----------------------------------------------------- JULY 17, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------- Source: San Jose Mercury News http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/3671924.htm Yes: Band of a Thousand Chances Album Rediscovered, Spirit Reawakened By Brad Kava Sometimes it seems the universe is saying a big NO to the rock group Yes. Almost every year, says Jon Anderson, who has been its main singer for most of 34 years, something happens that threatens to sink this mainstay of progressive rock. And just as often, it takes a clue from its appropriately upbeat name, and things turn magically around. Take last year, for example. The members, now scattered up the West Coast from Santa Barbara to Seattle and across the Atlantic to their native England, gathered to record an album that was a return to the epic-song form. They not only brought in a symphony orchestra to add icing to the music but they also wrote songs merging rock band and symphony. The resulting CD, ``Magnification,'' was deemed a success by these highly critical musicians, and they waited to see how it would do on the charts. Unfortunately, the album was released on Sept. 11. And a month after its release, the record label, Beyond, went out of business, sinking their hopes for an encore to earlier successes. ``We got strangled,'' Anderson, 57, says from San Luis Obispo. After his car broke down there, he fell in love with the small university town and moved there four years ago. ``We haven't had a hit album in 10 years, but we're still good. We worked three months on this and thought we really had something. ``We are supposed to be Yes, very positive, but we find that you are climbing a mountain every year with this band. And every year it's a different mountain.'' Perhaps appropriately, at a time when the mystical ``Lord of the Rings'' is a movie hit, the band, with its quasi-mystical romps into Neverland, is in the throes of a revival. In the new box set ``In a Word,'' on Rhino records, musicians such as Les Claypool, Phish's Jon Fishman, Tool's Danny Carey, filmmaker Cameron Crowe and Pearl Jam's Stone Gossard heap praises on the influential group. Yes, with members who rotate faster than your city council, has amazed even long-term fans with some of its paths to success. Such as in the mid-1980s, when radio stations stopped playing the long-form songs by groups such as Yes and King Crimson because they took too much time away from ads. The music scene was filled with cutesy English MTV bands, like Duran Duran and the Thompson Twins. Yes had fallen apart. Keyboard player Rick Wakeman and Anderson pursued solo projects. Guitarist Steve Howe joined the band Asia. But new members Trevor Rabin and Trevor Horn, who were brought in to fill out a touring contract for the old band, came up with the song ``Owner of a Lonely Heart.'' Anderson returned to sing it, and the resulting most un-Yes-like 1983 album, ``90125'' went on to become the band's biggest, selling 8 million copies. That success bred a problem that followed it for the next two decades. Anyone who has seen the mockumentary ``This Is Spinal Tap'' can relate: lots of conflicting ideas about which direction to take. This band is rare in being one of the few rock outfits that have survived decades with a democracy. Bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Who and Aerosmith have one or two relatively benevolent dictators, and the other members do what they are told and rake in their share. After its 1983 success, Yes was split between those who wanted to write another hit single and those who wanted to return to the longer, symphonic pieces that had launched the band's first round of success. The band even split in two for a while at the end of the 1980s: One group played shorter songs and kept the name Yes; the other -- Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe -- tried to recapture the earlier spirit. The deck shuffled several times over the next decade, with Yes touring in all sorts of guises, mostly agreeing to follow the ideas of various members. Some spent time working on catchy songs, such as ``Love Will Find A Way,'' which was a hit only in Puerto Rico, while others wanted to create longer, classically inspired tales. Two years ago, it found a lost chord with the excellent ``Masterworks'' tour, which returned to the long songs. Last year, it toured with a symphony orchestra. This year, with Anderson, Chris Squire, Steve Howe, Alan White and returning keyboard player Rick Wakeman, it will mix classic old songs with those from the doomed ``Magnification.'' Wakeman, the flamboyant, long-haired, cape-wearing Mozart wannabe, became a born-again Christian and left the band -- for a third time -- in the mid '90s, saying it played ``devil's music.'' (He was a ``Zuni-Christian, or loony-Christian,'' Anderson says.) Anderson and Wakeman had fallen out earlier, in the mid-'70s, when the keyboardist hated the band's most ambitious album. After the success of melodic albums such as ``Fragile'' and ``Close to the Edge,'' the band tried an experimental collection of 20-minute songs called ``Tales from Topographic Oceans.'' Some fans loved it, but it was a commercial and critical bomb. Wakeman disliked it so much that he once ate a curry dish on stage at London's Royal Albert Hall while the rest of the band played the songs. When Anderson saw him, he went ballistic, spilling curses and curry all over the reluctant keyboard player. Anderson was stung by the criticism of the album. ``For 10 years I wouldn't listen to it,'' he says. ``I thought I had done something wrong. But then one day I was in a restaurant and someone was playing Side 2. I listened to it as though it wasn't my music, and it sounded beautiful. The band has revived the songs from the album, and it's being appreciated decades later, even by Wakeman. Pearl Jam's Stone Gossard, listing the things he wants his band to accomplish, says ``what I really want is for us to make our `Tales from Topographic Oceans.' '' The mountain keeps getting climbed. Next year, says Anderson, the band may stage a Yes-fest, a daylong show with various bands that share its spirit. ``We expected it to last, maybe, three years,'' says Anderson, recalling the beginning of the band in 1968. ``Then in the 1970s people said, `In 10 years people will still be playing your music.' Well, half of that is true. The radio doesn't play our music, but people buy our records. ``We've survived the many storms." Close Window YesInThePress.com For site comments, problems, corrections, or additions, contact YesinthePress@aol.com