I support Trevor's stance on sharing files versus being in the same room together. There have been plenty of fine albums done long distance, but for a band like Yes (or ARW) I think the only way to do it right is to be together and work it out as a band. Just my 2 cents.
IMO there is no value for having Rick in the room anyway - same bad sounds, same slot machine runs up and down the board. He can do the same from afar.
Death inspires me like a dog inspires a rabbit
One can argue that the dubious claims and unpredictability are, in fact, "definitive" Yes.Originally Posted by JJ88
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
Rabin recorded Jacaranda at home with no advance. Anderson did Invention of Knowledge remotely (although all the other musicians did meet up). The parts for Wakeman's The Red Planet were all recorded separately. So they all have experience of recording in different ways. I agree: I think is deflection. If they'd really wanted to do new material together, they could have. They didn't.
What precisely wasn't working for them, I don't know. Maybe Rabin and Wakeman have forgotten how to compromise with others? Maybe Wakeman and Rabin discovered that being good friends does not translate into co-writing compatibility? The only musical disagreement we've heard about is Wakeman dissing "Fragile/Touch".
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
Great observation..
'Definitive' Brian Lane, maybe.
That's what everyone wants to be true. Whether it will be... On the one hand, if a musician has some good ideas not used on one project, they'll usually recycle them somewhere else. That said, 1000 Hands: Chapter Two is, at least in part, about recycling a different pot of unused material, and Rabin's forthcoming solo album appears to have been largely written before ARW activity, so I don't know if either will have much room for ARW rejects. Although Rabin has said he'd like to get Wakeman to guest on his album.
Some people have looked at The Red Planet, noted how ARW collapses and then suddenly Wakeman has a brand new proggy album coming out.... ooooooo, so there must be a connection?! But that's just how the timeline looks to us. ARW was over a fair bit earlier than we had the news about it, Wakeman has had years to write solo material and he has a track record of writing very quickly (he's released multiple solo albums in a single year before now). It's entirely plausible Wakeman wrote The Red Planet from scratch since ARW collapsed, or has been working on it for years independently of needing to recycle ideas not used by ARW. Or maybe he has recycled ARW ideas...
But what would that even mean? If you take "Let's Pretend" on ABWH, that's a Jon & Vangelis song for a late '80s project that never got finished. Anderson then recycles it on ABWH, with Vangelis credited as a co-writer. The ABWH version gives us a good idea what the Jon & Vangelis version would've been like. (Indeed, the Jon & Vangelis demo was bootlegged, so one can hear it and it is pretty similar.) What people hope for is that some ARW almost-completed song gets transferred to a Wakeman, or Anderson, or Rabin solo album in a similar way. One could imagine Rabin putting "Fragile/Touch" on his solo album, with Anderson and Wakeman guesting. That would be Yes ft ARW in all but name.
But what if Wakeman (or Anderson or Rabin) had an idea for ARW, and he shared it with the others, but ARW collapses, so now he goes back to the original idea and uses it on The Red Planet. We know the other musicians on The Red Planet were given the freedom to come up with their parts, so it can't be that Rabin's idea for a guitar part makes it over. Everything on the album appears to be credited to Wakeman alone for composition. So, if there's any ARW->Red Planet recycling, it's just of the original Wakeman idea, now developed differently. But why would that be any more interesting than an idea Wakeman had at any other time? What's interesting is if the collaborative work makes it out somewhere else, not if everyone just goes back to their original ideas and uses them.
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
They spent years talking -- and talking about writing together -- before they toured. I don't know how well developed any plans were, but there were clearly plans for new music that preceded touring. In the initial phase, the focus was explicitly on writing over touring.
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
The touring element spawned from the passing of Chris Squire; that "time" was not on their side and performing live was the first phase. But the writing and recording phase was too slow to develop and now is one more casualty of the Covit-19 global pandemic.
Rick has been quite bold to announce a UK tour in December but that is highly in doubt. I'm pretty sure his ticket sales must be next to zero.
But let's hope to hear from Jon to know what is the next major step forward but now limited by the pandemic uncertainty.
Touring began 2016. The band actually dates back much further. Wakeman first mentioned the band on 6 Feb 2010. They talked of writing together in 2010 and 2011. Initial plans were to record in 2012 and all three met up to discuss plans in early 2012 after a period of file-sharing and bilateral meetings. However, they struggled to make time for the project and it all seems to have gone off the boil as 2012 developed. They were still exchanging ideas on occasion, but not much seems to have happened through to Squire's passing in mid-2015. That motivates them. They bring in Lane as manager and they announce touring plans in Jan 2016.
Between the announcement and the tour starting in Oct, they appear to have been more active working on new material. There was a lot of talk of releasing material in late 2016. But that then shifted to talk of running out of time (Anderson's words) or wanting to take their time to do it properly (Wakeman's words), with talk of recording in 2017. Anderson was at Rabin's studio a fair amount in early 2017. There's talk of finishing recording in 2017 for an early 2018 release. But 2018 comes around and their interview comments become a bit less positive, talk of everyone being busy again, it will happen when it happens.
Summer 2018 and Rabin plays "Fragile/Touch" on the radio and it's on set lists for shows, but never actually gets played live. By early 2019, Anderson is kvetching about how an album hadn't come together, hinting at a lack of commitment from his band mates. Later that year, Wakeman is complaining of the lack of financing, but also disses "Fragile/Touch".
I get the impression that they couldn't agree on the music and were finding it a struggle. I think the lack of funding or everyone being busy are deflections. If it was going well, they'd have kept going. But they definitely spent a fair amount of time working on new material, and at various times talked of substantial progress.
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
While they were promising new music, they also talked a lot about radically reworking all the old material. Save for more solos and a tweak or two in "Awaken," that's something that didn't happen either.
True. He writes constantly. He "composes" when he's not at the keyboard. He's one of those guys. He just tweeted the other day about having a really good day at the piano, so there's probably another solo piano album coming.
The Red Planet may contain some ideas he intended for ARW, but it's not going to be a platter of ARW songs sans Trevor's guitar and Jon's vocals.
A lot of that came from Anderson. It's interesting because this is a thing Anderson has wanted to do for years, but it's not clear whether he's ever quite achieved what's in his head. You go back to his post-Yes tour at the beginning of the 1980s and he has these big medleys. There was the playing around with "Mind Drive" and "Foot Prints" that Yes did on tour. With the Anderson Ponty tour, he talked a lot about going on a musical journey and re-arranging fragments of different bits of music, which didn't really happen. Again with ARW, it's similar talk.
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
Anderson and Ponty did perform Time and a Word in a reggae fashion. And Anderson on his solo tour last year included sax and violin on a number of Yes tunes, and even steering Long Distance Runaround down the reggae path also. He clearly enjoys playing around with these songs.
One wonders if Jon gets big ideas, but at his age just bringing them to fruition on a single song completely wipes him out.
I'm holding out for the Wilson-mixed 5.1 super-duper walletbuster special anniversary extra adjectives edition.
What does touring look like for these guys? Do they fly? Bus? What kind of Hotels do they stay at? Does selling out a 1200 seat venue make the travel worth it? are these guys well enough off where they just tour because They like it? They all qualify for senior discounts... Do they use them? I often wonder about these things.
I got nothin' :
...avoiding any implication that I have ever entertained a cognizant thought.
live samples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwbCFGbAtFc
https://youtu.be/AEE5OZXJioE
https://soundcloud.com/yodelgoat/yod...om-a-live-show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUe3YhCjy6g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VOCJokzL_s
He remains productive: I don't get any sense of age slowing him down in terms of writing/recording.
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
I can't understand how RW's archive of unused ideas works...
Wasn't Defender of the Faith meant to be on the Six Wives album and shelved until the live concerts in 2009?
Wasn't about 14 minutes of surplus material from Journey shelved due to album limitations and not used elsewhere until the studio version was recorded in 2012?
Why didn't he play the whole 50mins as intended and then edit the recording down to fit the LP format?
Considering that this is often instrumental material it could hardly have been difficult to include the unused ideas on any of the multitudes of recordings he has produced in the interim.
Come to think of it why wasn't the surplus Journey material adapted for the Return to... album in 1999? Very odd!
Maybe he feels the excess 6 Wives and Journey pieces especially fit within those larger pieces, so couldn't be recycled somewhere else.
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
So he claims, but I can't imagine he would have cut two perfectly good vocal songs to make way for all that narration.
Yeah, funny that one- I don't ever remember hearing about that track until interviews leading into that 2009 show. I'm happy to be proved wrong but it sounds like something Wakeman could have written in his sleep any day.
There is another track from the Six Wives sessions, an arrangement of 'Farandole':
From Wiki: After the album's original tour, the conductor's score was placed into storage by his management company, MAM Records. After the label folded in the early 1980s, he recalled that no one had knowledge of its location and declined offers from promoters to stage concerts as he thought a rewrite of the score would not live up to the quality of the original.[1] However, in 2009, a box from Australia arrived at Wakeman's house which stayed in his garage for about five months before he looked through it, finding nothing that belonged to him except a copy of the original score which by then had suffered from water damage. In the course of a year, the score was digitised and pieced together with assistance from conductor and arranger Guy Protheroe which Wakeman used to make a new studio re-recording of Journey to the Centre of the Earth with 18 minutes of music that was cut from the original piece due to time constraints on a vinyl added in, making a new 54-minute piece.
I seem to remember Wakeman at one point several years ago saying that ARW had a few very good songs which were coming together very nicely - he said it was sounding really great - so I wonder how finished those songs were - or weren't. It' 's really a shame - I think that Rabin would be able to take some of Anderson's simple ideas, build a structure around them, inject them with some riffs and some weight, and then let Wakeman take the arrangement to the next level. I really did not care for 1000 Hands but I was very impressed with the Anderson/Stolt record, and I suspect Stolt is the major ingredient there. And Wakeman comes up with some very good stuff but I think he sounds best in a band context, and I do not mean the ERE just playing Wakeman material. I thought the ARW record could have been something great, I suppose we will never know.
What official rule book are you getting this BS information from? Music is music....who gives a fuck? Orchestras play music written by dead guys from 300+ years ago, and jazz groups play music written in the 1920's....all without having to have "new" music. And guess what - people love the experience. Why is rock different?
These blanket statements.......
If it isn't Krautrock, it's krap.
"And it's only the giving
That makes you what you are" - Ian Anderson
The answer is pretty simple: The guys are still alive and we would like to get more music from them.
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