Yes in the Press

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DECEMBER 2001
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Source: Hot Estonia

http://www.hot.ee/yespage/interviews/stevehoweinterview1.htm

Steve Howe Interview

By David Lee Wilson

Steve Howe forged his credentials as a genius songwriter/performer nearly thirty years ago and has had an incredible record of reaffirming that status in the years since "FRAGILE" first took YES to the heights of popular acceptance. Through his coming and goings with YES, his solo recordings, founding of ASIA and his one time pairing with fellow guitar Maestro, Steve Hackett, for their GTR project the artistic bar has always been held so high that few people other than Howe himself could even conceptualize the leap. More incredibly, in 2K1, Howe nudged his own high water mark up not once but twice, first with his solo disc "NATURAL TIMBRE" and then with his contribution to the latest YES masterpiece, "MAGNIFICATION."

"MAGNIFICATION" is a landmark YES record with something for everyone but mostly it just serves itself creating soundscapes completely un-producable, un-hearable and un-thinkable by other groups. Allowing his compositional brilliance to shine through the clutter of the "pop-YES" and onto something far more beautiful and substantive Howe's work on "MAGNIFICATION" challenges anything issued under the trademark since "GOING FOR THE ONE." Each moment between Howe slung tones is pregnant with desire for the next and at the end of the record you are simply compelled to replay it again and again until either the disc or time has worn thin.

The how(e) and why of YES-2K1's ability to produce such a magnificent work and do so this late in their careers may have more to do with the group's number being whittled from the traditional five to a basic four. Howe, vocalist Jon Anderson, Bassist Chris Squire and Drummer Alan White, are each allowed greater latitude to wander sonically sans a fully integrated keyboardist. In lieu of a their tradition of a full time tinkler YES has opened up their sound with a full orchestra and the results are nothing less than stunning.

Howe gives the best explanation of what he was going for on both "MAGNIFICATION" and "NATURAL TIMBRE" so, best to let him tell it himself. Howe phoned from his home in the UK where he was, not surprisingly, working on new music.

DAVID LEE You are enjoying a bit of a break now but you are generally very busy between YES and the solo material?

STEVE HOWE Yeah. Sometimes I do get a few months off and I am glad that I was industrious at other times so I can take that time off and not feel compelled to put things together and this is one such gap. In fact, when I finished "NATURAL TIMBRE" I was straight off to start work with YES about five days later so I had very little time between those two projects.

DL I know that when I spoke with Geoff Downs (ASIA, once of YES) about your playing on the last ASIA record he said that you were a very hard man to schedule because you are constantly working.

SH Yeah, yeah, last year was even worse!(laughs) I had my own solo tour out and it was just before that that I did the ASIA work so there is always plenty of work.(laughs)

DL How long ago was it that you conceived this record (NATURAL TIMBRE) and was it long before having the idea of what you wanted to do and finding the spot of time to do it?

SH I guess after "BEGININGS," twenty-five or twenty-six years ago.(laughs) I jumped right in the deep end there and did just about everything that I knew how to do on one record and pretty soon after that I wondered if it wouldn't be more logical for me to make a guitar record that implied acoustic. Then in the eighties I got on with the idea again with some people, a label, and they said, "Oh yeah, that is a nice idea" but nothing came of it so over the years the idea of an acoustic instrumental record was growing in me. It allowed me to put together some things that didn't have, in my mind, another way of living. I never really have put many acoustic tracks on my electric records, "TURBULENCE" has one and "QUANTUM GUITAR" has one so I am a bit sparing on it really. I don't know if it works to put a whole lot with it so this was very much a sort of "Ultimate record" for me. There is about half of the writing that is more historical and about half is more current and it is a record that had to wait for an opportunity really but it was there in my mind all the time. "Clap" and "Mood for a Day" it is in that style, not necessarily all acoustic and all solo but certainly as much solo as I have done.

DL That is interesting especially when you have managed to actually do several acoustic tours, I have one here on disc in fact, "NOT NECCISARILY ACOUSTIC?"

SH Yes and as it implies it wasn't "necessarily acoustic."(laughs) This album has been aided by my touring on my own and I am getting more and more sure that playing solo guitar on my own is an important voice that I have to keep working on.

DL A few visits back, with YES this is, I noticed that there were points in the evening where you seemed very much not into the music you had to play, "Owner of a Lonely Heart" for instance. Is this solo record and the solo touring kind of like a forum for you to do exactly what you want without compromise to a band situation?

SH Right!(laughs) I have been lucky and all of my solo albums have really been about that and of course the early YES albums were about that, just musicians doing what they really, really want to do. It is a great shame that the 80's started up with the notion that other people had something to say about the music, people who knew nothing about music sometimes. So, you learn to live with that and to live with collaborating, seeing your music go into something and not always coming out the way you wanted it to but quite often better. But, those collaborations tax you, they tax your creativity and they tax your ability to see something through the way that you want it. That is not always a bad thing, to have other people color your music but it is a really taxing process. Certainly, as you have noted, it is a big difference when you can make all of the music yourself because it is primarily yours. I have dabbled with that on things like "QUANTUM GUITAR" where I played all of the instruments and had my son, Dylan, as a drummer. This time it was the texture change that was really the challenge because I just didn't know how far that I could take it or how much I would enjoy it but I found that the more that I went into it I enjoyed it immensely. I could have done with one less dobro part but I just went wild with dobro and mandolins and that kind of thing just suddenly struck the chord, "Now go, go on with this now." Instead of it being against an electric backdrop, there was more freedom to do that.

DL For the technically inclined or just us completists who need to know it all, you have included a break down of all the instruments and where they were used on each track by using a line diagram. . .

SH I hope that doesn't get too boring!(laughs) I kind of like to make it (the sleeve notes) a little different, give it a little bit of a twist. Sometimes it has to be a simpler concept but other times, like this, I liked this kind of a graph idea and I guess really what I am saying is that there are not many musicians who can make different noises on one instrument. I took that a bit of the way with the early YES and the whole concept was to make it sound different but here, well, you wouldn't have this many instruments unless you collect them so I guess I like to explain things(laughs) For the people who say "I only heard that once, I wonder what that is?" They can kind of see what groupings are used on what tracks and it is usually quite clear which one is leading.

DL Was there much of a "try it and see" process that you went through to see if the instruments would be compatible on tape?

SH There are two areaS there that come to mind, the first one is the construction, you know, the actually shape of what the music is and if that is open to transition you can make it suit a particular instrument so you hope that you have got a good arrangement. Well, whether it is good or not, you work at the arrangement.(laughs) You know what it is and you know why you are doing it so if you are going to change the texture of it you will be on a much better footing. Some of the passages will almost require a certain color because you designed it that way, at least I do, so sure, one day I might have said, like on "Curls and Swirls" it starts with a Portuguese guitar and dobro but the thing that happens after that is that the mandolin gets quite adventurous really, playing melodies, and I remember when that didn't exist that here was something else going on then, something more ordinary, verse style melodies. Then I literally inserted that and fortunately it was the same bar length so I could insert the whole section to give the piece more color and that, to me, is the kind of work that I like to do. It has my sense of production to it because I didn't conceive that piece first off, it was a different piece of material really. I corrected the material, made a new shape and then I pulled out the mandolin and played, "Da da da da dot ta da" and thought, "Can I really use all that?" So, there it was. It was really used more for color than being pre-designed so I do have a lot of fun multi-tracking. I have always thought that it just didn't matter how I did it because multi-tracking is something that I have been able to do quite well and I don't worry, "Oh is this going to be something that will work." I have got to say that there are many things that I do that don't work but the majority of them do and if they didn't I guess I would just give up!

DL Have you given any thought to going out as an accompanied soloist, maybe with a fully stringed or guitar orchestra or something along those lines?

SH Well, yeah but it is kind of like a metronome going on inside of me, part of me wants to be in a trio with a bass and a drum. Don't fill in the spaces and don't give me anything else and just let me fill in the spaces with enough sound for the bass and drummer. Then the other side of it is that I keep recounting how many guitarists I would need to play some of these songs that I have done. One day I will think, "Well I only need one guitarist to play that song, he will be doing this while I am doing this but, oh no. . ."(laughs) So, you mentioned a guitar Orchestra and I mentioned it on the sleeve that there used to be such things that were more middle of the road kind of things. I haven't got a list of guitarists that I would be calling, unfortunately, so it is a kind of an idea that is latent really. It is laying in the back of my mind but this could be a nice stepping stone not only for me to play this stuff but many of the other pieces that I have done that would require, as you suggest, a mini guitar orchestra. The music that I write could be duplicated but people would have to have their particular specialties, banjo and that, and there are many players who could do this, most could even improve on what I have done!(laughs) It could be kind of good and my concepts of what I could do are pretty limitless, I don't think about trying anything that I can't do.

DL The trio sounds like something you wouldn't have much trouble putting good musicians together for?

SH Yeah but a trio is one of the ultimate ways of burning yourself out but having a whale of a good time simply because of what you control is all of the melodic and harmonic structure against the bass so it is wonderful! The other kind of show that I envision is a sort of solo show where I can play any song from my career and that concept would be more to work with Dylan and "NATURAL TIMBRE" begs for the kind of guys that would make it really easy for me to work. Building from that I would like to have Keith West on vocals and acoustic guitar or maybe Ray Fenwick on electric guitar and I mean, I would love to work with Albert Lee and Steve Morse but in the kind of band that I would be building I would need to work with people who I know would respond well in helping and supporting me. That would really be the kind of band that I was looking for, one that could be like, "Do you want to play something from THE SYNDICATS or something from YES, OK we can do that." This idea is getting much closer to actually having to be because I have never walked onstage with a band like this other than in New York where we played at the 20th Century Guitar Fair one May. We could be here all night talking about what I want to do.(laughs) I am fifty-four years old and I have been playing the guitar for forty-two, no, forty-four years and I still have got some other things that I would like to do.

DL There was a period of time when both you and Steve Hackett blazed some new ground for the guitar in GTR, would you ever want to revisit that?

SH Steve and I were a pretty formidable guitar duo and the fact that we didn't do anything predictable was also very, very satisfying. We did some nice guitar harmonies but we did a minimal amount of that and spent the bulk of our time building on some strong ideas, that is how we wrote the songs, we built on the strongest ideas and then we put the band together and recorded it. It really was a lot of fun, at that stage. The fun element is one of those things that you can't re-create, you either got people together who are having fun or you haven't and if somebody isn't having fun then it kind of goes soft. "Fun" doesn't sound like a very intelligent thing to say about a group but I guess I mean to say that you can't ignore the difficulties personalities have. Steve and I really didn't have any but put us in another situation and things did change and I think Steve would explain it the same because that was much more a problem then anything that Steve and I were doing. We picked the band and in a way it kind of picked at us and picked at him in another ways without going any further. The music that we did, "When the heart rules the Mind" and "Still get Through," that is a stunning piece of music, I still love the arrangement that we did. There again we started with some pretty good material but we were caught in a bit of a fashion era and I don't think that Steve and I were terribly interested in being caught in it. I am not talking about clothes but more of an audio style. We were just at the edge of a period there and right at that time Trevor Horn was doing things like PROPAGANDA and FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD and things like that. GTR was much more interested in America. It certainly could have been a bit more stunning audio wise if we had slightly more forward thinking design on the style of reverbs and the style of mixing so that was, not really a bone of contention but just left it all a bit washy. I believe that when we go to do the re-issue next year we still have some dry mixes that are really going to sound great. Strangely enough our label at the time asked for wetter mixes!(laughs) I was like, "God no, I don't want it any wetter! It sounds pretty wet to me as it is." And it still got wetter. Steve and I, I think that it really takes a long time to heal some problems because, as I say, they weren't really about Steve and my personalities as much as the inherent problems of running a business with people who have their own attitude and who are helpful in most ways but problematic in others. Steve and I needed to get out and lose that, I like Steve a lot and I think that he feels good about me to.

DL Yes, the last I spoke with him he was thoroughly disgusted with the whole business end of it and started up his own label basically saying, "I will sell what I sell."

SH Yes and I like the way that Billy Budis has managed him and kept everything quite realistic. Steve was always very realistic, I even thought that he was over realistic when he was cautious about the details surrounding the way GTR was being launched and there were like forty-five flight cases and stuff.(laughs) You know, we were going at it really big time and it kind of paid off in a way but we needed to re-group and that is when the business thing collapsed.

DL That was a brilliant album and it is too bad that it didn't continue but you have found yourself back to YES a time or two since then and now you are performing with orchestras after having lost another keyboard player, what gives with your keyboard players anyway?(laughs)

SH (Laughing) Well, that is a funny way of putting it but, yeah, you could put it like that.

DL Yeah, that is a bit strained isn't it? Will this situation eventually allow you to do some of the orchestral things from the solo record?

SH That is a nice idea but I am not sure that I have thought about it that seriously. I guess I would play something like "Pyramidology" or something, something that I could do on my own but of course the orchestra is there and many of the band had hoped that I would do a piece. If something spontaneous can come off, well maybe but I think there should be a great deal of emphasis on YES in this particular instance. We are a four-piece band and we are with an orchestra and I think that it is vital that there is space for moments that feature each of us so how we use that, it is never really decided.

DL I must say that the idea of seeing YES without a keyboard player up front was a bit strange but it did come off fairly well with the orchestra.

SH Yeah and don't think that "there isn't a keyboard player" precisely. Besides the orchestra we have a musician with us who plays keyboards, almost as one of the orchestra if you like. He is called upon to play all of the crucial keyboard parts that wouldn't be well arranged for an orchestra, you can think of them quite easily I am sure. On "SYMPHONIC MUSIC WITH YES" David Palmer, the conductor said, "Well I would like to include 'Owner of a lonely Heart'" and I said, "That is OK but I am not going to play the guitar solo" so the orchestra plays the guitar solo.(laughs) It was quite hard to handle!

DL As I said earlier, I won't soon forget the absolutely annoyed look that you had on your face when playing that song on "The Ladder" tour, it was priceless.(laughs)

SH Oh yeah. It may have been at the time that I got a little tired of a couple of games that were going on with that tour, a couple of musical games that were going on. I decided that maybe I would be late for "Owner of a Lonely Heart" a couple of times and I was.(laughs) I disappeared for the guitar solo at the end. I found that an incredibly hard piece for me to do and I don't like putting one over on the guys but this was just a way for me to say, "This doesn't really mean a lot to me because it is not my music." Basically, YES plays a considerable amount of my music and, I mean, I will play a song like "Wondrous Stories" because I was there when it was written and I made it sound like "Wondrous Stories" and I obviously have a connection with "Wondrous Stories" and I don't have any connection with "Owner of a lonely Heart." I did leave during that song because I really didn't need to be there and if you feel like that, why bother?

DL It is nice to hear that though you all have played together for so long you can still poke a bit of fun at each other.

SH Yeah.(laughs) I like Trevor Rabin very much and I have no axe to grind with him at all. He had his role in YES and nobody can take that away from him, certainly not me, it is just that it is easier for me to play Peter Banks than Trevor Rabin because I kind of had to do that when I joined. It is just where my mind was at then, "Yeah, I have to learn how to play 'Astral Traveler' and all of that stuff." That was really good for me at the beginning because the guitar style was much more related to mine being that he was another Brit and he played a bit of Jazz and, like me, he was a chordal player, he was not afraid to use chords in nice ways and it was easy for me to jump on that.

DL We know about Dylan Howe following in his Dad's musical footsteps but are there other Howe's coming along that we should watch for?

SH Well, there certainly are. Mainly in the shape of Dylan and his brother Virgil. Virgil has appeared with me on "The grande scheme of Things" where he plays Piano on a few tracks, a few of the instrumental tracks and we also do a duet. Virgil developed amazingly and has astounded us all in his song writing and playing great keyboards and he is also drumming incredibly well. He is also doing a lot of production and re-mixing and all sorts of very clever things so we are all very excited for him. I think my daughters, who follow in age after my sons, are probably much too clever to come into the music business.(laughs) They have seen all of the pitfalls of this music business and I think that they will definitely keep away, they are very academic and very estudious. My daughter Georgia has done remarkably and is one of the top students in Britain so we are very proud of them all. I think that my wife and I are very intense people and we concentrate quite a lot and that kind of concentration is one of the things that they have, they can really focus on things so it is very exciting. I can't say too much now but in the future their roles with me are bound to increase in different ways so I look forward to that.

DL I think that it is fairly well known that you don't fly between gigs and that you drive. . .

SH Yeah.

DL Do you have all the family in a Winnebego kind of thing while you are on tour?

SH In the old days, in the seventies, my family would stay at a location which was en route to where a gig would be and we would work it out, fantastically well actually. As the family increased my wife would come over when she could and has come out but she certainly doesn't tour. My son has gone on tour and come and sat in the car and rode for a couple of miles. They take that all quite naturally, I think because they all like cars. Sometimes you have got to fly because it is just too far and I quite like the concept of high-tech aviation and it is a lot better today than an Air-France Corvaire that I was once in that was about to be taken out of service.(laughs) They should have done it about three days before I got on it! Yeah, I have had all sorts of fantastic flying experiences including on the Concords, about fifteen times, and I can tell you that flying is great but you can't enjoy it in the way that you are supposed to so I only do it as a necessity of my work. I travel immensely, for instance, I did a two-month tour around Europe and didn't fly at all. You have to be dedicated to do it, I mean, you have to drive at night and sometimes you have to change the tires three times in a month because of the crappy roads so you have to really like driving and I do. I will always do that whenever I can and when I can't I will have to fly like everyone else.

DL Is it something that allows you a bit of solitude as opposed to being in a jet with the rest of the band and crew?

SH In a way. It is interesting because it is quite confrontational in a way because you are with one person and that is why that one person is actually a very important person and that is where my experiences have varied sometimes.(laughs) Mostly I have had tremendous people work for me. Recently in America I have had a chap called Lane and he has been driving me whenever he has been able. Since 1983, when I started touring, it is usually great when we get on and we can understand each others pace, I mean, you are not going to sit in a car for eight hours talking. You have to understand the mood and there are only two choices, one has got to drive and the other one has to rest. You can play with your toys and do what you like and of course there is the mobile phone, except in Europe of course but I don't need a phone around me all of my life, that is for sure. So, yes, the car is mainly about staying on the ground when everything else is, the gear is staying on the ground, the crew is staying on the ground, I am staying on the ground. I get there and people say, "Wow, you are just getting here?" and I say, "Yeah!" but we have had such different days and I feel that I have more to offer the group than I would have, maybe I am not big on entourages?(laughs) I can live without an entourage.

DL Having done it so much are there spots that you are sure to hit each time you pass by or is this just for traveling from one place to the next?

SH Oh yes, I can hit the vegetarian restaurants, the guitar shops the friend in Minneapolis, it has enabled me to think of touring as not terribly isolating. There are still people who find it fun to travel this way and there is always a different twist to it so, yeah, a good Mercedes and gas and a couple of CDs and off we go!(laughs)

DL What do you use for travel music?

SH What CDs will I be buying is a more likely question.(laughs) I have gone off of the tapes, I like them in cases now because I have done these "hundred in a packet" sort of things and you can never find out anything about what you are listening to, who it is, when it was recorded, who wrote it and that kind of thing. I have a box that will go on the back seat and I guess what it has got in it is, I have some fine guitar classic people, I have a Chet Atkins in there somewhere. It will have different things, a little twist on classical or something, you know, I just like music. I don't just like guitar music in fact there is certain guitar music that I don't listen to. I don't know, you need a kind of twist now and then, like Bob Dylan is good on the road like when he comes in (singing) "You got to . . .," there is something about that kind of attitude and you need attitude music more than guitar music. I still like GO WEST, I find that group just really had some life in there and their guitar players death was a great loss to the guitar world though many people didn't know much about him. He was an incredibly fine guitarist and I worked with him on a record produced by George Martin.

DL Could I guess that there is some classical music filling a bit of that box?

SH I am really pretty big on classical, not the sort of classical that we are doing with YES right now, I am talking about just things that I like, I don't know. I bought the Toronto Consort singing "The Way of the Pilgrim." Track two is just amazing, you see what happens is that you are in this medieval setting with a woman's voice and she is really brilliant and clear and then you have drums and this guitar going "Ding diddly ding ding diddly ding. . .," and she comes in and it just freaked me out when I heard it on the radio once so I tracked the CD down. I like Medieval and renaissance music, I love the sound of a nice twangy guitar or a lute, I love those sounds so I go back and forth and sideways from the center of music which to me is Chet Atkins. Everything that I have ever been interested in is because when I got to Chet, after Les Paul and so many others, that was the ultimate guitarist. I am still learning some of the things that he does.

DL Were you much of a collector of his recordings, did you have to posses every note that he wrote or was there a particular piece of his that you grasped onto?

SH Yeah, I knew when to stop, when I saw sleigh bells on the cover of the album.(laughs) I didn't have a lot of money so I had to choose quite carefully but I believe that the first record I got of his was a much later recording called "KINGDOMS" which, because it was the first, was the ultimate Chet Atkins record for me. Then "FINGER PICKIN'" was great. I am really interested in hillbilly music actually. We call it "Hillbilly" but I think you might call it. . .

DL Bluegrass?

SH Yeah, kinda verging on Bluegrass. I went to Bluegrass, I went to Bill Monroe and all that and I didn't get what I was looking for. I like it a little bit more like, "Look, this is Rock, Rock is coming." Very early Bill Haley and Tennessee Ernie Ford with DD West on Guitar, the kind of stuff that inspired Albert Lee. We could have a very, very long list of guys that I like and that is because I was a collector of records very early on and so much of it was illuminating to me and is still the kind of stuff that I want to play. The fact that I play a lot of this other stuff is really by the by with me but it is not by the by in recognition so maybe Jazz guitar is what everyone wants to talk about so that is what you get.

DL I have heard the story of you playing with Jimi Hendix in your pre-YES days a couple of different ways but now that you are here, how was it that you came to play with Hendrix?

SH There is a photograph of it actually and when I used to speak about this years ago I didn't know that there was actually a photograph but there is and it is in an album called something like, "REMIXES AND LIVE SHOWS BY TOMORROW." Basically what happened was that we used to play every week in a place called U.F.O. and to play there was the ultimate thing. We were there with PINK FLOYD and Arthur Brown and all of these nut cases with people dropping acid in your Pepsi-Cola when you were not looking.(laughs) So, we were doing our usual thing up on stage, we were a three piece, and the bass player used to put his bass on the floor and let it feedback while he was off after Suzi Creamcheese and at that moment the drums and I would improvise, usually with my D string pole piece where the pick up was wound up so close that it just went "waaaanggg" all the time. This was a marvelous invention of mine that really did sound like a sitar, so anyway, I am off doing this and suddenly on the stage is Jimi Hendrix and he picks up the bass and stands there and just went out of control! Obviously I can't remember every second that I spent on stage but those moments are possibly the hardest because they were such a wipeout sensation.(Laughs) It was like, "Wow, this guy that we have been seeing is just out of control." He didn't need any introduction, he just did it and then the number ended somehow, everybody clapped and we got offstage. It wasn't considered all that unusual really at the time, considering that Arthur Brown would set the curtains on fire every night with his flaming hat. (Sighs) Oh dear. So, we played with Jimi Hendrix and Arthur Brown and PINK FLOYD often all through 1967. We were on tour with TRAFFIC with Stevie Winwood around that time as well and then Delaney and Bonnie with Eric Clapton in 1969 so the people who were hanging out at that time, Joanie Mitchell and Steven
Stills, I mean these people were mega then.

DL I think a lot of them are still "mega."(laughs) It is too bad that the ultra choreographed touring musicians of today can't make room for something impromptu like that?

SH Yeah. I don't know but there was a time when it happened a lot. We saw Jimi play when we had a residency in some club and it was pretty astounding what was going on, not just guitar playing, I mean, this was a personality, singer/songwriter, guitarist extrovert and it was just fascinating. Not many people know this, this very rarely comes out but just before Mitch Mitchell joined with Jimi Hendrix there was to be a band put together with him and me. I don't know whether he remembers this or not but I do and we would rehearse and we were looking for other people and then suddenly Mitch was gone, obviously to Jimi Hendrix. So, it was amazing then and you know, I don't think that I have ever told anybody that so you have got a complete exclusive on that!

DL Hey! Alright!

SH I just hope Mitch remembers otherwise I will look like a complete idiot! But it is true! We went to some church and rehearsed in a church, it is amazing because people say that your memory goes when you get older but Gingko Biloba has certainly made a difference for me!

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