Last night, for the very first time — which should utterly shock you, except you probably have no clue about my musical tastes; suffice it to say that I grew up listening to these guys — I listened to Fly From Here, the most recent release by Yes. To be honest, I had no earthly idea the album had ever been recorded until a couple of days ago when a Twitter discussion about the Buggles sent me down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. What had begun as me jotting down some notes about how I felt about this release has instead turned into a nearly three-thousand word essay, so, you know, get ready (or tl;dr, ya bastards). The album was released in 2011, but to talk about it with an audience which may not understand what I’m getting at in the end here, a few paragraphs about things from 1979-1980 are required to put this in proper perspective.
In 1979, something very strange happened to the band who, to that point, had been the most commercially-successful progressive rock outfit in the brief history of rock music. During the recording sessions for their follow-up to the critically-panned Tormato — an album which history records as having been a platinum-selling disc, but only because record stores across the United States ordered so damned many of the things that they ended up dumping cutout copies for $1.99 within two years — Yes reached a crossroads. Tormato had been attacked by critics as the pinnacle of progressive rock’s pretentious excesses, and the band themselves for having been the primary exponent of same.
The band was unable to come to a consensus on their direction as the seventies lurched to a close. In one camp, lead vocalist Jon Anderson and keyboard impresario Rick Wakeman still wanted to rely on the band’s bread and butter, long epics with layers of airy instrumentation. Guitarist Steve Howe, bassist Chris Squire, and drummer Alan White were more keen to grow out of that model and develop a harder sound. When White suffered a foot injury which caused the band to have to take time off from rehearsal and attempted songwriting, the mercurial Wakeman — not for the first or last time — decided he had other things he’d rather be doing and slipped off into the mist, announcing he’d come back and record the keyboard tracks if and when they ever had material recorded. Anderson, meanwhile, essentially went on a mental vacation, showing little to no passion for the project. The remaining band members resisted all of Anderson’s material, which fed the singer’s ambivalence. Ultimately, Squire and White (without even involving Howe) began writing material as a duo, expecting the band to break up.
At the same time, in a nearby studio in the same complex, another duo were working on the follow-up to their first album. Buoyed by the surprising success of that first record’s hit single, “Video Killed the Radio Star”, the Buggles were having some issues of their own. Singer-bassist Trevor Horn and keyboardist Geoff Downes had both recently taken on Brian Lane as their manager; coincidentally (or perhaps not so much, as Horn and Downes had both been fans of the band for some time) Lane also happened to be the long-time manager of Yes. Squire met with the pair without any real intention of anything happening. Horn and Downes had a song they thought would be perfect for Yes, but by the end of the meeting Squire had invited the duo to join Yes, replacing Anderson and Wakeman.
The result of all this was 1980’s Drama, an album which shocked pretty much everyone. Even accounting for Anderson’s absence and the decidedly different vocal sound provided by Horn, the release was much harder than prior Yes records. Fan reaction was guardedly positive, although obviously a large segment of the fanbase simply couldn’t accept anyone other than Anderson as the front man; critical reaction was mixed. (I, personally, think it’s fantastic, and still consider it one of their three best records.) The album did well in England, even with the Punk Backlash in full swing, reaching #2 in the charts. In America, the record didn’t fare as well; it became the first Yes album not to reach the top 10 or be certified gold since The Yes Album in 1970. Further, Horn simply wasn’t up to the task of reaching the higher tone of Anderson’s voice when performing the old material live. Horn departed after the tour to go back to working on the abandoned second Buggles album (Adventures in Modern Recording, finally released in 1982); Downes began working with him as well, but artistic conflicts between the two led to Horn mostly completing the record on his own. The remaining members of Yes decided to call it a day, with Howe soon joining Downes as charter members of Asia while Squire and White attempted to hook up with Jimmy Page for a new project which failed when Robert Plant wasn’t interested.
Time has a strange way of altering perceptions, however. Over the years, the conventional wisdom regarding Drama has changed. Many Yes fans list it as among their favorite albums now, and for a long time bootleg recordings of the Drama tour were among the most hotly-traded among the circle of Yes fans (largely because that was the only way to get any live recordings of any tracks from Drama; Anderson refused to perform them, and the album essentially disappeared from the Yes live catalog with the exceptions of excepts from “Tempus Fugit” being included in Squire’s nightly bass solo). Meanwhile, after the 80s-era revival of Yes — marked by the hit albums 90125 and Big Generator and a spate of (gasp!) hit singles — the band retreated back into making the sort of music they had in the 70s, causing an evaporation of that newly-minted portion of their fanbase who appreciated the fact that they’d moved on to something somewhat different.
Which brings us to more recent events. Yes released Magnification in 2001, their seventh straight album featuring most or all of the classic lineup (i.e., Anderson-Squire-Howe-White, with Wakeman sometimes there and sometimes not). From that point until the late 2000s, the band only toured, and those tours mostly consisted of classic material; the exceptions were restricted to longform hard-prog pieces from those seven 1990s releases. They were even performing 70s material that they hadn’t performed since the 70s while mostly ignoring the songs from their 80s resurgence (with the notable exception of “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and on one tour “Rhythm of Love”, songs which they finally managed to convince Steve Howe to play; until sideman Billy Sherwood’s departure from the band in 2000, Howe even left the stage when the band performed any of the material from the Trevor Rabin era, leaving the guitar work to Sherwood).
In 2008, the band’s 40th anniversary tour had to be cancelled because Anderson was beset with an attack of respiratory failure. Much to Anderson’s consternation both at the time and in the present, the band regrouped without him and drafted Benoit David, the lead vocalist for Canadian prog band Mystery (and who’d also become well-known to hardcore Yes fans as the lead singer for Yes tribute act Close to the Edge) to take over the vocal duties. After one lengthy tour during which Rick Wakeman’s place behind the keyboards was taken by his son Oliver, the band finally decided to record a new album. Early in the sessions, Oliver Wakeman departed, and was replaced by…
…Geoff Downes, and Trevor Horn was hanging around to produce the thing, and, oh yeah, provide some backing vocals.
See, there was a point to all that background. Now here we are in 2010 and we’ve got Howe, Squire, Downes, and White. We’ve even got Trevor Horn hanging around. And here’s the thing: although Benoit David is able to handle Jon Anderson’s workload in a way poor Trevor Horn wasn’t able to, when left to his own devices, David sounds more like Horn than he does Anderson. For all intents and purposes, after flailing away for nearly 25 years since the blush wore off their career resurgence in the mid-80s (holy crap, has it really been over 25 years since Big Generator came out?). Yes put the Drama lineup back together.
Perhaps more interesting, though, is this: the opening strains of “Fly From Here: Overture” bring to mind not even Drama, but Adventures in Modern Recording. It’s a poppy, staccato keyboard-driven instrumental laced with Howe’s signature riffs, although those riffs are played with an intensity Howe hasn’t really shown since Drama. (Well, at least with Yes. His work with Asia, GTR, and as a solo artist was never restrained by the needs of the Overall Yes Experience.) When we’re finally introduced to David’s voice in “Fly from Here, Part 1: We Can Fly”… I’m not even kidding when I tell you that he sounds exactly like Trevor Horn, so much so that I actually thought Horn was singing the opening verses. This shouldn’t be a surprise; the “Fly from Here” suite is based on a song Horn and Downes wrote in 1980, a version of which was actually performed live on the Drama tour and appeared on the In a Word… Live boxed set in 2003. David clearly set out to be Trevor Horn here, and it certainly didn’t hurt having Horn around telling him what to do.
The six-part suite takes up the first 24 minutes of the album. Each part is distinct enough to be its own song, though they do blend together and share certain thematic connections in addition, of course, to the lyrics being interconnected. Squire added material to “We Can Fly”, and “Fly from Here, Part IV: Bumpy Ride” is credited solely to Howe; otherwise, Downes and Horn are entirely responsible. Unfortunately, although the overture and first part are a good start to the album, “Fly from Here, Part II: A Sad Night at the Airfield” brings matters down; it’s a maudlin ballad which belies the mild freneticism of the two parts preceding it. That energy returns in “Fly from Here, Part III: Madman at the Screens”, another cut which truly does sound like a Buggles tune. “Bumpy Ride” is a bizarre little interlude driven by almost videogame-like noodling from its author Howe, assisted by Downes and including an ethereal vocal reprise of “Madman” near the end. That segues into the closing reprise, which like any good reprise introduces nothing new, just puts it together a little differently.
“Side two” of the album, if it were one of those old vinyl things, begins with a track Chris Squire co-wrote with Simon Sessler and Gerard Johnson and brought to the band. It’s a sappy ballad entitled “The Man You Always Wanted Me to Be”, and David again shows his vocal chameleonism by doing a fairly decent Squire impression; like “Fly from Here” he’s augmented by the real thing singing harmony. Squire, as a songwriter, has always been at his best working with Howe or Rabin. Here, it’s uninspired. It’s not horribly offensive, and as the track progresses some deeper layers show up, but then the song’s sort of ruined with a bunch of annoying “eeyeah eeyeah eeyeah” nonsense. That’s followed by another Downes/Horn composition, “Life on a Film Set”. Interestingly, this is probably the slowest song ever penned by the duo, but they counter that by directing Howe and White to put some oomph into their portions of the song. The middle section of the song contains the first outward appearance of Squire’s trademark bass hammering, as well; it’s present earlier in the album, but muted enough that here it’s the first time I noted it as being forward in the mix. Nice little track, although it’s worth noting that on a certain level it sounds like Downes/Horn trying to write a Yes song as opposed to Yes recording a Downes/Horn composition.
The following two tracks are short three-minute-plus Howe solo compositions. The first, “Hour of Need”, contains Howe jangling along acoustically, and I can’t describe it much better than to say “imagine if Yes did a country song”. (There is a six-minute version of the song as a bonus track on the Japanese release, and it’s… well, it’s a lot better. For starters, the first minute isn’t acoustic, and neither are the last two. Howe actually rips during the electric sections, and I cannot for the life of me understand why this wasn’t the album version. The actual album version is execrable. The full-length version is a damned good song.) That’s followed by “Solitare”, with Howe again rolling acoustic; this one’s wholly instrumental, and it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a three-minute Steve Howe acoustic piece. Okay, that’s probably inaccurate; this isn’t “The Clap” or “Mood for a Day”. It’s a more… thoughtful piece than those two classics, and I would like you to understand that when I use the word “thoughtful” I’m really trying to be evocative. It’s how the song feels.
The album closes with the disc’s only whole-band composition, “Into the Storm”. I say “whole band”, except this was the one song written and completed before Downes replaced Oliver Wakeman, and you can tell. Downes has his style, and Wakeman’s isn’t his. It’s also not his dad’s; Oliver’s keyboards on this track are a mixture of piano and a funky wah-wah beat which blends harmoniously with Squire’s bass. This is the one track on the album co-written by Horn which doesn’t feel like a Buggles track in any real sense. However, it does sound a lot like the material the band was performing when Sherwood was with the band in the late 90s. It’s also the only track on which David seems to make an effort to sound like Anderson, which is ironic since it’s the only track for which he got a writing credit. It’s a pretty good cut, although I don’t think time will cause me to consider it a Yes classic.
Can I recommend this album to people who aren’t familiar with Yes or the Buggles? No. I don’t think I can. It’s a fine album, but without context it’s probably a hard listen; you’d have to bone up first. Can I recommend it to a casual Yes fan? Again, no. It’s not going to be what you expect, and if you’re looking for either “Roundabout” or “Owner of a Lonely Heart” you’re not getting it here.
But if you’re familiar with Drama and like it, or if you dig the Buggles, I can recommend it without hesitation. And if you’re crazy enough to give something a listen just because I like it, then knock yourself out.
Indeed, that’s the problem with this album. If you judge it by the cover, you’re not going to get what you expect. On the other hand, if you judge it by the credits, you’re not going to be surprised at all. This could easily be either the third Buggles album or the follow-up to Drama, but it certainly doesn’t “fit” within the rest of the Yes oeuvre.
That could have been — should have been — a good thing. In a different environment, it would have. Unfortunately, the music business is a lot different than it used to be. It’s hard enough to promote material from classic bands without having to promote the fact that it’s a complete change of direction or, more accurately, an updating of a brief moment in time from almost 35 years ago. And that’s a shame, because bands like this require updating, require a fresh sound, and this release accomplished that. Thirty years ago, Yes re-invented themselves with 90125 and went on to the most successful period of their career. Five years before that, they tried to reinvent themselves and failed… but because they failed on the stage, not in the studio. In 2011, they failed because there was no new audience to rope in like there was with 90125; had there been, it might have resurrected the band’s career yet again because they relied on the new material to an extent they hadn’t since the Big Generator tour. They should have been rewarded for it; instead, they got casino audiences who wanted to hear “Yours Is No Disgrace” for the four billionth time.
And that’s a shame.
(Note: David has since left the band after having suffered a respiratory issue himself; he’s been replaced by Jon Davison of Chattanooga prog outfit Glass Hammer. The band is slated to re-enter the studio this fall to record a follow-up, this time with Downes involved from the outset; whether Horn will produce is still an open question.)
