The Voice of Prog Rock | Jon Anderson of YES

[Music] how many of you know that song i'm sure most of you do if you're my age or even if you're a kid as young as my kids you know that song because it's the song roundabout well i had the great pleasure to interview the co-writer and lead singer of yes john anderson here's my interview john welcome welcome rick how you doing doing very well how about yourself very good thank you i was in my kitchen yesterday and i said to my kids did you know this song and they says oh yes oh yeah of course every kid knows roundabout how does that make you feel fantastic you know get him to listen to 1000 hands and we're going up and up and up today they just put out a video of phil collins it's in the air tonight coda virus yeah it's crazy right it's great you know phil would be happy he needs the money that's not true that is natural i know that i know that when i was in high school to prove that you were a great musician you had to be able to play long distance run around okay this is like where i was growing up yeah that was a song if you could play long distance run around people freaked out oh my god he can play a long distance run around do you remember writing the song i sure do um you know at that moment in time yes it really sort of found its feet musically you know the s album was the first album that we knew what we were doing the the first two albums we were still trying to figure out basically what we what we were about musically and and i remember long distance runaround is is very very simple idea um and i i went in the studio one afternoon and uh i said let's try this song because everybody's sitting around what are we gonna do next and so on you know and uh i said well it's just these chords and i played them and they all joined in and i just said okay guys uh why don't we just uh you know why don't we try i'll just rick to and of course bill loved that very much because like and that be that b that beat that b and then the chorus then you know so that's how we work together you know i was able to come up with ideas there was sort of totally left field and that's how we recorded we recorded one afternoon it was really a lot of fun you would come in just with the ideas and you guys would just arrange it on the spot in the studio yeah yeah um i said everything was done because we were very compatible you know with each other and i was like uh the the guy in the middle he i could hear stuff while they were learning stuff and i heard the next part and then sang the next part to them and then you know the idea is like playing tennis you know you send an idea out and then it comes back with another idea and another idea and before we know we're all recreating ideas and making them sound better and you know it's really fun working with musicians that way especially a group you know a group of musicians and i was very fortunate to work with fantastic musicians all my life you know when you were recording back then you for example in you would record multiple records in 71 you had two records come out in the same year and that was actually common back then right yeah yeah creation you know music uh see steve joined the band and all of a sudden i had a writing partner uh i would write with chris but it was very spasmodic with chris but with with steve he was a master of chord ideas progressions and riffs and things so we were writing whenever we met we write something in the studio oh we write some stuff and then we write something else in the cafe you know and uh on tour a lot of things that happened musically with yes was on tour when you've got plenty of time after a show or a day off and things like that we sit down you start writing together and i would sit sit with with steve a lot you know and then chris would come in and chris was this sort of uh very interesting musician that he was so melodic on his base that sort of helped my vocal so much and then he'd sing along with me so because me and chris started the band we were the integral part the yin and yang of the band and no matter who came in we were still the ying and yang of the band you know can you talk a little bit about recording back in those days what the process was like if you think about it you know we we would record yours and no disgrace and it's it's in seven sections so you record one section at a time same with close to the edge you know close to this was recorded in maybe 20 sections and you you have to have a really good engineer and we were lucky we had eddie alford it was like a number six musician in the band because he was a musician as well as an engineer yeah and uh we have uh stories that kind of get funny because he put together a two-minute idea and then he took it through and then the band started rehearsing it and i'm listening and saying yeah that's right oh great can you play can you you know or no that's good uh good yeah and i'm thinking about the next part because i've already worked with with steve on the next part the next bridge if you like you know and uh so you do it in sections and then and would you would you mix them down and then assemble them in one on one reel yeah the idea was you got 24 tracks in those days you got 24 tracks and of sounds 24 layers so you finished up with 24 tracks you would mix together the bass come up a bit vocal more so like that always yeah yeah and uh and then you do it a mix and it's on a quarter inch tape like that and then you know you you know eddie offer would put that tape on a reel and put it to one side and then do the next part put it to one side so we finish up with a stack of uh quarter inch tapes then you start sticking them together with the super glue so i always wondered that if if you would actually record them in sections and then put them together like that's great but you really got to a point where the band really performed that two-minute idea really tight you know i remember the beginning of close to the edge uh because me and steve had already sort of found our way in structure of it and i had a certain song and then steve had close to the edge around by the corner and i sang down to the end round by the river and i said change key and he hit another chord seasons will pass you by i get up it find the chord bring it down now that it's all over and dance okay that'll work so you work that out and then you bring that to the guys because they've been working on something else an intro section you know and we've got the next section and it would be like tennis i kept thinking of musical tennis you know and you do a bunch of takes you get one that really everybody agreed upon was the right one except chris and then you would and steph chris chris chris was always saying one more i said but we've done 13 the second one was brilliant just one more okay chris and you'd go you go you'd go back in john and listen to these right in the control room and say okay yeah i like this one i like this one would you guys argue as to or would you pretty much agree never argue more more disgust you know you say well what's the point of doing another one when that number three was amazing okay we'll do one more and then it just happens that other one the next one we did was fantastic and said okay that's enough and that's a full afternoon's work you know for a two minute piece of music you know can you tell me a little bit about when you would do your vocals and do harmonies and how you would how you would record those would you be in an iso booth would you guys yeah and then and and then when you did harmony parts if you had multiple people singing uh would you sing around one mic or if would you just do all the overdubs how would you do it yeah we we tried singing around one mic now and again uh for effect more more for effective the sound of the voices and you could track it and track it and track it and then squeeze it down seeing all good people to you know as many as many voices as you can you know for that but when we got into the got into the you know the the the harder work was when i i would then uh go in early at ten in the morning and do my vocal by the time they came i'd done my vocal and then they could uh chris would have harmony and then steve would come in and do his harmony and it was a very methodical way of doing things nobody was sitting around judging you know it was a very kind of unique moment in time to make sure that i think it wasn't until fragile maybe the yes album fragile i felt gosh i'm singing pretty good now before then i was very shy being in a studio my voice not sounding as good as i hoped it would be but by then i felt really confident you know so i go in there and sing my parts in the morning and which i do every morning now anyway i do the same thing and uh by the end of the experience of a piece of music just being being able to sit back and watch eddie alfred mix it and we'd sit back and listen to everything on the big speakers heaven it's like being in heaven musical heaven you know there was one funny time though we were finishing off close to the edge and you know close to the edge the song of course it comes out of the organ rick wegman solo and then it goes into the next stanza you know close to the yes round by the corner so we we we we've done everything the solo then the stanza uh and according to the man who showed his arms just onto space he turned you know and then it goes into the the big song at the end and what was happening by then uh eddie offered was uh doing quarter inch mixes and there must have been about i don't know probably about ten uh strips of uh tape and they were very long so he used to hang them up on on the wall with some sellotape you know so he had all these string and he had all numbered and everything so i knew where it was going and it was a friday night and the cleaner lizzy who lived next door and this is the app vision studio lizzie next door comes in and starts sweeping up and cleaning up and jenna did get out the way kids get out the way you rock and rollers you know and uh so she went out and and and we just start that last uh chorus to to edit in with a quarter inch and eddie's looking for it and he he can't find number 27. we're number 27. i put it up there and we couldn't we looked around on the floor and somebody said well lizzy just cleaned up and said oh my god it took us about four hours to mix it correctly onto quarter inch and so we we ran outside in the dustbin and it was raining and we're pulling out pieces of tape 19 19. no that's it that didn't work 26 okay and we take it back in and we cleaned it and cleaned it it was about 11 o'clock at night and just okay and we put it on and we all sat there like please and it was perfect it was perfect one of the things about those records they're such great headphone records they're all the panning of the instruments yeah i mean were you conscious of that about headphone records would you put headphones on while you're listening to the to the mixes and say oh put this over here put this over here that that came around that period of time with the ocean sound of the middle of uh close to edge and you know surround sound things that you think about and that was done probably just happenstance that you know eddie alfred was a great engineer he was brilliant and he you know he did all that positioning and everything and everybody had a gig you know i was in the middle of everybody zooming around making sure this is going to work that's going to work i need more lyrica i got to figure out a better lyric for this section and so on and so on and uh everybody was committed to their work and that was the brilliance of yes in that in the 70s up until uh the end of the 70s you know there was there was ups and downs of course which you know every band since the beatles had ups and downs in the 80s when you had your biggest hit really owner of a lonely heart um probably your biggest said or at least it was for people that yeah it was your biggest set rice i mean that was one of the biggest songs i mean it's one of the biggest songs ever but one of the biggest songs of the 80s for sure and it was interesting for me because i grew up you know in the 70s i was in college when that hit yeah and there was seemed like there was a whole new group of people that experienced yes for the first time then what was that like as far as the change in sound with the band you know 90125 was a a a miracle in a way for me because i was in the south of france and i'd let go of yes because of a very bad experience with producers and managers in trying to make an album in paris that never worked you know and it was outside influencers that did that with the band and that's that's part of being in a band you've got to be careful what outside influences talk about blah blah blah so i was inside of france writing music about fairies and mark chagall the great russian artist who i met and then i went to london and chris called me up and i've been listening to the radio by the way uh there's a one of the best radio stations in in the world is called fip f-i-p out of paris and they were playing these records from a guy who used to malcolm mclaren who was the manager of um sex pistols and he did an album called duck rock with with trevor horn and trevor horn was the bee's knees as a producer at that time he was having hit records and uh he tried to be in yes for a while which is really not not the best gig for him and uh he started working with trevor raven trevor uh horn uh chris squire alan and tony had been calling himself cinema and that's when chris called me and said uh do you want to listen to some music i said yeah i'm cool so we got in his car and listened to these tapes and they were so amazing right on the edge where sampling was coming through and there was something about the songs that really uh well they needed help in some ways you know i remember listening to owner of the lonely heart and thinking the chorus is a hit you know that but the sounds and the the samples what's the sample and he said oh it's james brown it's so trigger horn you know and um then i oh i said uh it's missing a few things and chris said i thought you'd say that um would you be interested in singing on the tracks and i said well yeah i would because i i think the production is amazing to be honest i think the production is a unique energy and uh i think that um yeah the the verse of owner needs to be a little bit more spiky at the moment it's a bit sort of wishy-washy sort of that's what i said anyway and so he said well come on in tomorrow and join the band and we'll call ourselves yes and i said ah that's why yes because if you join yes of course it will you know so i went in the following day we met trevor rayburn and we got on great uh i realized he was a very talented musician guitar player and everything songwriter and uh so we started working on the the verse on of a lonely heart and i said right away never thinking of the future you know that's how i work um i sort of mimic what i'm going to sing and he said oh yeah that's i just and he wrote the second line and then we know we got through the first person and trevor raymond said you get on with that because i'm going to have some lunch and i said okay i'll just get on with it i just carried on writing the verses and trevor horn helped a couple of times so it was a very joint experience to write the the verses need to be more shall we say interesting because one of the lonely heart you know if you don't take care of yourself you're gonna have a long lonely heart you know sort of thing um so it's a great experience to to join the band again in in the 901-5 time and go on tour total spinal tap upside down it was it was amazing it was thank god i saw spinal tap before we started touring because i would i would i would have been so serious about it but after that movie i just said forget it you know did it surprise you that that record was such a massively big record i just knew the owner was a hit and it's a question then of how they're going to project it and you know we had a couple of guys came along and make a video on top of a skyscraper in london and we're all dressed up in suits and then we become eagles or snakes or and it's kind of a fun video and i thought well the new world is mtv and of course that that was that was that was the 80s mtv and uh you know that that was a great experience you know the whole the touring of the world and everything uh with that album and you get treated with obviously uh great respect wherever you go because you you're you're a rock star which when something goes over my head you know because i was actually on tour of the 90125 i was still working on music uh and discovering new ideas about music that i wanted to create and so i didn't sort of lock myself into the yes cage if you like and and um yes i can't go out i can't i can't dream anything else you know that's what i do i do all the time i'm always thinking of new ideas and new music john when you're when you come up with an idea now for example yeah do you have a do you have a rig that you use that you uh or do you use voice memos let's say you have a melody idea what do you do how do you put it down how do you keep track of things you just remember yeah because what i found out was no matter what that song is not going to go away when in fact five years later you're thinking oh what the hell is that song i keep hearing oh i'll write it all right i'll i'll record it and you know you come back later with the music that you wrote i i just finished a piece of music for christmas that i wrote 1981 and uh it's a sort of orchestral piece but i'm putting lyrics to it now just just trying it out just for a gift for all the fans put it on on youtube does it ever occur to you that you've written some of the biggest songs of all time and that have been played on the radio forever and that still get played on the radio all the time how does that feel or do you not even think about it no the longest songs yes some of the longest ones but that's all the beatles fault because they did a dude and you know they did a seven minute piece of music there was a hit and maybe you want to do it did that make you give music you know okay yeah did that actually give people a license to have longer songs that got you know that you could actually have radio songs that were longer the beatles changed the world you know musically speaking it's a natural thing that happens anyway but you don't copy anybody or say oh now we must do a song just like zappa you know or whatever uh no it's not something that was part of our vocabulary in the band but me and chris we first saw um king crimson their first gig at the speakeasy playing their first album in the corner of the crimson king and i looked to chris and said we gotta practice better because these guys are amazing and then maybe five years later we were on tour with the kinks in in america and the opening act was my vishnu orchestra and i looked at chris and said wow that's we gotta rehearse better because they were unbelievable and there's always that there's always that learning curve that you know you listen to the band when the band came out with their album from uh big pink oh the sound of it beautiful the sound of it but the sound was unbelievably real we were into reverb and there was like straightforward in your face sound music right from a room in woodstock and the songs were immaculate and that that happens at least every six months something will come through to me and uh just go a musician needs um that kind of help on a regular basis i was just watching ravi shankar with anushka from three years ago just blows your mind the kind of music is that's around us all the time and just makes you want to be a better artist and that's that's what it's all about tell me what you're working on right now john you have a new project you've been working on i've been working on a couple for years um my son damien i was talking to him one day he's in he was in london and he said dad you know elias your first solo album why don't you do son of elias and that was 15 years ago and i started sketching out a piece called zamran the son of elias and it's all about the creation of the the planet earth you know in terms of uh the creation of the planet you know how it works and stuff and uh it was it was something that i started doing and then doing them stop then doing them stuff and now i have about four hours of ideas and it's very hard to piece them together because it's not it's not ready yet you see it's like baking a cake you know it's not ready until it's ready and be careful you don't want to burn it and other than that i've been working on another project um that i really love very much actually you can youtube john anderson joyfulness and it's four pieces of music that i created just before i went on tour last year with 1000 hands band and i just did this music one week and i just liked it very much and i started writing lyrics and songs within the music so there are four pieces that are on youtube and my friend mickey byrne has done some beautiful videos on them and so that's another project that's slowly slowly cooking what do you think about things like streaming now streaming music excellent uh and the okay you're all you're you like streaming but what do you think about the album experience you know of actually having an actual physical album that you flip over that you read the album covers and you know uh you know who is in the bands you know who produced it you know you there's our artwork artwork was a huge part of yes yeah right the the the album cover was really you guys mastered the album cover yeah well we weren't the first of course you know the beatles did it the pink floyd didn't uh tommy you remember when tommy came out god help yes oh boy we've just been on tour um a year earlier yes it just started and the first tour we ever did real tour of england was the who rod stewart and the small faces joe cocker i was mesmerized by pete townsend and the who and keith moon and oh my god they were amazing it was mesmerized by everybody and then towards the end of the tour pete townsend comes over and says john and i look up and say pete townsend has talked to me yes pete he said lightly band nice band i said thank you petey i'm making an album he said i'm doing this album about a blind dumb deaf kid and i said to myself pete townsend is talking to me and then the album came out what most beautifully arranged album cover opened it up and you know that's really how what what we did we were sort of the next extension of that was roger dean of finding somebody who could actually stay with the band each album for a period of time and it worked john if if i said to you if you think back over your career are there any specific gigs that just jump right out from from whenever can you is there things that happened on gigs or say can you say i remember this one gig in 1973 here that this this was a really special special gig there were so many uh one one wanted to do do stick out because we played in front of 150 130 000 people in uh in philadelphia at the soldier fielder i think it was not soldier field something like a memorial film and the opening night was uh what you saw me the way that guy what's his name peter peter great guy i mean he was brilliant and he opened up the show and then we went on stage in front of thousands of people doing gates of delirium with laser beams he's like take bats suckers you know thinking i wonder if they're gonna like this gosh but we had a great time and i remember one time we toured with the eagles their first tour and you know we got friendly with the eagles and you know we took them out for dinner and night before the last gig and um we we played our last show and came off stage feeling really good and backstage it was all dark and and the roadies had these flashlights saying this way guys this way the lights have gone out don't worry it's the electricity problem this way and we're going down this corridor and just flashlights everywhere and then it put us in this big room and then it all went quiet and then the lights came on and there was a table full of custard cream pies and the eagles standing there and started throwing us throwing custard cream pies all over us and steve howe's got his guitar going oh no my guitar and i jumped on the table and started throwing things out of my head that's all for now don't forget to subscribe if you're a first time viewer ring the bell that'll let you know when i go live and when a new video comes out give it a thumbs up leave a comment that's very important if you're interested in the biato book go to my website at www.rickbiota.com follow me on instagram at rickbiota1 check out the new beatto ear training program at 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Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 282,861

Rating: 4.9791579 out of 5

Keywords: rick beato, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, steve howe, progressive rock, rick wakeman, chris squire, close to the edge, to be continued song, to be continued jojo, roundabout, Interview, Songwriting, Yes, Jojo's, jon anderson interview, The making of Yes albums, owner of a lonely heart – yes, behind the music, close to the edge yes, Fragile yes, jon anderson (musical artist), jojos bizarre adventure, meme song, Phantom Blood, Battle Tendency

Id: mWib02yZmKc

Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Nobhudy]

I appreciate Jon but I don’t fully believe any of his stories about the band. All the stories you hear about the grueling recording process, Bill Bruford and Chris Squire getting into fistfights, Steve Howe being completely domineering from a musical standpoint, Wakeman being extremely unhappy most of the time, it’s like Jon is being a revisionist just to ignore it or he is just so aggressively happy as a human being that he was just oblivious to it. Bill Bruford has spoken to Jon Anderson’s character before, how he was insecure about his lack of musical knowledge yet still really aggressive dictating things about the compositions.

Tellingly he says that Bill Bruford loved Long Distance Runaround because he played the verses in 3/4 to add a cool effect, but Bill did that because he found the song boring and wanted something more substantial to do in the background.

[u/LudwigJager_EC]

I've ever wanted Rick to talk about some big Prog Band and this is an amazing opportunity, with one of my favorite singers of all time Jon Anderson! He's so lovely

[u/Rubrum_]

The great custard pie battle between Yes and The Eagles. Lest we forget.

[u/CunningStunts]

Jon: "Do you know 'Close to the Edge', the song?"

lol

[u/jfmdavisburg]

I enjoyed this. Thanks for posting.

[u/kokocijo]

I really like Rick Beato's channel. Hope he interviews another musician fron the prog world soon!

[u/Domminney]

This was a great conversation!