I was earning money at the weekends, playing in pubs -- which I shouldn't have been, of course, I was too young. When I left school I wanted to continue. I did part-time jobs for a little while, and then when I was, I think, about 18, I turned fully professional and stayed that way. I've always had the feeling, ever since I started, that I wouldn't judge myself till I'd played for 25 years. I mean, I wasn't ever going to say I'm not good enough after 12 years or whatever. I've been playing for 12 or 13 years, and I can't judge that yet. Only when I've been playing for 20 or 25 years can I really say I should be good, you know, I should be able to play spontaneous music, arranged music, whatever I feel I'm called upon to do, or whatever is available. I don't know whether it's part of my dilemma to change directions so often, but it keeps me awake. Like how I felt years ago when I was playing blues in a group called Syndicats and I made a couple of records for EMI. I felt a bit hemmed in then, I wanted to move on to jazz. For a long time my major influence was in fact jazz. I thought, when I was about 15 or 16, my ideal would be to be a dance band guitarist in the very early days. Because they seemed to be having a ball, you know, chucking away these chords and progressions. That kicked me off, wanting to learn chords and progressions and how to improvise. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Next month Steve talks about his fabulous collection of guitars. He s also got a lot to say about the many great guitarists, past and present, who have influenced him. It's highly relevant to the contemporary scene, so don't miss the March issue of Guitar! Close Window YesInThePress.com For site comments, problems, corrections, or additions, contact YesinthePress@aol.com