----------------------------------------------------- FEBRUARY 21, 1988 ----------------------------------------------------- Source: The Sacramento Bee High priests of '70s rock plug into the '80s By Bruce Nixon Normal procedures in the music business dictate that a band with a hot record on its hands not wait four years before it puts out a follow-up. Attention shifts. Momentum sags. Fans grow weary of waiting, and possess a well-documented tendency to drift on to other things. Tony Kaye is perfectly aware of all this. "It did take a long time," he agreed, and you could almost hear the resigned shrug in his voice. The question comes up altogether too often, now that Yes is finally back on the road. "There's no short answer to it, either," the keyboardist quickly added. "I guess you can say that Yes takes longer than most bands to make their records." When "90125" appeared in late '83 -- three years following the group's previous record and official reports of disbandment -- it was more than a reunion. Kaye was with Yes for the first time since 1971. And to the long time core of the group -- Jon Anderson, Chris Squire and Alan White -- came Trevor Rabin, a young South African guitarist who's had a great deal to do with the current sound. Given the circumstances -- and the whole total the record, which was so well-tuned to the glossy, facile, high-tech pop of the new decade -- it was essentially a brand-new band. "Big Generator," the long-awaited follow-up, finally appeared in September, and now the big tour -- which Friday brings the Yes to Kings Arena -- is well under way. The story of the new record is a tale of struggle, production problems and endless, frustrating delay -- difficulties that took the band from a studio in Italy to London and finally to the United States, where "Big Generator" was completed. "People aren't supposed to know when a record's hard to make," Kaye chuckles, "but we did learn a lot. We know we can't indulge ourselves with the time factor again." But perhaps that answers the biggest question of all. The current incarnation of Yes is neither fluke nor fancy. We'll probably be hearing from this group for awhile yet. " '90125' was kind of a practice thing," Kaye said, "or at least that's how it seems in retrospect. 'Generator,' it seems for us in the band, is pointing in a direction that hasn't quite been achieved. I can see something more magnificent next time, and we are getting a better idea of what it should be. These things take time. It takes some evolution to really get it going. "But I've been encouraged by what we've been doing on the road," he continued. "We are using material we are writing now, but we're finally letting in great pieces of the past. I think doing that has helped give us insight into what the band was and where it should go. We've become aware of how complicated a thing it is, but more aware of what we have to do. For a long time, some of us in the band didn't want to do the old songs -- we just didn't want to do those numbers. We wanted a new band, a real rock show. But now, there's an awareness of what the past has given us. Things go around and around." The long shadow of Yes' role as a kind of high priest of '70s-era rock probably has obscured some of the band's accomplishments. Old-timers can be taken for granted, and, to some extent, Yes probably is. But early on, even at its most overblown and fatuous, Yes was among a handful of bands engaged in an expansion of the rock'n'roll vocabulary -- new sounds, new forms, new compositional ideas. A lot of these have become commonplace in pop of these days, and, now, Yes has moved on, dealing in the images and issues of modern technology. Although it may not be immediately apparent beneath the slippery sound of the recent hits, the band's is a kind of high-tech aesthetic that looks to the future. It's no surprise, perhaps, to discover that Kaye's interested in new age music -- this may be the one band that's brought some of the language of new age into the mainstream of pop. "You can read a lot of things into the record," Kaye said, "and a lot of these things are very apparent  to us. "When you began a record, you start with a blank sheet, and these ideas have to come from somewhere. This is a pretty progressive band, and we have ideas about technology, and 'Big Generator' came out of the feeling about machinery and technology. It's all part of rock'n'roll. Jon has that overall cosmic sense that he brings to everything. Trevor and I are more down-to-earth with the rock'n'roll thing. Chris has other things that interest him. It's the combination that brings the band alive. But it's different from the '70s, that's for sure." Yes performs at 8 PM Friday at Kings Arena. Tickets cost $18.50. For information: 395-2277. Close Window YesInThePress.com For site comments, problems, corrections, or additions, contact YesinthePress@aol.com