Yesstories - Interview

THE INTERVIEW FILE

EXCERPTS FROM THE CHRIS SQUIRE INTERVIEW
In January 1995 I had the opportunity to interview Chris Squire from my book. I found him to be friendly. thoughtful and generous with his time. The following are excerpts from those interviews, some of this material was not included in my book:

Tim Morse: With Fish Out Of Water, did you have those songs stockpiled over the years? Or did you write them in a burst when you realized there was a solo album to be done?

Chris Squire: It was kind of like that - there were ideas that I had been working on the previous year to year and a half. I'm doing another solo album now, it's because its become a reality that I'm now doing it. And some of things that I'm doing are based on things I've had for two or three years. Other things are fresh now that I'm actually doing it.

TM: You're actually recording it now?

CS: Yeah, I've done a couple of tracks - a couple of backing tracks.

TM: Is some of the stuff from the Chris Squire Experiment?

CS: No, it's new stuff - it's fresh material.

TM: Is that right? Because those Experiment songs are great too.

CS:Well they were, yeah. I may include something from that, I'm not sure yet. I'm seeing how it's developing. I think before the middle of this year (1995!) I should have it all pretty much in shape.

TM: That's fantastic news. Who's the lineup in the band, or are you using session musicians? How are you putting it together?

CS:I'm doing it in a different way - I'm not going to say just yet whom I'm doing it with. I'm working with a guitarist and a drummer and it's going fantastically well. The people I'm working with aren't supposed to be doing it at the moment because of contractual problems, but they're being worked on.

TM:This is an aside, but at the end of "Lucky Seven" there's a line that you sing while the saxaphone is going on and it sounds like "synthesize," do you happen to remember what you sing there?

CS: At the end? Oh, it's "sugar eyes." It's a heroin comment, actually.

TM:Is there more to this song than I realize?

CS: No, it's an obscure thing - it just sounded good. But I remember that was the thought at the time when I wrote the words, because I'd been around some people who were doing smack and it was like "brown sugar" and things like that. But I just threw it in. It wasn't supposed to be the main focus, it was supposed to be subliminal.

TM: Exactly, all these years I've been trying to make out what you sang! In the song "Hold Out Your Hand," you're talking about the feeling and it comes...are you talking about the spirit of God entering in with you? Is that the idea?

CS: That's right, that's exactly right. It was another song of hope.

TM: One aspect of your style seems to be an inventive use of repetition, say the ostinato in "The Fish" that you build on with other ideas or lyrical repetition such as on "I've Seen All Good People." Is something that you picked up when you were a choir boy or something you developed later?

CS: Repetition is the basis of pop, actually (laughter). That's really where it comes from. Of course our pop songs are a little better than the average pop songs. It's an important part of rock or pop music is restating the theme, I guess in classical terms. You can't give people too much new music, we have made this mistake in the past as with Topographic Oceans - it was too varied and too scattered. People tend to be able to accept something with a kind of attention span focus - I wouldn't say short attention span, but some kind of focus.

TM: In "Close To The Edge" or "Awaken" there are themes that are returned to and developed and built upon, but I remember reading somewhere that you said that Jon would feel like the vibes would make the music happen and get the music through, but you felt at the end of the day that there was a need to analyze the music and there wasn't as much of that on Topographic as you would have liked.

CS: I still feel pretty much the same way about it.

TM: Is there still the possibility that Topographic could be revisited?

CS: Jon has mentioned doing some of it with an orchestra or something, but I don't know it's very hard. Maybe we could, as you know we used to perform "Ritual" out of context. We played that onstage quite a lot and I enjoyed that. The more obscure parts like side three, I don't know whether people should be made to sit through it! For a true aficionado of Yes I would suppose it would be okay, but once again I think it's a bit too much for most people.

TM: Steve was talking to me about how difficult "The Ancient" was to do because of the cues. That there were certain times where he would play a melody and then the rest of the band on the next bar would have to stop completely - that these things were very difficult to pull together.

CS: It certainly was!

TM: Is there a movement from Tales that you prefer?

CS: Actually, I liked side two a lot. It's one of my favorite sides - "Ritual" too I like.

TM: Was the Tales set list hard to get across to an audience? When you played it you also played "Close To The Edge" as well, so you performed five 20 minute songs! It seems staggering that you could play that kind of music...

CS: It was pretty tough, even by Yes's standards. It was quite a tough show to get across to an audience.

EXCERPTS FROM THE BILL BRUFORD INTERVIEW
In late 1994 and early 1995 I had the pleasure of interviewing Bill Bruford. I found him to be intelligent, witty and very down to earth. The following are excerpts from those interviews:

Tim Morse: Are you amazed by the longevity that Yes's music has experienced?

Bill Bruford: Yeah, pretty much - I'm very amazed. I think none of us thought that there would be a CD revolution. Of course, how could we have seen that this stuff would be bought and sold all over again, I think that confused everybody.

TM: And now they are digitally remastered.

BB: I have some of those, but I haven't heard them yet.

TM: I think Fragile sounds great - it's the best I've ever heard it.

BB: Very good.

TM: The song "Close To The Edge" has great form to it. It's almost a sonata-allegro form, where the themes come back and build on each other.

BB: Yes, absolutely. It's a real part of history that just fit on the side of an album perfectly. As I recall no one really knew how we were going to finish it. It felt like we were going on and on and on, just adding sections in different meters without anyone knowing what the conclusion to this music would be.

TM: Was there any idea of the length? Did you think well we've got about five minutes here and then realize "Hey, this is twenty minutes long!"

BB: I don't think so and I don't think we conciously said, "Let's make this the whole side of an album." The other thing is was at the time was that everybody was saying that Simon and Garfunkel had spent three months doing Bridge Over Troubled Water and that seemed like a record that needed to be smashed. If that was the longest time spent on making a record, then by God we were going to take four months!

TM: You were just the guys to do it.

BB: Absolutely. The feeling was very much like that in the band at the time. That somehow to take a very long time was hip. But Close To The Edge is very good, even at this distance.

TM: I've just been listening to the first Drums and Piano album with Patrick Moraz and I have to tell you that there are some really nice things on it.

BB: I threw down quite a challenge to Patrick, I think. Because he had always had in this biography of himself that he had won the Zurich jazz piano competition when he was twenty years old or something. And I always sensed that underneath there was a jazz player that was ready to get out. Chick Corea had written a song for him and there was a jazz player in Patrick at one time, much more than Rick Wakeman - who hasn't got a note of jazz in him! It is true, don't you think?

TM: I think Rick is definitely more classically oriented.

BB: He is entirely classically oriented. He doesn't know what a blue note is - which is fine, it's a phenomenally European thing.

TM: He's more into major scales and arpeggios.

BB: That's right. There's no syncopation, but lots of arpeggios - diatonic stuff. You couldn't pay an American to play that, he wouldn't know how to. An American would have to hit a blue note.

TM: Right, right.

BB: But Moraz had a fair amount of jazz in him and I said to him, "Let's improvise and let's go cheap. We'll rent drums and pianos and if you are a real player this will be the kind of album you can play on. With no excuses and totally naked as it were." And he seemed to respond to that and he did play quite well...but it was liberating for me having just come out a highly electronic King Crimson to get back to something small like that.

TM: You seem to thrive on extremes, like going from Yes to King Crimson.

BB: Yeah, I do! I like big changes. It's what makes you react differently - I'm not the kind of guy that goes from one blues group to another blues group.

TM: It seems like it would really round you out as a player to accept those challenges. On the solo albums that you did...that's some of my favorites of your body of work, particularly One Of A Kind.

BB: I'm pleased, that's one of my favorites too. I don't where it came from, in retrospect. I sort of look back and go, "Where did that come from?" I don't even remember writing half on it. I had a very young family at the time and if you have two or three children screaming around your ankles...they say there's no such dampener on artistic endevour as a pram in the lobby - I think you call them baby carriages. And life was just a blur, of diapers, phone calls, trying to put studio dates together, trying to write music and staying up all night. I'm more relaxed now and I don't know where all that stuff came from.

TM: I was wondering about the song "Sahara of Snow", was that something that was left over from your time in U.K.?

BB: Hhmmm, now you've got me!

TM: Because the second part of the song is credited to Jobson and you.

BB: That's right we may well have used that in U.K. - there may even be a live tape of that around somewhere (there is!), which would be very smoking, because U.K. live was quite a thing.

TM: I saw you in Sacramento and it was a great show.

BB: Did you? Well you caught us at the right time, because it started to get pretty noisy...John Wetton was having problems with the sound mixes and was very loud on stage...but I thought it was a good band. It was one of those bands that could have gone a long way, but unfortunately we just couldn't hold it together. Wetton and Jobson wanted to go off and be stars and Holdsworth and I weren't ready to do that at all. It just didn't seem to make sense.

TM: It was funny that on "In The Dead Of Night" when the spotlight went on Allan for his guitar solo he actually moved away!

BB: He still does that - if you put a spotlight on him, he'll walk away. Half the musicians I know are like that. The more introverted they are, the less they like the light.

EXCERPTS FROM THE PETER BANKS INTERVIEW
On Sunday, July 21 1996 I had the chance to interview Peter Banks. Peter is an excellent guitar player and a great guy as well. I enjoyed our chat and the following represents part one of this interview.

Tim Morse:Tim Morse:What did you think of Yesstories?

Peter Banks:It's lovely, are you pleased with it?

TM: I'm extremely happy with the way it has turned out.

PB: I've actually read it from beginning to end, it's very good. A friend of mine read it cover to cover and he loved it.

TM: Have you found a keyboardist from your Notes From The Edge advertisement?

PB: I've had lots of replies, we're into the double figures now. And the overall standard is very good. In fact I've been feeling a little guilty, because I haven't replied to anyone yet - it is something I will be doing. There is a guy in England named Jerad Johnson who is a keyboard player/producer/engineer and he's very good, very talented. And we've started working together, we've decided to do an album together. We have started with the Flash song "Small Beginnings."

TM: I heard that you've wanted to redo that song for some time.

PB: I've wanted to do it for years, but every attempt at it has turned into another tune. We have actually taken a different approach, we're doing a lot of sampling - we're even sampling bits of Flash! We're making slow progress on it, because Jerad is working on two other projects. So I have to work around his schedule, fitting in one day every two weeks. It's sounding great, what we're doing is exactly the same as the other version, except we are kind of deconstructing it as we go along - subverting it in part. There's not a moment on it that will sound too familiar, as soon as it sounds comfortably familiar then we like to do something with it to take away that comfortable feeling. We are trying to drag it screaming into the 90's! We are going to do a couple of other Flash pieces as well. It's been fun.

TM: Was there anyone else that interested you with their tape?

PB: There was another keyboard player from North Carolina named Keith Roberts, who did a fantastic improvisation on two Flash tunes. It's really good and we are going to work on his idea - he did it as a solo improvisation. He said that he had never played those tunes before, but he really got inside those songs. He made it sound really fresh.

TM: Is it true that you may do an Internet tour like Patrick Moraz did?

PB: Yes, I've been talking to Gary Davis (Patrick's old manager) about this. Keith Roberts is very keen to do this with me and is flexible about scheduling it with me. Whether or not it is going to happen...I don't know, because I am also doing another record for One Way Records. In fact I've just got the contracts for that this week.

TM: Will that be another solo album?

PB: That's going to be a completely solo one. I'm not altogether sure what I'm going to do for that. I think it will be a lot more low key than the other two I've done. Dare I say it, a bit more relaxing.

TM: More meditative?

PB: I don't know about that! But not so involved, I tend to throw everything into these pieces and I don't want to do that, I've kind of burned myself out on that.

TM: You know one of the tunes that I liked from Self-Contained is "Lost Days." Which is very gentle, drifting, kind of floating music.

TM: It's supposed to be kind of a desert scene, that's what I envisioned when I did it.

TM: It has that cinematic quality to it.

PB: Well thanks, there'll be more of that. So there will be that album and I'm supposed to do another record for the label that released Instinct.

TM: You have a lot of projects lined up!

PB: Yeah, there seems to be and there's the Internet thing which I would like to do. It's really just a question of fitting everything in.

TM: I'd love to see you play live.

PB: And I'd love to as well. Also I'm supposed to be working with the two guys from ASIA - writing with them for the next ASIA project.

TM: I was going to ask you about that - so you and Geoff have been in touch?

PB: Yes, in a couple of weeks time I'm supposed to go down to their very nice studio in Wales. He and John Payne need a writing partner and I'm going to go down and see what happens. I think they want to write stuff from scratch for the album, maybe they're thinking I can bring some fresh ideas and whatever. I'm looking forward to meeting them, I've only spoken to them over the phone. They like my writing on Instinct and Self-Contained and if they want more of that...I've got plenty more of that!

TM: I can see your style meshing well with Geoff's.

PB: Yeah! I'm looking forward to it, so there is quite a few things going on.

TM: I have heard rumors about a Flash reunion, is that happening as well?

PB: No, but I've actually found out where Colin Carter is. I have his phone number, he's currently living in Oregon. I haven't as yet called him, but a Flash reunion...I don't know. There is a live Flash album that is coming out on the Voice Print label in England in the fall of this year. It's actually a bootleg and I just got a copy of it from a friend of mine in L.A. It's off a radio program in New York and a couple of T.V. things we did in L.A. That is going to be officially released.

TM: It sounds like Frank Zappa's "Beat The Boots."

PB:It is actually. I was taking to the head of this label and I said, "Can we put this out?" And he said, "Yeah, what is the bootlegger going to do?"

TM: Yes, what is he going to do, sue you? I wanted to ask you a little about the version you did of "Astral Traveller" that you did for the Yes tribute album - how did you get involved and how did you pick that song?

PB: I was asked to it and since I don't sing I thought I'd do an instrumental version of it. I had attempted to do that song about year before and I had put it to one side. So I thought I'd do "Astral Traveller" - Robert Berry deserves a lot of credit, because basically we did it over the telephone. He put down the basic track, which he did a beautiful job on and sent me the ADAT tape and I put my bit on. It was as simple as that. It was his idea to it in that shuffle feel.

TM: It sounds like a surf-guitar-whammy-bar extravaganza!

PB: I tried to make it sound like one of the 60's western things. It's got that twangy, Duane Eddy type of thing. That's what I wanted.

TM: I wanted to ask you about some ancient history, some things we discussed when I was in London that some people may not know about. Isn't true that when Anthony Phillips left Genesis that you were asked to join the band?

PB: Yes, but I was in Yes at the time and I think we were making five pounds a week more than Genesis were. It's another one of those "what if's?" And I recomended Phil Collins to Peter Gabriel. Phil was playing in a band called Flaming Youth and I recomended him for Genesis and there you go.

TM: The rest is history.

PB: Didn't I do him a favor?

TM: What was your recollection of the Yes gig where you opened for Cream's farewell show?

PB: Funnily enough there was something about it the other night on the television. It was a big gig, to play at the Albert Hall and it still is in a way. They didn't have many rock bands there. We had played there four times in the space of a year - so there was kind of a joke around that we were the resident band for the Albert Hall. All I remember is that we didn't have much time, Cream played for a long time and I think we were given about a half an hour. Which is about one and a half songs for us! It was all over very quickly.

TM: They had to set up the drum kit for Ginger Baker.

PB: It was a very good gig for us - it got us a lot of good publicity. I don't think we were signed with Atlantic yet so we were very much in the public eye through gigs like that. It was useful.

THIS CONCLUDES PART ONE OF THIS INTERVIEW, STAYED TUNED FOR PART TWO!

This is Part Two of the Peter Banks interview:

Tim Morse: Is it true that the Syn opened for Jimi Hendrix?

Peter Banks: Yes, it was at the Marquee. The official record for the Marquee was broken that night, it was something like 1,200 or 1,400 people in this tiny little club. We were the support band.

TM: Had you heard of him before that?

PB: Oh yeah! I saw the second gig he ever did in this country. I'd been told that this guy was fantastic and every guitar player in town was there. Townsend, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page were all there in this tiny room that held probably two hundred people at the most. Hendrix was doing things that most people could do, but not only was he doing them much better...he was making it look easy. And the fact that he was left handed made it awkward to tell what he was playing.

TM: You needed a mirror to figure it out!

PB: Yeah, he was highly proficient. And even in those days he looked very unusual, very imposing. He had a lot of charisma on stage or when he just walked into the room - although he was quite a shy guy. He was the kind of guy that you see and you say, "That guy's a star." He had that whole vibe about him.

TM: The gig where you opened for him - wasn't that some kind of showcase?

PB: Yeah, it didn't mean that much to us, because we had played the Marquee dozens of times. We played there every week so playing there was no big deal. The main difference was that night anybody who was anybody was there. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and every guitar player within a hundred miles was there, so it was a star studded audience. The biggest problem with that gig was that we had to play two sets. So we would play, come off, get changed, dry off...it was incredibly hot in there, it was about 120 degrees. The guitar just wouldn't stay in tune.

TM: And your hands are sweaty...

PB: Yes and we came off and everybody is ready for Hendrix and then we came on and had to do another set. And we had only one roadie so after we had said our thank-yous, we had to creep back on stage and take our gear down.

TM: I seem to remember that Hendrix was asking how the crowd was and that you told him that it was a tough audience.

PB: The Marquee crowd was a tough one. London audiences are traditionally not easy to impress, because that's their attitude, "Okay, impress me." You'd have to jump through hoops of fire for them.

TM: Isn't the British music press like that too?

PB: Oh absolutely.

TM: In fact it was kind of funny to read Melody Maker to see how brutally they were going to savage someone.

PB: There is that English hypocrisy - they build someone up like Blur or Oasis to vast heights of grandeur and then the press gets sick of them and knocks them down.

TM: Speaking of new bands, what have you been listening to lately?

PB: Nothing new, but I have been spending too much of my money on back catalog stuff.

TM: Aren't you into world music?

PB: Yes I am. There's a group called Loop Guru that samples Indonesian music. I like that stuff, but it's not traditional rock music. I just bought the latest King Crimson and that's terrific. Most of the things I buy are good at the computer and good at sampling. I liked the new Bowie album, I thought that was fantastic. That's more the direction I like to see people going, I mean we're getting towards the end of the 90's and people are still sounding like the 60's or 70's.

TM: That's the Oasis thing, isn't it?

PB: Although I'm redoing Flash the last thing I want to do is make it sound like 1972 or 1973. That's not where it's at for me.

TM: Your version of "Astral Traveller" sounded very little like the original.

PB: If you're going to redo something - to my mind - you need to do it differently. That is how Yes got started, we were a cover band. In fact 90 percent of our original set was cover versions. But since we had different tastes and styles musically we figured that if we were going to do these tunes - and some of them were pretty crappy tunes - that we'd make them sound the way we wanted them to sound. So we would take things and subvert and twist them around until all five of us were happy with it. It was purely by accident if the audience seemed to like it. We were pretty arrogant about that really.

TM: I think that's a good thing.

PB: Yeah, but I'd love to hear a band now that did that. A band that would take something middle of the road and make it sound hip and interesting. Jazz people do it all the time, but now no one would get a recording contract doing that sort of thing.

TM: What were some of the songs that Yes covered that weren't recorded?

PB: We did "Heaven Is In Your Mind" by Traffic. We did a great version of "Eleanor Rigby." We did the Fifth Dimension, "Paper Cup" and it sounded fantastic. But I don't think we ever got it on tape. We used to throw a lot of stuff away if it wasn't working. We were very good about that. If we weren't really into it, it would get dropped.

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