One more thread about YES: Tell me, Johnny Fever, why you despise the Big Generator album so much. I'm curious, because it's one of my favorites.

Yes at their best aren't about guitar hooks, Yes at their best are about 20 minute suites, influenced by classical music and with a lot of mellotrons and vintage analogue synths. For Yes at their best, see "Close To The Edge" from 1972.

Prog is meant for 17 year-old nerds to enjoy.

Prog is for nerds of all ages to enjoy, and we do!

But "The Yes Album" suffers from not having Rick Wakeman in the band.

I strongly disagree.

I don't know - I reckon it'd be the easiest sell to people who otherwise wouldn't bother their ears with Yes.

People who otherwise wouldn't bother their ears with Yes would probably prefer "90125" - not being ready for the more complex musical sophistication of their earlier (and superior) work.

this is like exactly the opposite of the actual truth...those are the dudez i have to "deal" with to like yes...wow.

To Dominique: "Shoot High Aim Low" is obviously Yes's attempt at making a Gilmour-era Pink Floyd anthem. Depending on how you view that Floyd stuff probably goes a long way in how you view "Shoot High Aim Low."

Squire/Howe make it. Absolutely.

however i suspect as a PERSON -- in terms of the chemistry in life rather than in music, bcz he's chummy and easygoing rather than brittle or imaginative -- he was quite important, as regards cohesion more than concrete musical inspiration,

the moraz relationship only sparked for a short time, but while it sparked it sparked well, perhaps bcz there was crackle and dissent and unease and therefore a lot of invention and drive: as a result, relayer is the only sustained project where that everything that's good about yes came to the fore and everything that's timesome was kept at bay (it sounds "fusiony" the way earlier yes sounds "classical" -- ie not at all)

yes are probably the only major group lumped in with prog who had a genuinely strong melodic sensibility -- and a very strong propulsive unit in squire plus a.n.drummer: their problem for a long while was structure (again, if wakeman had any serious grasp of classical music this would have been invaluable at this point -- what he was called on to provide instead was vamp-till-ready pseudo-classical patterns, to fill in the spaces where they couldn't work out the joins)

the ideal solution would maybe have been to employ wakeman as a guitar roadie, so he was always around keeping the band in good spirits -- that kind of stuff is generally central to whether bands survive, after all: did moraz provide their structural chops, or had the others worked their way through to this, long-form, by painful experiment and failure? his own solo records aren't very thrilling -- obviously they're better than wakeman's, but that is a low low bar -- but then he probably needed the goad of people he had to surprise and please and match and battle

And now this thread has completely gone off-topic, as we're talking about an entirely different band!

Neither Yes nor Genesis were really rock bands in the traditional sense. They were a lot closer to classical music than most rock bands are.

I haven't heard any post-GFTO Yes whatsoever, and may things long remain that way.

relayer is the shit. gates of delirium>>>to be over>sound chaser>>>>>most music written before I was born. that melody which breaks through about 12:40 into GOD...omg. OMG.

And why do we hear so little of Moraz as a soloist? Sure, I do hear all those Chick Corea influenced synths creating sort of a background mood, but Moraz as a soloist is more or less only heard in the beginning of "To Be Over".

As far as Wakeman vs. Moraz: a joke to think Moraz tops Wakeman as a signature, unifying element of Yes. Like I said on some other Yes thread: defending Tony Kaye (or Moraz for that matter) as better than Wakeman within the confines of Yes is just...nuts. Yeah, Wakeman wanked around a bit on some tunes but... who in the band didn't?!? And it always sounds great (well, except for those shrill MiniMoogs all over Tormato ).

Still doesn't hold up in the case of Yes though.

Anyway, I disagree with nearly everyone in this thread. I think Yes was great from The Yes Album through Going for the One (which is a slight step down from Relayer). (I don't know the first two albums that well and I've never heard Tormato.) I think this stretch holds up against any comparable stretch in any rock band's catalogue. I think all the band members did their jobs very well through this stretch and contributed meaningfully to the overall sound while maintaining highly unique and accomplished individual voices. I like Wakeman and Moraz. While there is something clumsy and vacuous about Wakeman, and I can see how it can come off as overbearing, I still think he was a genius in his own way. I don't like what he did because it draws on what's good in classical music (mark's probably right here) but more because it's like proto-electronica or ambient or something. I just love the range of sounds he got from those keyboards and the way they fit in with Yes' sound. They sound like the holograms on the cover of Classic Yes look. And I do think their compositions were structured pretty well. Wakeman's vamps don't sound like he's just filling space to me, any more than Sonic Youth noise/drone breaks are just filling space before they go back to the tune. The sound reminds me in some ways of early-to-mid Philip Glass (which could also be described as "pseudo-classical vamps," I suppose). I think it is like some late 20th-century postmodern or post-minimal classical music (much of which is influenced by prog, not just the other way around) but mark is right in that it's nothing like the Classic or Romantic music to which people sometimes compare it.

I've never heard Big Generator but I've never made it through much of 90125. Drama is OK but not something I need to put on much.

I dunno - he himself never liked it, and some (but not all) of his playing on the album sounds half-hearted. You could make up your mind about the album by reading the liner notes, never mind what it sounds like. It never feels like an 80-minute listen to me, though - "The Remembering" is as good as anything they ever did, with the possible exception of "Awaken".

http://www.nndb.com/people/497/000056329/rick-wakeman.jpg

And just because I am a Relayer fan doesn't mean I don't like Wakeman. I agree with the guy above who loves everything from "TYE" to "GFTO". After that, they were no longer Yes.

Listen closely to "Gates", and about 9 minutes in, behind a guitar solo, I SWEAR I can hear what sounds like a live audience cheering!
Maybe the guitar solo was taken from a previous live performance of a completely different song and then, Zappa style, dubbed in to the new studio recording. That's gotta be the explanation, right? The cheers make no sense in the context of the song (plus they're hard to hear), so it surely couldn't have been intentional.

There's a song on Tormato, "Release Release" where it breaks into unexpected (and obviously dubbed in) audience cheering in the middle of the song...sounds pretty cheezy on that instance.

I'll throw my hands up for Big Generator... "Love Will Find a Way" is killer. "Shoot High Aim Low" sounds enormous and syrupy. I'd rather listen to this record than Fragile or Close to the Edge these days.

I'm gonna go ahead and rep for Big Generator by Yes. 90125 makes a little queasy (outside of choice cuts "Leave It" and "It Can Happen") but this is big dumb hooky corporate rock done right. I think I'm digging this so much more because of how much I expected to really dislike it - "Big Generator" (the song) is probably the worst thing on here, and the cover is about as unappealing as they come. But how can you hate something as stupidly catchy and upbeat as "Almost Like Love"??

This thread wins for Gier incredulity at it's most hilariously incredulous.

My sister saw them on this tour. Apparently the opening act was a screening of Popeye cartoons from the '30s.

I think this was actually the first Yes album I heard, and loved it, at least for one summer in junior high. It was my mom's cassette, thinking that Love Will Find A Way was a big single or something. I haven't heard it in years, and I'd probably not like it much these days -- but given that I got way into older Yes in high school, BG must retain something about them that still captures an essential Yes-ness, proggy and highly melodic. Also, I remember a really great, Beach Boys-esque intro. Am I making that up?

I saw them in '84, and yeah, instead of an opener, they showed Bugs Bunny cartoons. I thought it was a great idea, and I'm surprised no other bands tried something similar.

Other than that, the show was excruciating, and I couldn't listen to them for 20 years.

(xp)

Also, I remember a really great, Beach Boys-esque intro. Am I making that up?

No, the first song ("Rhythm of Love") does have that. I don't think the album is that proggy - there's bits of organ and on occasion the structures can be a bit more adventurous, but the prog content is about the same as say Invisible Touch. I also hear a lot of the ideas put forth on Synchronicity on this album. Considering that the YesOlds had completely run out of ideas I think it's no exaggeration to say that Trevor Rabin really revitalized the band for a time.

i still have a really hard time listening to this. I love 90125 but it seems that all of Rabin's good work went into that one. I don't like Talk either, so I must just not like his Yes work at all.

ha, listening on youtube now. Proggiest thing is probably the deep cut "I'm Running" on side two, and now that I'm hearing, I remember this was my favorite!

I just realized I was reading GFTO as GTFO and assuming this meant Tormato.