Interview with Steve Howe --------------------------------------------- OCTOBER 1, 2001 --------------------------------------------- Source: Classic Rock Revisited http://www.classicrockrevisited.com/steve_howe_of_yes_interview.htm Classic Rock Revisited Presents an exclusive interview with.... Steve Howe! By Jeb Wright Steve Howe is among the best guitar players to ever pick up the instrument. He has won several honors and plays with grace and virtuosity in every style of music. He helped create the genre of Progressive Rock and continues to inspire musicians and music fans around the globe.  Howe has a new album out on www.spitfirerecords.com called Natural Timbre. It is the first all acoustic album of his career. The music on the CD is breathtaking and is a 'must have' for anyone who loves the guitar. Despite winning every honor that can be bestowed on a guitarist, Howe remains gracious and humble. Read on to discover the man behind the legend as Howe talks about being one of the greatest players, Yes, Asia and how he approaches songwriting.  Visit Steve on line at www.yesworld.com or www.stevehowe.com. Special thanks for this interview goes out to Jon at Spitfire Records.  - Jeb Wright October 2001 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Interview Jeb: Why do an all-acoustic album at this stage in your career? Steve: I’ve had it in the pipeline and been wanting to do for a long time but I had other opportunities. Last year the record company asked me, “What about an all acoustic album?” I was thrilled that they wanted it. I knew there was a time where I could come through with something strong that had a lot of guitar solos. The idea of it being completely acoustic as well really appealed to me. It was part of my fantasy that one day I would do it and Natural Timbre is the first of it. Jeb: Were these all new songs or had you had some of them around for a while? Steve: A bit of each. I’ve got the ambition to do these kinds of solos. It is a slower process in writing and they take a lot of rehearsing and streamlining. They are the things that really give it a chance to stand on its own feet so I guess I am all about it. Jeb: Hard how was it for you to select songs for the album? Steve: As I hinted, part of it was lying there and just needed finishing up. I wanted some new ideas to come in. There were a few tunes that had been around quite a few years that I had not recorded. I saw this as a chance to do tunes like “Golden Years” and “Curls & Swirls.” They have been sitting in my repertoire for years but their home was on this record. Jeb: I like the fact that you included liner notes for each song. It really makes it personal. Steve: When you take away all the devices and mucking around that you can do with the electric guitar it becomes intimate. There was a time of reckoning where it was really down to the music, performance and the construction and arrangements. It was demanding in its own kind of way but it was also refreshing because I had left out a part of my world of electric guitars. It really made me hone down with some personal endeavor work. Solo guitar playing isn’t something anyone told me to do. I just wanted to do it. I am influenced from Chet Atkins. I wanted it to be quite obvious that I come from a learning curve that includes people like Chet. Jeb: One of my favorite songs on the CD is “In The Course Of A Day.” Steve: I dedicated that song to some friends of mine in Pennsylvania that we have known for a time. It is all about the early days of Yes and the fine team of people we had. They went on to be very successful in their own right, not only supplying staging for Yes but they did it for everyone else as well. They have been really good to me over the years. I wrote the tune in when I was staying there a few years back. I was looking for the right home for it, composition wise. Jeb: How do you capture your emotions in your music? Steve: I always believe that recording and dare I say overdubbing, isn’t an unnatural process for modern musicians to create in. When I heard Les Paul’s stuff from the 40’s and 50’s I noticed that his overdubbing sounded just great. I wanted to be able to do that but also be able to keep the type of spirits, whether it was phsycodelic in ’67 or progressive in the 70’s. I still wanted my playing to have a bite. I guess that is what I am doing. It is mainly because I am more of an emotional player. I respond to the things around me. I think people see this clearly when I am working on stage. The air of spontaneity is obviously great there. It is demanding. On records, I think that being able to overdub and get good feel is very important. It is important to get things right. Not just get the parts right but to make sure they actually have the right spirited ingredient. Jeb: On “Pyramidology” you say, “Symmetry is beautiful to my eye. It is in pyramids and it is in people.” Steve: That refers to oriental diagnosis. In Japanese and Chinese cultures you can meet people and they can take one look at you and say, “You ought to take it easy in this part of the body.” That is all about healing but funny enough beauty has been defined by symmetry. When there is symmetry in a face there is what we call beauty. Even if you ask somebody with different faces in their culture you would think that there would be no choreography in it. In fact, they did this with natives who had never seen the outside world. They asked them to select a face and a body shape to demonstrate in this scientific endeavor of what beauty is. It showed that beauty is symmetry. It reminds of a famous photograph that is the same photo cut in two. You get beauty and then you double it and it becomes more beautiful. When the eyes are very nicely balanced and the mouth is right then that is beauty. I thought pyramidology was a strange way of coming around to it but funny enough; I had some friends at the Boston Museum Of Fine Arts. I knew a chap in the music department and he introduced me to a friend… I usually don’t tell this much about a title. Titles are very interesting and I have a lot of fun doing them and changing them too. Anyway, he introduced me to his friend and he was in the Egyptian department. I didn’t like my original title to the song. It was very lame and didn’t say anything. All of the sudden I came up with “Pyramidology” and my Wife said, “That’s to weird!” I said, “No, no, I am sticking with that!” So it was somewhere between the oriental diagnosis, the beauty in symmetry and meeting people who were fascinated with pyramids that I came up with the title. Jeb: I have to say that I was really thrilled to hear you included the Yes song “Your Move.” Steve: I consider that arrangement has everything to do with being a musician as writing. It does not matter if you are a writer; you still have to arrange the song. This was a piece of cake in a way because I stole the arrangement lock, stock and barrel from Yes. My contribution was to take each of our voices and make them an instrument. I made Jon a guitar, me a mandola and Chris the mandolin. It was a fun twist to do that. I had fun doing it. I had a good structure in my mind, I knew what I was going to do and bang! I put it down. Jeb: How did it come to your creative mind to voice each person as an instrument? Steve: I was hell bent on doing “To Be Over.” That was my Yes endeavor. That was a big project to rearrange it and to know what not to do on it. I thought maybe one Yes track was enough. I got some input and I decided to do one more short thing. I thought I should do some easy thing and just make it happen. I looked at some tracks and I sat there with a guitar playing Yes tracks and seeing if I could see an opening with acoustic. Suddenly, I came to “Your Move.” I thought, “This is going to be to easy.” Then I thought, “Not if I do this.” The idea just came to me. I was so tempted to go into “All Good People.” It just isn’t an acoustic number. It is really an electric number. I was looking at the Yes album and I saw “Disillusion.” I thought, “There is my part!” I always play that country picking part so I thought; “Surely I can go from “Your Move” to “Disillusion.” That was my tease. I was having fun. It was a bit tongue in cheek because I wanted it to be light. Jeb: It has been a long time since even you had played “To Be Over” hasn’t it? Steve: That is correct. When Yes decides what to play on tours, people have different reactions to suggestions. The way I look at it, I will play anything because I remember everything I have played or at least sketches of it. I certainly would have to freshen up a bit. If we tried to do “To Be Over” I would have to freshen up with it even though I have just recorded it. I have never lost touch with various parts of it, mostly all of it really. The part that I left out was the Vegas part with all the moving vocal lines. I just didn’t see it. I have voted that one as one of my favorite tracks and Relayer one of my favorite albums. The sleeve is one of my favorite sleeves. It was a very combustibles time. We had already achieved our first major big stepping-stone. We got to playing the 20 minute style piece and we were in this enormous landscape where we could do things like that. We did Topographic. We had not even absorbed all of the criticism from when we changed keyboard players and we still went in and did another 20 minute piece. We did an album almost identical to Close To The Edge in structure. I think it is a really exciting format for Yes. I really wish we would have done that with the new album. Jeb: Do you find it surprising that Yes became as popular as they did playing a format that was unheard of at the time or commercial? Steve: That is one of the things that I am most proud of with Yes. In the mid seventies we used to say that we were purposely un-commercial. Atlantic really did want us to have hits. We had “Roundabout” which was a very deserving kind of hit because it so encapsulated the style of Yes. We just haven’t written enough songs like that but we should. It gave us a foot in the door with Atlantic. On Close To The Edge they asked, “What’s the single?” but we really didn’t have one. They were quite happy that we sold millions of albums so they were not ready to kick us out the door! There was a marvelous leverage for originality and lack of commerciality. We had people in America that were playing this on the radio. We were one of the only bands to do that. That was based on our reputation. When I said to Jon, “Let’s do a tour where we only play 20 minute pieces because that will really show them!” What I was saying was that Yes had done many things that were verged on things that other groups could do but we were the only group that did that. Masterworks came out of that discussion. It was a slightly watered down discussion of that idea. Some days we might get closer to the ultimate Masterworks and only play the 20-minute pieces that we kind of created our major mystic about us. Jeb: I loved the Masterworks tour. Yes really grabs the audience. Other concerts get people pumped up and the juices flowing but sometimes Yes will end a song and there will be a moment of silence because everyone is going “wow!” Steve: I always wanted to close with “Gates Of Delirium.” We are not doing so but I would like to. The responses we have been getting with “Gates” have just blown us away. We just take it musically with however well tuned our egos are! Jon says, “It is the way you listen that helps us play better.” It is a nice touch. We are an interactive group. We use a lot of mental telepathy with each other and the audience. One member of the group does go over the top to make it a show. I have never felt that is totally in line with Yes but it is certainly in line with what Chris does. He likes to perform a lot. I think all of Yes is into the music much more than anything else. Sure, we look weird! I will openly admit that in 1973 I went onstage in a complete Afghani outfit. I had boots that tied up my legs. Everything I had was from Afghanistan. It was the right thing for Topographic because I was this kind of folk guy. We all took on certain personas. Chris had very outrageous clothes. Over the years we have kind of played that down and got more stereotypical rock and roll look. Of course, Trevor Rabin wore his famous leather trousers for a while. The group changed image and look in the 80’s. I think we were left with that in the 90’s. Yes was a mixture. Jon was still looking a little bit hippie. I have gone more lethargic. Chris definitely wanted to be outrageous but he played it down. It used to shout but it just kind of barks now! You never see Alan because he is behind the drum kit. People find out what he has on at the end of the show. We never ever talk about what we are going to wear. We used to laugh at each other the first night of every tour. We would go, “You are really wearing that?” After that you were not allowed to say anything more about it. You just got one shot at it! Jeb: When did you know that Yes was something special? Steve: When I went for the audition for Yes it was quite a straightforward thing. I had been putting my face around saying; “I am not doing anything right now.” That was about the most I have ever been without a group when I wanted to be in a group. Chris called and said, “We have been seeing you play and you have been doing great things. Come and see what it is like to play with us.” It was that first day that I heard in Jon and Chris tremendous originality, capability, style and technique. Bill was just awesome. When Bill played I was like, “I think I’m going to like this!”  Even though it is maybe not visually documented, the drummer is a very central figure in my music when he is there. When Bill left Yes, I was very sad. I was not sad immediately but when I was able to judge his impact then I was very sad that he had gone. I loved his writing, his personality and the way he looked. He had a great creativeness. He had a craziness that was like drummer madness. He was a very fanatical drummer and a conscience performer. He was almost overly individual. To him, Close To The Edge was too commercial! That is one of the main reasons he left. Bill had other ambitions and aspirations. He wanted to carry on learning. He didn’t want to carry on with a group that was going to be doing this artsy fartsy music that wasn’t really jazz. I felt Bill was a messenger of that kind of progressive freedom to go for the kind of music that we were going for in the 1970’s. Bill was replaced by the perfect solution, which was Alan. He brought his solid robust drama. He saw what we hope any member of Yes will see and that is that Yes is a great vehicle if you keep your head screwed on. If you play and you develop your own parts and your own landscape for Yes. Alan did that. I still carry a bit of the Bill Bruford flame because we still play so much of his music. I mention it because I don’t think anyone else does. I don’t think that you can forget an originator. Time And A Word, the album before I joined was just amazing. We have always gone back there to do magnification because we have orchestration. We have looked back at it but not all of us with the greatest respect for Time And A Word. I think I have been carrying the banner for that one! That line that goes boom…. Boom, boom, boom…boom, boom. When Yes played that, that sold me! Jeb: There is no Roger Dean on the new Yes CD! Steve: I am equally horrified! I was equally outvoted. I didn’t want to change from Roger, not because he is a good friend or a brilliant artist but most of all because he has a way of creating images which parallel and were contusive to our music. I know that we don’t have that. Before in the 80’s they didn’t have that so much because Roger has a certain presence and a certain effect on paper that nobody else has. He is a great artist. We were lucky to have him in the past. I really hope we have him in the future. Jeb: I talked to your old band mate Geoff Downes. You made an appearance on the new Asia CD. Steve: Geoff and I are still friends. We talk as friends and he asked me to do something on the album last year. I just managed to fit it in. I really enjoyed it. They took it on from there and they did the album and they had a lot of guests on there. I love Roger’s sleeve as well. I saw it the other day at an exhibition and it is really stunning. Jeb: I love what he has done on the new Uriah Heep covers as well. Steve: The Uriah Heep one is very, very good. Jeb: The first Asia album is one of my favorites. When you went to the Asia format and left the 20-minute song format, some of your fans said you were selling out. Did that bother you? Steve: The idea was that we weren’t going to sell out. I think the group had a fair amount of integrity about them. We were making the album with Mike Stone. We got to the end and we were discussing mixing it and he said, “Just leave me alone and I will mix it.” I said, “No, we want to steer the mixing. We want you to produce it and put your own ideas in it but we really want to sit here and do it.” He invited us back every evening to let us see where he got with a song that day. We would go in and touch a few things up and admire some of the details on the songs and go away happy. It was a good album. We made it in a sensible way. The only thing that was close to sell out was the fact that Geoff Downes and John Wetton wrote together. Of course, the second album we were inundated by teeny bobber love songs. Carl and I were integral in the construction of the first album, like a group should be. Four people should have a constant role in the shape and direction the album is going. Asia was doing a good job of that. We did a short tour and then the album took off. We called it Asia because this was not a Yes spin-off. Geoff and I were playing in quite a different way. John Wetton was singing and he had his own style of writing. He had a terrific voice to bring to the party. Carl has his whole charisma and his big drum approach. Everybody was happy with the first album as one could expect to be. That meant that everybody was happy with it in an even way. The production was great. I can hold my head up with just about all of it. We were having a pretty good time. It wasn’t like we were saying, “Hey, lets do a pop song!” By the time we got to the second album that’s what Carl and I were saying! “Can you just hold on? Slow down! Steve’s got something else we can play!” While the first album was quite a lot like a pop rock record, there was this tinge of progressive hangover on it. It had, not indulgence, but what they called indulgence. It had some of what people call artsy fartsy trends on it. Some of the things Geoff and I wrote were quite dramatic, especially the beginning of “Only Time Will Tell.” We had all these counterpart lines and the bass came tumbling in with the drums but Geoff and I were actually playing two different things. That was quite exciting. I’ve got to confess that it allowed me to be honest and say, “I like pop!” Hey, I like Abba and I like the Beatles. The Beatles were pop and they were one of the best bands ever. Jeb: I’m with you but I remember the guitar crowd complaining because there were no twenty-minute guitar solos. I think with the first Asia album is was about the mix of people. It is the same thing with Yes. Steve: “Wildest Dreams” was no pop song. We did a lot of tricky harmony stuff -- it was a bit like Queen. “Time And Time Again” was like that. Like you say, it was kind of a mixed bag of reactions.  For some it was to short but for some it was another way….. Jeb: It seems that Asia went on for a while and the dissolved and Yes has done that a couple of time. What gets in the way that makes the bands break up? Steve: The 80’s was a really hard thing to put up with. Asia was short lived and GTR was short lived and then ABWH was short lived. When it became Yes it came out as it was before as if nothing had happened. It was very disappointing. The basic headings, the main thing that artists love to blame are management. They usually are somewhat to blame but I wouldn’t say that they can take all the blame.  I think that personalities create tremendous problems in bands. The personality clash or the musical interference clash can be bad. When someone is bugging someone because they keep doing stuff that should not be there or they are doing stuff that was not there yesterday -- there are so many levels. You can get stuck in ruts. You can think, “He’s really getting a bit out of it.” You get the imbalance in the group from working because that is really wearing. You can also let things come up more like a bad luck story. One thing keeps going bad and then another thing goes bad. That is not what you thought was going to happen and then someone is not even around anymore. People can sometimes walk out on the spur of the moment. Then they want to come back. You get all this paradoxical farting around. Another problem is the high-level business stuff. Somebody gets the needle about something or there is something that they don’t agree on. Maybe they think they were not paid their share. People can make life pretty difficult for themselves. I think Asia may have suffered from that. Yes was a long time ocean lining ship. It was always being boasted up and put back into operation. These other groups didn’t get that chance. The original members went adrift. They were each problematic. Yes has a course of action that somehow keeps it alive. Jeb: Do some of the sparks fuel the creativity? Steve: It is quite a management cliché to say that the band is falling apart but musical argument is good. It is sometimes good to stand back from the situation. People can push themselves down a ramp by what they say. Some of it they have to eat. There is a book in there somewhere and I have written it already (laughter). There are a lot of inherent problems. Another thing that can affect a band is bad financial planning. One of the bands that we mentioned was like that. We got to a point where we overspent and over expected and we were eventually in trouble. One of the first bands I was in had a van taken back. 30-40 years later things haven’t really changed. We might be taking about a Hummer now instead of a van (much laughter)! Jeb: How do you meld spirituality with music. Steve: That is the easiest thing. There is a channel that I don’t ask too many questions about, prophesize about or speculate about. I open myself up to the world and I get ready to play. The opening is really just playing as well as you can with as much concentration and purposefulness as you can. I think that is a reasonably easy channel but I am a professional musician and I have been doing it for years. I don’t think a guitarist should just walk in a venue and play. I don’t think any musician should treat himself that poorly. He should center himself and get ready in a disciplined way. He should think about the show in his mind. You want to get on there and have everyone pull together and accelerate, not just go out there and play. If you think like that it helps. Other people might have four beers and go onstage (laughter). There are different ways of doing it. It depends how important it is to you. Jeb: The new tour with the orchestra must take even more preparation. Steve: I do the same things that I usually do. There have been occasional tours where I don’t do any sound checks but I am doing them regularly on this tour. I like to get my switches in the right place and make sure nothing is breaking or falling apart. When I do that it is right after the orchestra has just rehearsed and I hear a few tunes by them -- some of which that I wrote and that is quite nice to hear that. When it comes to Showtime it is like we are here and they are up there and they have got to keep up with us. As soon as the lights go on the conductor is trying to keep the two things together and he does a great job. We expect it to be right and it is right. I think it takes no actual consideration for me to walk onto the orchestra. They don’t demand it. Once you have the luxury of all that going on it is very enjoyable. It is restful, peaceful and big. They are there and I am not having to push the switches. They are just there! It is a marvelous contribution to the idea of the expansion of Yes with a symphony orchestra. We rehearsed for two weeks in Reno getting ready for the show. We rehearsed with tapes of the orchestra and we didn’t really like it much. We just wanted to get ourselves together so we could say, “We are ready!” Jeb: Tell me about the picture on the back of your album? Steve: That is in Barnes, England. All across England there are disused power stations. It is by the river Tims. The label was really working hard on this sleeve because I have had all the covers with Roger. They said for me to come along and to bring some clothes. They told me how they liked the softness of my work on the album. They said, “We want to see hard and soft.” We sat around and looked at everything from the shoot. We ended up using most of the things that we shot. On the outer sleeve the idea is that I am behind all of this rusty green stuff but by the time I have filtered it through my brain it comes out very swirley. They are saying, “Steve is a guy from London. He was born in the most industrial city in the world and yet he wants to make music like this.” Jeb: Your art is important to you. Steve: If I am going to change to another way of working then I am going to get on top of it at some point and then I am going to put it together in a way that I can understand so I can talk about it. Jeb: Do you ever get tired of people saying that Steve Howe is one of the greatest guitarists of all time? Steve: Not really, to be honest. Jeb: Do you feel that you are one of the best? Steve: I am excited to be asked that in that way. I feel that I am quite a guitarist. You can say that I have my own sort of theme on the guitar and that my theme comes across in the way that I am playing. It has quite a lot to do with my personality. I think if you put a rainbow out there you could say that Steve Howe is all these different themes. The multi-guitarist role has given me a kind of smokescreen effect. I surprise myself playing something in one context of the guitar like a Spanish guitar solo and then five minutes later I have a fuzz box on! I like the way that I make the transition. As long as I am happy with the transitions as an artist then I’m okay. If they jar me then I am doing something wrong. I like to be a chameleon. I like to change from electric to steel in a second. I like that side of me that I am still going there. I am on a CD from an artist named Oliver Wakeman. He is Rick’s eldest son and he has never had a major release before. It’s called The Three Ages Of Magic. I get to be a little bit of an executive producer on that release. I also play guitar on it. It is quite like Rick and I playing together. I played my Les Paul Junior as well as acoustic and steel guitars on there. It gives me the chance to put my color spectrum into Oliver’s. He wanted me to play all these different guitars and he is happy that I did it. It (playing guitar) is not only for Yes and it is not only for me to do on my own. It is an open store for me to work with other people. Jeb: Steve, once again I want to thank you for the interview. I am a big fan of your music. Steve: It’s been fun talking to you. Close Window YesInThePress.com For site comments, problems, corrections, or additions, contact YesinthePress@aol.com