All My Yesterdays by Steve Howe

All My Yesterdays by Steve Howe

Author:Steve Howe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Omnibus Press
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 14

No Yes

It seemed like only a few months after everything fell apart with GTR that I got a call from Jon Anderson asking me if I had any songs.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got six on a cassette. Do you want to hear them?’

I invited Jon to our house on the edge of Hampstead Garden Suburb. We had a few laughs as if nothing too insurmountable had happened and he left with the cassette. I still have a copy and the demos formed part of the first volume of Homebrew, released in 1996. This was to be the start of some really convoluted recording experiences. I can’t tell you everything and you wouldn’t believe the half of it if I did, but I can say it was simply a mind-boggling time that began with the recording of the ABWH album.

Jon had had enough – for a while, at least – of the Los Angeles Yes setup. Chris, whom Jon clearly loved, had been getting harder to work with. The members of each new incarnation of Yes needed to stand on solid ground, as they completely relied on each other. This quality is an essential key that can unlock any band’s progress. Reliability and trust are the glue that bind musicians together to create great performances. Lack of it had played havoc throughout my career.

Jon was steering this project, but his relationship with Sun Arts, our management, was – as usual – a bit too cosy. He began work on the tracks in various locations, including Montserrat, where he convened with Bill Bruford and Tony Levin to record their parts. Tony had come well prepared, as he always does, but apparently Jon needed convincing. They had a few words but, of course, it settled down once it was clear Tony had learned the titles. I flatly refused to attempt guitar parts in the Bahamas, instead recording all my parts at Air Studios, London. The tracks were developed with Matt Clifford on keyboards and Milton McDonald on guitar to form the overall structures.

I took about forty guitars to the studio, storing them in a vocal booth. Two digital twenty-four-track machines were synchronised to get forty-eight tracks. That was plenty of tracks but also plenty of ‘wind-up’ time – when the machines had to locate their positions and then synchronise. This process wasn’t automatically muted and all too often the manual mute on the playback system wasn’t pressed. I’d hear the horrid slurring up of two tapes, which was frightening and sickening. Chris Kimsey, with Chris Potter engineering, got the job done and I was happy with what I played in those two weeks.

Sadly, instead of staying as a homespun, British-sounding album, Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe was farmed out to a mixing team who were very popular at the time but who appeared to have no idea about the internal instrument balance that we’d developed over the years, a crucial part of Yes. The album opens with a strange overture, several minutes of musical folly, and, although I’m credited as a writer, I had nothing to do with ‘Themes’.



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