Prog at the movies Nov. '24

"Your Move" by Yes is featured in the trailer for Robert Zemeckis' new movie Here. Not sure if it appears on the movie itself, though.

Triumvirat of prog

We have a proggy trifecta of anniversaries today.

First we have Jethro Tull's Catfish Rising released this day in 1991. Perhaps not their strongest album, but it nonetheless has some fine music on it including the slightly lascivious "Like a Tall Thin Girl". Here it is from 25 November of that year at the Chicago Theatre.

 

 

Five years later Rush gave us Test For Echo. It continues the trend started on Counterparts of largely eschewing synthesizers and instead letting Alex Lifeson flex his chops in a lead, riffy kind of way.

This is the beautiful "Half the World" recorded in Milwaukee on 13 June 1997.

Another five years later Yes released Magnification. It's an album I've never really given a proper listen, although I really like the title track and "In the Presence Of".

This is "Don't Go" from their show in Milwaukee on 15 August 2001. Thinking back, I am wondering why I didn't go (ha!) to this concert when a couple friends of mine did. I suspect it had to do with the fact that 15 August is a common move-in date for renters and I was one back in the day.

It really did happen

44 years ago Yes released Drama, their first album without Jon Anderson. 44 years!! I really like the album and appreciate how they reinvented their sound with new members. It greets 1980 and the new musical styles of the era just like Rush did with Permanent Waves.

Here's the opening song from their Chicago concert on 22 September 1980, "Does It Really Happen?"

Bill Bruford meet Alan White

Union by Yes turns 33 today. To be sure, the album is a mediocre mix of the Squire/Rabin version of Yes and Anderson Wakeman Bruford Howe but it had a few very fine songs on it. Both camps united for a tour.

This is "Shock to the System" recorded at their tour stop at Alpine Valley here in Wisconsin on 26 July 1991.

Catch as we look and use the passions that flow

Not only is it Pearl Harbor Day but also the 50th birthday of Yes' Tales From Topographic Oceans. While it is certainly imperfect, "Ritual" kicks ass. Here is it from Milwaukee on the band's 2001 tour.

Relayer turns 49

Wikipedia says Yes' Relayer turned 49 a couple days ago. Here is the side-long epic "Gates of Delirium" from that album recorded live in Milwaukee on 15 August 2001. I'm not sure why I didn't go to that show. Perhaps I was moving.

I've seen all good people...I just couldn't hear them

Yes released their Big Generator album on this day in 1987. This is the title track from their tour stop in Milwaukee on 24 November 1987.

Apparently there were a lot of technical difficulties at this show, hence the name of the bootleg.

Ancient ones, they watch and listen

It was on this day back in 1999 that Yes released The Ladder. Here's "Homeworld" from that album recorded live on The Ladder tour in Milwaukee on 13 November 1999.

The Corona Diaries Vol. 79: Total Madison Retain

(mid-November 2022)

(Watch the prelude.)

Having done a fair amount of traveling in October, November is shaping up to mostly be spent close to home.

My Frau and I went to see progressive rock stalwarts Yes on the 9th. It was my 5th time seeing them live, 6th if you include an Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe show. The band formed back in the late 60s and, while a couple of the guys are a bit long in the tooth, some newer, younger members are helping to keep the flame alive.

Having been around so long with many, many albums to choose songs from, every fan is bound to have a tune that they really want to hear but doesn't get played. The band performed a couple songs I didn’t expect to hear along with several that I did and are, simply put, obligatory these days. The tour was to mark the 50th anniversary of Close to the Edge, their 5th album and so they performed it in its entirety.

The church organ section of the title track never fails to send a shiver down my spine. Similarly, the vocal arrangement in that section, called "I Get Up, I Get Down", is truly a thing of beauty. One autumn evening many years ago, I was driving down Bailey Road east of Madison listening to the song very loudly and, when that section came on, I felt surrounded by grandeur and as if I had been transported somewhere else. Perhaps to the land of Roger Dean's album covers where everyone talks impressionistically - like Jon Anderson's lyrics. It was simply a beautiful moment.

Still, I wish that there had been a bit more variety in the setlist. "On the Silent Wings of Freedom" was an unexpected choice and I enjoyed it greatly. This opened the concert and it was my first time seeing Billy Sherwood on bass. He played reverently but not in slavish imitation of Chris Squire, to my ears. Plus, they did a couple new songs from their latest album, The Quest. But it was really a show dedicated to a trio of their early 70s work - The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to the Edge.

With Geoff Downes in the band, I find it a shame that they included no Drama material or anything released since he rejoined the band in 2010. "Fly From Here" or a chunk of it would have been great to hear.

Despite my desire to have more eras of the band's history represented, it was still fun. They seemed happy to be onstage and played a spirited show.

Someone who sat 8-10’ in front of me shot some video and posted it online. Here’s most of the epic song “Close to the Edge”.

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A few days later I donned my apron and headed over to a local church where the Polish Heritage Club – Madison was holding its Christmas Bazaar. I believe it was the first once since the pandemic took hold.

Although it was a bazaar and there were plenty of things to buy, I always think of eating when it comes to this event. This is because I spend all day back in the kitchen cooking. I think I grilled up a metric ton of kielbasa.

While I enjoy cooking at home and helping out the PHC, I am glad that I no longer work in a commercial kitchen having to feed hungry hordes.

As folks ate, they were serenaded by these fellows.

There was a room with information about Poland as well as materials to help people take their first steps into genealogical research.

If you need Wianek (floral headbands), we’ve got you covered.

There was a craft room for kids, lots of food for sale to take home including a plethora of tempting sweets such as Makowiec. Sadly, I neglected to get in line early and all of the tasty sweet treats were gone by the time I had finished my duties in the kitchen.

Polish pottery was to be had as well as all manner of amber jewelry.

Working in a hot kitchen all day is hard work and we needed to stay hydrated. And so we did. With Polish beer, er, piwo.

Next up for me will be on the Polish heritage front will be Pączki Day on 21 (or 23) February. Then on Palm Sunday, I will again be cooking for the Club’s Spring Festival.

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Man cannot live on kielbasa alone so I took advantage of this year’s bumper cranberry crop and made some cranberry pork chops.

I thought they turned out rather well.

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The UW’s main repository of human knowledge, Memorial Library, has an exhibit on display called “Press Play” which gives a brief history of recorded sound and draws from the library’s holdings. A friend and I stopped down there recently.

The first thing we saw was this:

Described as a “flat disc”, it dates to 1896 and features George J. Gaskin singing “Tramp Tramp Tramp” which was apparently on the hit parade during the Civil War.

Next to this was an Edison Phonograph from 1919.

The platter on that magnificent looking turntable features the earliest known vocal rendition of “On, Wisconsin”, which is not only the UW’s fight song, but also the State Song of Wisconsin.

Next to Edison’s phonograph were some of his wax cylinders.

At about this point, a young woman came into the exhibit who looked to be of undergrad age. She was smart and donned her headphones, scanned QR codes, and listened to the audio portion of the exhibit which allowed one to hear the recordings behind the glass.

I am not sure how to scan a QR code. Instead, my friend and I chatted away about what we were seeing. We had heard of these recording doodads but probably hadn’t actually seen many of them in person. One playback technology I hadn’t encountered before were these records that were 20” in diameter. Reading the card next to one, I was quite surprised to find that they played at 100(+) RPM. 100 RPM?!

“If that thing flew off the spindle, it could surely decapitate someone like Odd Job’s hat in Goldfinger,” I reasoned.

This display featured local (south central Wisconsin) history. WIBA is a Madison radio station while that marionette is Jim Kirchstein, the founder of Cuca Records. Cuca was formed in Sauk City, a town about 25-30 miles northwest of Madison, in 1959 and it released a lot of polka and other “ethnic music” of the area from European immigrants and their descendants, including the polkabilly stylings of the Goose Island Ramblers, a favorite group of mine.

But Cuca also recorded rock bands and is most famous for The Fendermen’s cover of “Mule Skinner Blues” by Jimmie Rodgers. The Fendermen, a.k.a. - Jim Sundquist and Phil Humphrey, were Wisconsin natives and met while they were both attending UW-Madison. The song was recorded in the basement of a music store in Middleton, a Madison suburb.

Before the records yielded to cases of 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, and iPods, there was this handy guide for aspiring DJs and rappers on how to scratch.

Lastly, I’ll note that the exhibit also featured a record from the legendary blues singer Ma Rainey on the Paramount label. While I knew of Paramount, I don’t think I’d ever actually seen of one their discs in real life.

Paramount Records was a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company which made, in addition to chairs, cabinets for phonographs. They got into the record business in 1918 and Paramount lasted until the early 1930s. Although they released music by a variety of artists in a variety of genres, the label is best known these days for the blues recordings it did from the late 1920s through the early 30s.

Contacts in Chicago arranged for blues (and jazz) musicians from all around, including the deep South, to head to a small town – Grafton – in Wisconsin, a bit north of Milwaukee. And so the vaunted label gave us recordings by such hallowed figures as Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Louis Armstrong, Meade Lux Lewis, and many others.

Rock star Jack White became so enamored of Paramount's blues recordings that he had his record company, Third Man Records, put out deluxe sets of the material called The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records: Volumes One and Two. This surely involved lots of time and effort simply spent tracking down recordings alone, not to mention that spent getting them cleaned up for the best possible sonic experience. These sets include vinyl records, tons more digital recordings, books worth of liner notes, and replicas of ads for the records that appeared in the Chicago Defender in the 1920s such as this one.

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In a previous entry I related how I had finally read Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I figured in for a penny, in for a pound so I went ahead and read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I appreciated the vernacular language as well as the descriptions of the Mississippi River and environs, but I missed the more playful aspect of Tom Sawyer. That book had funny bits but this one is much darker. The humor is replaced by life or death gambits.

I’m glad I read it but Huck Finn is a historical relic to me and not a piece of literature to which I shall return.

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Bonus photo! Here is Grabby being very naughty and scouting for food on the kitchen counter.

 

 

 (Head to the postlude.)

We are star dust

I did not expect something new from Yes. Great snare sound here. Good song. Feels like they've caught a wave. The song just has more energy to it than most of their recent music.

Some Fine Covers

Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters producer Greg Kurstin have been doing Hanukkah Sessions and they enlisted Jack Black for a performance of "The Spirit of Radio" by Rush.

 

 

Another cover tune that I stumbled upon recently was this version of Yes' "I've Seen All Good People" by Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs. I never thought I'd ever hear The Bangles' singer perform a prog tune. It's a very faithful cover and Hoffs does a fine job. She has a wonderful voice.

Happy 49th Tales From Topographic Oceans!

Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes is 49 today. I found this neat video which collects a bunch of 8mm film footage from that tour and pieces all the disparate scenes together.

A show from the following tour that features "Ritual" was professionally recorded on video and audio but here you get healthy chunks of all the Tales songs plus Rick Wakeman is on keys.

Make the bold, the brave leap

While Yes' 2014 album Heaven & Earth will never be held in the same regard as the likes of Fragile or Going For the One, I think it is better than it's usually given credit for. Despite the frozen landscape of the album's cover, it was released in July (its 8th anniversary was just a couple days ago) and I think that I shall forever hear the lazy, hazy days of summer in its music. The songs have an easy going, West Coast feel to them.

Some may scoff at the man taking Jon Anderson's spot (or was he Benoît David's replacement?), Jon Davison, but he has a beautiful voice and he certainly brings on the New Age, hippie vibes. When I saw Yes in concert here in Madison just a few days after the release of Heaven & Earth, I felt Davison came across as a bit more down to earth than his legendary predecessor and just thrilled to be fronting a band that he surely grew up listening to. He did a fine job on the older material which made up the bulk of the set as older bands seem to have little to no confidence in their new songs these days.

Heaven & Earth's main failing, to my ears, is the drumming. Alan White (R.I.P.) generally kept everything at an often times enjoyable but ultimately monotonous mid-tempo. It's hard to believe that this was the same guy who maniacally propelled songs like "Ritual" and "Sound Chaser" forward as if they were primitive rites upon which the band members lives depended on. And it was his bass drum lick that made "Shoot High Aim Low" such a memorable piece of neo-Yes. Most of the songs on Heaven & Earth have a demo-like quality to them in that White's beats seem like placeholders and that the band just ran out of time to replace them with the real drum parts.

Having said this, Yes managed to eek out at least a couple great songs on Heaven & Earth and one of those is "Step Beyond". While it's not one of the songs that veers towards the band's proggy past, it does have some Yes trademarks as well as the virtue of being incredibly catchy. It was written by Steve Howe and Jon Davison but I don't know if there was a strict division between writing the music and the lyrics or not.

It begins with a springy synth line from Geoff Downes that bounces from channel to channel and sounds really neat on headphones. A couple hits on the snare and the rest of the band come in. Howe's guitar introduces the melody Davison uses for his vocals. The lyrics feel very much like those of old - "If I don't let go/I'd never know/The joy freedom brings" - but are more direct. Davison doesn't seem to throw in words strictly because of their sonorous qualities as Anderson did.

While I do wish White's playing was more dynamic, Howe's guitar work is tasteful and melodic and he and Chris Squire (R.I.P.) team up with Davison for those trademark Yes vocal harmonies that make the second half of the song such a joy. And it is always a pleasure to hear Squire's bass step away from rhythm duties and play its own melody.

R.I.P. Alan White

A short while ago I heard that Alan White died. While primarily known for being the drummer in Yes, he also played with the Plastic Ono Band, Joe Cocker, George Harrison, et al. I last saw him perform back in the summer of 2014 when Yes played here in Madison.

This is their show here from back in 1984.

Keeping It Cool

I recently began reading Arnaldur Indriðason's Hypothermia thinking that a murder mystery set in Iceland during the cooler months would be a good way to mentally beat this 90+ degree weather we've been having. Unfortunately, there's precious little about cold weather and snow so far, although that looks to be changing with a storyline a la Flatliners. This being the case, I've been thinking of other bits of entertainment that can make things frosty in the brain box. Since my attempt involved a book, I'll start with those.



You can always start with the adventure of Miskatonic University's Willian Dyer at the mountains of madness, but for sheer cooling power the first tome that comes to mind is The Terror by Dan Simmons. It is a fictional account of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition of 1845 to find the Northwest Passage. His two ships, the HMSes Terror and Erebus, got stuck in pack ice and there were no survivors. Ergo this book is all about men struggling to survive is sub-zero weather. With nearly 800 pages of ice, snow, blizzards, terror, frozen bodies, and more ice and snow, this book will keep you cool in desert conditions.

If you're looking for a quicker fix, may I recommend Jack London's "To Build a Fire". It begins:

Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland.

And chronicles a man hiking the Yukon Trail in bitter cold and his desperate attempts to build a fire before settling into his chilly fate.



More good cyro-fiction in the graphic novel arena is Whiteout by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber. There's a murder at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica and Deputy U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko is on the case. It's a good, solid murder mystery with lots of blizzards. It was turned into a feature film a few years ago starring Kate Beckinsale. While it certainly has cooling power, it was a pretty bad film.



Moving over to the realm of video games we have Alpha Polaris a horror adventure which takes place at an oil research station in Greenland. (I see a theme here.) I've played the demo and it was pretty good, although you don't really get much of a sense of the lurking terror that the Finnish game designers promise. Still, the game should inspire icy thoughts.

There are probably a country ton of movies (besides the dreadful Whiteout) to put you in a glacial state of mind. The first one I thought of was John Carpenter's remake of The Thing, though don't be afraid to watch James Arness in the original from 1951. I've not yet seen the prequel from last year but I don't doubt that it would do the trick.



Next, I'll thrown in a couple audio dramas.

First there is some Doctor Who.



I recall listening to Winter for the Adept for the first time and feeling more than a little chilly as Nyssa finds herself alone in the Alps.

However, for sheer frigid audio, check out Simon Bovey's Cold Blood.





This is the aural equivalent of The Terror. Biotech and oil companies are exploiting Antarctica in 2014 and someone is willing to kill to keep a discovery to herself. Not only does it take place in the freezing cold so you get to hear the wind howling, the characters are always talking about incredibly cold it is. The fact that the story takes place in a bitter, frigid land is never far from your mind. I listened to this story a few summers ago and had to cover myself with a blanket because I felt so cold.



Gamers can get in on the action here too. I don't know of any board games that take place in the ice and snow but, if you're into RPGs, there's always Beyond the Mountains of Madness. Helm the Starkweather-Moore expedition to find out what happened to Professor Dyer and company.

Lastly, there's music. I always think of "South Side of the Sky" by Yes as being a good way to cool things down as it's about the terminal fate of a polar expedition:

A river a mountain to be crossed
The sunshine in mountains sometimes lost
Around the south side so cold that we cried
Were we ever colder on that day
A million miles away
It seemed from all of eternity


So, dear reader, there my tentative list. I suppose I could have catalogued stuff like radio adaptations of At the Mountains of Madness, for example, but figured a couple iterations was enough. Any further suggestions?

Regardless of what entertainment you choose during these hot summer days, you'll need a drink. Might I suggest a Stiegl Grapefruit Radler? I bought a six-pack of it last weekend and it is might tasty. The mix of grapefruit soda and a light lager was extremely refreshing and, at 2.5%ABV, you won't get drunk nor dehydrate yourself.

90125 Mk 1

Lately I've been listening to bits and pieces of Trevor Rabin's 90124. At first, I approached it out of intellectual curiosity as I was eager to hear the demos he presented to his band members in Yes and to compare & contrast how they turned out as Yes songs. If I've lost you already, let me backtrack just a little.

By the start of 1981, Yes was a done deal. Bassist Chris Squire and drummer Alan White moved on and teamed up with Jimmy Page who was newly free after the dissolution of Led Zeppelin. They formed XYZ (for ex-Yes and Zeppelin). They wrote and recorded some demos in 1981 but the project never went anywhere and Page went on his own path while Squire & White looked around for another gig. (Among the demos XYZ did record is an instrumental version of what became "Fortune Hunter", a song Page recorded a few years later with The Firm.) They eventually met up with Rabin. With the addition of violin & keyboard prodigy Eddie Jobson (late of UK and Roxy Music),the band christened themselves Cinema and set about recording an album. Along the way, Squire met up with former Yes vocalist Jon Anderson and played him some of the music they were working on and, next thing you know, Anderson had been added as a member. Soon Jobson left and was replaced by former Yes member, Tony Kaye, on keys. (You can see bits of Jobson in the video for "Owner of a Lonely Heart".) At this point the band's name was changed to Yes and the album they released in 1983 was 90125. The Yes sound was dramatically different than the one they had during their 1970s heyday. Progressive rock fans cried foul while new fans latched onto the band with their hit single, "Owner of a Lonely Heart". Gone were the sweeping keyboards and Steve Howe's faux-Chet Atkins guitar sound; Squire's chugging Rickenbacker bass was absent or severely reined in; the songs were shorter and more direct; and the often surreal, airy-fairy lyrics of Yes in their prime were gone.

Much of the material on the album was based on demos that Rabin had written in 1981 and brought to Cinema. The original idea behind 90124 was to present these demos. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the album was modified to include demos for songs that appeared on the subsequent 3 Yes albums. Still, there are several songs here that are part of the 90125 era. Of this bunch are 3 songs that appear on the album: "Hold On", "Changes", and "Owner of a Lonely Heart" all appeared on 90125 with those names and are very much like the demos here. Of the tunes from that era that didn't appear on the album, two of the three were scavenged in some way or another. For instance, some of the keyboards and the angular rhythm from "Moving In" were transferred to "Hold On". "Don't Give In" was became the song "Make It Easy" which did not appear on the album but the opening instrumental section was appended to the beginning of "Owner of a Lonely Heart" when it was played live. Finally, "Would You Feel My Love" was left unused.

Listening to these songs, the first thing that comes to mind is Foreigner. Rabin's voice, the rousing choruses, and the intermittent rushes of synthesizers all bespeak of Foreigner. The melodies, some of the lyrics, and the basic rhythms were kept by Yes. And so listening to these demos, one can get a sense of just how much the band changed, how much Squire, Anderson, White, and Jobson/Kaye de-Foreignerized Rabin's source material. If you're a progressive rock fan who hates 90125, you can be thankful because it could have been much worse.

I'm not really sure who altered the lyrics – whether it was Anderson alone or the band together – but thank Christ he or they did. "Hold On" went from a cheesy plea from a man to his woman to hold on because he'll be home soon and she can have his love to a song about having optimism and perseverance to get through all the crap that life throws at you. I'm thinking that if the lyric contains "dark citadel", then Anderson at least had a hand in the re-writing of the lyrics. And now that I look, Anderson is given second writer's credit on the album. The version of "Owner…" on 90124 is a mish-mash of two demos. The first bit is just Rabin on acoustic guitar while he extemporizes the vocal melody. This then segues into a fleshed-out demo with a full band replete with cowbell and an annoying little synth line that makes is sound more like "Low Rider" than the version on 90125. The bridge was dropped completely by the band and producer Trevor Horn, himself a former member of Yes, added samples galore and took Rabin's take on 70s funk and made it into a catchy and thoroughly early 1980s piece of pop. Rabin's demo for "Changes" was basically used verbatim by the band but expanded greatly.

The original tracklisting for 90124 was:

"One Track Mind"
"Hold On"
"It's Enough"
"Changes"
"Love Ain't Easy"
"Moving In"
"Who Were You with Last Night?"
"Baby I'm Easy"
"Would You Feel My Love?"
"Tonight's Our Night"
"Owner of a Lonely Heart"
"I'm With You"
"Must be Love"
"Don't Give In"

If you can't listen to 90124 at the moment, then these titles should tell you what the rest of Yes were up against.

Hearing these demos has given me a new appreciation for 90125. I have never personally hated it as many prog fans do and now I can hear exactly what the band added, many of which are traditional elements of Yes. I think that Rabin's voice works well with Yes especially because Squire and Anderson's contrast so well with it. The vocal harmonies never left the band. Plus there are a bunch of little touches. First there's the samples I mentioned above but there's also the xylophone sound on "Hold On", the fiddle sound on "Leave It", and the sitar on "It Can Happen". None of these timbres featured on Rabin's demos, though the last two songs were not demoed by Rabin or, at least, don't appear on 90124. And, although Squire's bass is much more restrained here than it ever was in the 1970s, there are little flourishes here and there that are absent from Rabin's demos.

I don't mean to come across as a Rabin-hater here because I'm not. Rick Wakeman remarked in an interview 2 or 3 years ago that, had it not been for Rabin, the classic Yes line-up together now in 2006 would never have gotten back together. He credited Rabin with keeping the whole spirit of Yes alive. I personally like how 90125 sounds in some ways to be totally a product of the early 1980s and yet in other ways it still sounds very fresh and new. The demos on 90124 give Yes fans a new perspective on what it perhaps the band's most-despised album. The changes affected by the band are thrown into sharp relief when comparing the demos to the finished product. For me, they take the notion that the old Yes members had sold-out and kicks it out the door. And while Rabin's demos really aren't super impressive and "Owner of a Lonely Heart" has surely been played to death on the radio, but the guy could write a great melody. "Owner…" is just blatantly catchy.

90124 is required listening for all Yes fans.