Wherever the Sound Takes You by David Rowell

Author:David Rowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

I first met John in Washington’s Union Station. We found a table in the downstairs food court, and here we were, a Washington Post journalist and a Washington political operative blathering for hours about a British progressive rock band whose keyboardist, after the first of many times he left Yes, once staged a set of concerts telling the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table—on ice.

When I asked John about his beginning point with Yes, he unfolded his own involved backstory. Every teenager’s life changes when he or she starts driving, but for the sixteen-year-old John growing up in Erie, Pennsylvania, the keys to his older brother’s Pontiac GTO ushered in more consequences than he could have imagined. His brother, he said, had an eight-track cassette of The Yes Album in the car, and the music took a powerful hold. John was knocked out by the sheer complexity. A Yes song “might be a ten-minute piece of music, and it had movements,” he said. “And you could literally isolate different instruments and listen to them.”

He bought the rest of the band’s catalogue and gave Yes’s triple live album, Yessongs, to his girlfriend for her sixteenth birthday. In his freshman year at the University of Richmond, John went through a phase when he couldn’t stop playing Yes’s Relayer album. A hallmate finally knocked on the door and begged: “Can you please put another album on?”

As he became an adult, being a Yes fan got more complicated. In 1980 he read that Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman had split from the band but that Yes was continuing on. “It was like finding a singles ad written by your wife,” he said.

Because we loved Yes so deeply, we wanted other people to love Yes, too. But as John pointed out, “Yes music is not something that you’re going to listen to and think, I’m not sure if I like this. You either get it or you don’t. And they’re a lot of people, believe me, that don’t get it. In fact, a lot of them turn out to be rock critics.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.