Jon Anderson
Allmusic Zine, c. November 1999
Most of the musicians I’ve interviewed find identity in their roots. Jon Anderson was one of the few whose mission was to transcend his roots, even before he could be sure of what those roots were.
It is, in fact, rather amazing that all those grandiose sounds that we’ve come to associate with Yes, all that sprawling orchestration and deft execution, those moments both pompous and profound, trace back to the mind of a somewhat dreamy lad, raised in modest circumstances in a town that was all too aware of its borders. Who would have guessed that this kid with his ear pressed to the radio was already stretching the borders of his imagination far beyond Lancashire? As time passed, as he struggled to put a career together in swinging London by taking odd jobs or going on welfare, this restlessness roamed even further, toward legendary cultures in far-off lands or further still to places yet to be discovered.
So it was kismet that he would bump into bass player Chris Squire one day at La Chasse, a London club where Anderson was earning some scratch as a janitor. They found that they had similar tastes in some ways: a fondness for Simon & Garfunkel and Fifth Dimension, a frustration with the shortage of groups who could play and sing with equal strength. From this encounter a band was born, whose name, in its optimism and affirmation, encapsulated Anderson’s personality.
Part 2 of this transcript digs deeper into the Yes saga. For now, here’s how it began. I think it’s a pretty good example of how cues derived research can guide the flow of an interview, especially when the subject enjoys the pleasures of conversation.
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Describe Accrington, the town where you were born?
Accrington is a sort of mill town, where cotton products are made. There’s a lot of dairy farms around too. I used to spend most of my life on the dairy farm, working fourteen-hour days.
Was your father a farmer?
No, he was a traveling salesman. I have three siblings, two brothers and a sister. I was the third child, so I was the one who was sort of left on my own. I lived in a kind of dream world. I spent a lot of time thinking about music and listening to symphonies on the radio. I used to sit in the corner of the room, where my family were getting on with their world, and listen to Radio 3, which was the symphonic station.
Your mother was Irish. Your father was Scottish. Was Celtic music a part of your family life?
Not really, although it was something I always did love, from my earliest days. But if you look at the scenario of the Beatles, their music is very Celtic in melody. That’s why it touched so many people. They were ancient melodies that we all knew. We just rehashed them in a different form with lyrics we could all understand.
Were there any particular composers or works you enjoyed hearing over Radio 3?
I didn’t really know who I was listening to, to be honest. I was young, eight or nine years old. But I think I liked Tchaikovsky at that time, and I realized that Vaughan Williams was a very important part of my life. Even Delius, who was born nearly thirty miles away from Accrington, near Bradford in Yorkshire. I still listen to him today. Later I began listening to Sibelius, who is one of the most underrated symphonic composers of the past hundred years. When I started listening to Sibelius at the beginning of the Seventies, he was hardly ever performed. It’s as though the classical world has grown up as to how good this guy really was.
So you were already thinking of music in the grand, symphony scale that Yes would later epitomize.
Not really. My initiation into music came very young. I started my first band when I was nine. It was a skiffle band.
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What did you call that first band of yours?
That was the Little Jon Skiffle Group. We never did a gig; we just played in somebody’s garage. By the time I was sixteen, I was in my first real band. And by the time I was seventeen, I was a professional, which means I went on the dole [laughs]. You went on welfare and you played music. It was a great escape in so many different ways. During that first four or five years, all that the band ever did was to cover Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys and eventually R&B, like Joe Tex and Wilson Pickett. Everybody sang “In the Midnight Hour.” My first real band was the Warriors. We were together for five years, from ‘63 through to ‘67.
You released a single with them, “You Came Along.”
It was just a pop song. In those days, you had these people walking around, looking for groups that fit into the Merseybeat Sound or the Manchester Sound. I remember vividly this car dealer coming to see the Warriors. He said he wanted to put some money into the band and make a record, and he could make us Number One because they had this payola thing going. We had no idea what he was talking about. Unfortunately, the day that he wanted us to do an audition, we already had a booking. So we said, “I’m sorry, we can’t come.” And he said, “Well, screw you. I’ll find somebody else.”He went and found this group called the Four pennies, and they had a Number One three months later. So it was really easy to get a Top Ten record; it was all sort of under the table. That’s the way it was in the Sixties.
What happened to the Warriors after that?
Well, we survived. We went off to pla and work in Germany and Scandinavia. In a way, we followed the Beatles’ road. We actually played the Top Ten Club in Hamburg. So we got that same kind of conditioning. That gives you a lot of samina, believe me.
Swinging Into Jazz
You had a brief solo stint as Hans Christian Anderson.
Yeah. I was living in an apartment, and some guy knocked on the door and said he needed a singer. He was EMI’s budding producer at that time, a guy called Paul Korda. I said, “That’s what I do. I can sing.” So I did a couple of songs for him. That was a hopeful thing, but actually at that time I was into joining a big band that did swing and pop music.
A jazz big band, with a horn section?
Yeah! There was always one in every town, at these places called the Mecca Ballroom. I was thinking that maybe I should join one of them and do that kind of music. I was sort of into Frank Sinatra at the time. I was digging Billie Holiday and Count Basie, and Nina Simone as well. I was staying at the house of this guy who had this record collection, so for about three months I kept playing all this music and thinking, “Hey, I can do some swing jazz, man!” But then I met Chris [Squire].
How did that affect your plans?
Well, I’d been in London for nearly a year, trying to find my way. I was realizing by then that I’d learned a heck of a lot about music. When I met Chris, we sort of bonded because we had very opposite ideas about music, yet we had a very logical idea about how to make a band. At that time, there were some amazing musicians in London, doing very musical things, like the Nice and the Family and Traffic. These kinds of bands were very musical, with a song here and there, but never really any harmonies. So we decided to put a lot of harmonies into a more musical band. That was the fusion that we started off with. Like Chris has said many times, we thought we’d only last a couple of years. In those days, you know, the Beatles had been together only seven years, so anything past that was never even considered.
How did you and Chris decide to experiment with larger forms than the traditional sixteen-bar format?
It came from a couple of records. One was the Vanilla Fudge album [Vanilla Fudge, 1967] and the other was an album by the Fifth Dimension, with all these songs by the guy who wrote “MacArthur Park.”
Jimmy Webb?
Right. These were great songs, and this was a beautiful album [Up, Up and Away, 1967]. It was one of the first albums to come out after the experience of listening to Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper. It was a complete album of music. That’s when we started to consider stretching our music. We started doing basically what Vanilla Fudge had done with the Supremes song, “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” rearranging and stretching the music and giving each performer in the band a little bit of room to maneuver and to shine. That became the flag of the band; that’s how the band evolved. We were very into doing arrangements. Of course, we weren’t the only ones at the time: King Crimson were happening at the same time, as were Led Zeppelin and Genesis, and Pink Floyd were coming through. There was a lot of musical energy around ‘69 that pushed a lot of buttons for everybody.
Rick Wakeman
Was it hard to find musicians who fit into your vision for the band?
The only guy we auditioned was a drummer called Bill Bruford, who was going to go to law school. He actually did leave the band after a couple of months to go to university, but we went up and played there, and he loved the band so much that he joined us.
You deprived the world of another lawyer.
That’s just what we all need [laughs]. So we’d settled within a couple of months on what the band was. It was only a couple of years later that we started to realize that the music was so important and that the success we were getting was like a treasure. You can’t pretend to be in a band and not rehearse. You have to be a part of the will to keep it going. Unfortunately, Peter Banks just didn’t have that thing about him that he would want to continue with the music, so we had to move on, and we found this guy Steve Howe, who really pushed us into a more musical world because he had this great capacity for musical styles. Eventually, every incarnation of the band would push the band into a better mode.
The arrival of Rick Wakeman must have made as big an impact on Yes as the addition of Steve Howe.
Equally, yes.
His impact must have been to broaden the orchestrational vision of the band.
We’d tried an album with an orchestra [Yes, 1969]. It didn’t quite work as we’d all dreamed it would, but as soon as Rick joined, he was your one-man orchestra. If you needed flutes, he could play flutes. If you wanted a cello section, he could do that. If you wanted a harpsichord, a piano, an organ … This guy was a revolution for us. At that time, I was learning to enjoy the music of Vangelis, who was another exponent of orchestral keyboard music, and then eventually Jean Michel Jarre, Kitaro, Yanni … It was all an extension of where Rick and Vangelis started off in the early Seventies.
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Topographic Turmoil
Was there any one song that caused more dissension in the band than anything else?
I think there were two. Of course, every progression of music has its own drawbacks, because you’re moving at a speed that really doesn’t have anything to do with the business or the makeup of what surrounds the group. So when we were doing Tales from Topographic Oceans, I was headlong into creating what I would say is a masterpiece. I thought that the band had the talent and the music wherewithal to create a piece of music that would go down in history. You always want to do that, even if it’s with a song that’s a Number One hit and that people remember for about a year and that’s it. But I wanted to create something that would stand the test of time.
What was the problem?
During the course of making that album, two things happened, which led to a sort of disastrous momentum within the group. One was that Eddie Offord, who was engineering the band at that time, started to get a little sick. Unfortunately, he got into the wrong crowd, so he spent a lot of time forgetting who he was and what he was doing. At the same time, Rick Wakeman just didn’t afford the time it takes to be involved with something so special. It’s really nothing against him, but he was having a great success as a solo artist, with Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Rick was becoming a super-duper star and, as he would tell you, he was drinking himself under the table every day.
And if you’ve got one piece missing from the jigsaw puzzle, then the puzzle doesn’t work as well. That coupled with trying to create a large piece of music that required everybody to be at the helm, made this a daunting task. It was part of the karma of the band. So I just pushed it through, like a megalomaniac. It took six months to create, but after about three months I was already incensed by the frustration. After that came mass criticism of the project, and then Rick jumped the ship and Eddie ended up in a mental home for a while. That was a hell of a difficult time for the band.
Why was their “mass criticism” of the album, as you put it?
It was a combination of things, to be honest. If you know what you’re trying to create, and you’ve got a fully committed team, you finish up with what you’ve collectively dreamed of doing. With Tales from Topographic Oceans, Steve [Howe] and I ended up doing about eighty percent of the music, so when it comes down to one or two people to finish it, it’s more about hanging in there and trying to finish something where we’d hoped that everybody would be there at the end. The interesting thing was that it was called “album of the year” by Time magazine, but it did split the Yes fans in half. One half carried on with their lives, and the other half are still with us. Just last year, we performed the first movement of that piece on tour, and it was magic. We didn’t change any of the music. We didn’t edit any of it down, even though we had been told constantly that it could have made one great album instead of a difficult double album.
As you listen to Tales from Topographic Oceans now, do you hear the areas where you had to cover for Wakeman’s disinterest in the project?
It’s funny. The first movement and the fourth movement are really great. I think that if we tried to perform the second and third movements, we would still come through. Really, we were doing something that went against the grain of the business at that time. In 1973 or ‘74, that was right when FM radio was taking off, and people were playing Close to the Edge and long pieces of music. Then all of a sudden, within the space of six months, the business changed and went in the opposite way, simply because the radio stations couldn’t survive without advertising.
“Yes have come through some bizarre experiences.”
But was that all due to length? What about the music itself? Even at its peak progressive rock was criticized as pompous and pretentious.
That’s hard to say, because I wasn’t listening to other bands that much. I was listening to Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report, and what was wrong with that? I didn’t really listen to King Crimson or ELP [Emerson, Lake & Palmer] or Genesis, but these musicians were all trying to find their own voice, and people are gonna criticize that. You know, Mozart was criticized and Stravinsky was nearly killed for being progressive. Some of Stravinsky’s work is pretty bizarre, but some beautiful gems have come out from that. I think that Yes have come through some bizarre experiences too, but some gems have come through as well. In fact, it was only a couple of years later that we did “Awaken,” on Going for the One, and “Turn of the Century.” These are very beautiful pieces of music. Whether they’re commercial, whether they satisfy millions and millions of people, isn’t the point. It’s a question of whether you create something worthwhile.
What, from that era of Yes, has sustained its popularity among today’s audiences?
A lot of people, strangely enough, love Relayer. I say “strangely” because it wasn’t my favorite recording. It was a very interesting piece of music to perform onstage, but the actual recording had a sort of grayness, very much like the album cover. It didn’t sing well. I wasn’t there at the print [i.e., when the initial LPs were pressed]. When we heard it, we were on tour, and I thought, “Gosh, it sounds like I’m listening through cotton wool.” The actual printing of the record was very bad, and sometimes that can ruin a piece of music, when you can’t hear the bass or the bass drum as clearly as you should be able to, which enables you to hear the guitar phrasing better, which helps the vocals and the harmonies and so forth.
You get much clearer mixes these days from digital recording and CDs.
Sometimes it works, but if you spend too much time on making it sound crystal-clear, you miss the soul of the song.
In Part 2 of this transcript, Anderson outlines his songwriting (and painting!) process, recounts his band’s most turbulent period, shares the spiritual perspective he brings into his music and much more. Watch this space!
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