Is This A Mixtape? Yes! Is It Weird? Yes! Is It Yes? Yes!

If you've been around a while, you know two things about the One Buck Guy and prog rock: I'm not a huge fan of the genre, but I like Yes. But I like a lot of the bits and pieces from Yes that a - shall we say more classic - fan would probably frown upon. Hell, the One Buck Record of the day even proudly contains what is unofficially the worst Yes song of all time. Classic Rock ranked all (the) released tracks from Yes, and Tormato-era b-side "Abilene" came in 207 ot of 207! And yet here it is! Suck it, Classic Rock, I like what I like. and once you don't have to worry about the admittedly ridiculous opening (a synth made to sound like a horse neighing, predating Neil Young's synth horse experiments on Trans by a couple of years), the song is pretty neat. Sue me! 

This is just one example of what to expect - and not to - here. This albums is called a Mixtape, but isn't tagged as such, because it isn't one long megamix like the ones that are, even though that was the original idea. No, Mixtape here is meant to show you that this is someone's mix, a personal selection of songs. Oh, also: You have to take the word Mix really seriously. This was made during the 'OBG goes wild on Audacity'-era (some might say the 'OBG, WTF?'-era, but let's not dwell on that...), so it really is a mixtape in the literal sens, mixing and matching moments from Yes that I like. Often it's complete songs, but sometimes it might just be an extract  from a longer piece, or I edited out something I felt was superfluous, like the false ending to "Into The Lens (I Am A Camera)", the aforementioned fake-horse-bullshit on "Abilene" or even the occasional gratuitous keyboard solo. 

Before you recoil in horror, know that a lot of the music is intact, including my two favorite long-form pieces from Yes, "Homeorld (The Ladder)" and "Roundabout". But there is also a track called "A Moment - Alternate View", which is a remnant of the original idea, before plans changed. When I still wanted to do a one-hour megamix of my favorite Yes moments, I had prepared little bits from longer pieces that were supposed to serve as bridges in between the songs. But then, halfway through I realized that my original plan was counter-productive to my 'personal best' approach. If I want to hear one of my faves right away, it has to be indexed, so out went the continuous megamix idea, but I already had a couple of these 'linking bits' ready, so I decided to throw them on anyway. 

Seeing that this is a truly personal mix, in every word of the sense, you get - for better or worse - some exclusive edits. I've always liked Yes' take on Simon & Garfunkel's "America" for example, but the album version took forever to get to the vocals/song section, while the single edit threw out one of my favorite parts: the little country licks Steve Howe played - and for a classically trained Brit he sure loved to play a country lick or two - so I edited a third version that splits the difference between the two mentioned. 

The so-called 'Chop Shop Mix' of "White Car" is a whole 'nother story. I had always liked the original one-and-a-half minute doodle off Drama, but it really was just a doodle, an intro and a short verse. So I tried to make it into more of a song, using the original song, the tracking sessions version and a live version from the Drama tour to create this version. I always felt that that song deserved more than to be an excuse for Geoff Downes to doodle on his keyboards, for Horn to mess around with a vocoder and for both to tease the audience with a couple of notes from "Video Killed The Radio Star". Whether this new mix makes this more of an epic song or whether it works for you remains to be seen, but hey, lemme know, eh. 

So yeah, this is what YESterdays is, and I hope you enjoy it. The whole adventure spread into a two-disc thing at the time, but I'll just send out this as a test balloon, and can bring out the sequel if anyone is actually interested. and despite being essentially a Part 1 or Volume 1, this album is - as all of my alts and other albums are - sequenced to tell a story, so it has a short prelude in the classical-sounding "Vevey's Theme" and ends with an epilogue of sorts, Chris Squire's amazing solo bass version of "Amazing Grace". 

So, time go back in time and enjoy some YESterdays...yes?  

A change to this blog's flight plan...

A ton of things to be featured are lying on their dedicated space on my HDD for a good long while now, while other things just come up in the moment, while I post some of those first things. In more plain words: I tend to get distracted. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, since it means I'm still discovering and researching and reworking on the fly. Life is constant flux, so why should a music blog be any different. All this is a long-winded way to say that when I posted Yes' From A Page (A Single Page) a week ago that got me thinking of the Drama and Fly From Here era bands, which in turn got me interested in the origins of the latter album's centerpiece. I knew it was based on a piece Trevor Horn and Geoffrey Downes a.k.a. The Buggles had presented to Yes and occasionally played live on the Drama tour before that specific version of Yes, lovingly dubbed BugglYes by me as opposed to other fans' more dismissive-sounding The Yeggles, disbanded. It turns out that "We Can Fly From Here" has a much bigger importance for Mrs. Horn and Downes than initially thought, which also explains why that song is the thread that binds the two bands together, over a time span of almost forty years. 

"We Can Fly From here" has the distinction of directly and indirectly starting two bands: According to Horn's introductions in concert, it was the first song the Buggles ever wrote together, then became the song that got them the gig as the bulkheads of Drama-era Yes. They never got to finish a version of "We Can Fly From Here" for their debut album Adventures in Plastic, but - like other tracks - noticed how, well, proggish the song sounded and, having the same manager, decided to offer the song to Yes, who had recently suffered the defections of Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman. Whether the Buggles were angling for this or not, their meeting to offer "We Can Fly From Here" to Yes turned into the remains of Yes offering them a place in the band. A demo version of the song was produced in 1980, but the song seemngly wasn't developed much further and never made it onto Drama, though some archival live recordings exist. Horns and Downes then cut an impressive, elaborate demo in 1981 for possible inclusion on the second Buggles album, Adventures In Modern Recording, but this didn't come to pass, either. Basically , Horn and Downes decided to end their collaboration and Horn finished the album alone, with only three tracks featuring Downes, none of them "We Can Fly From Here". And then that was it, for a long time, for the song that started it all. 

Songs that have such a personal importance for its authors tend to die hard, though, and it seems obvious that Horn never really let the song go entirely.. So when the band reconnected with him in the late 2000s (after having been produced by him through their 1980s chart-making era, a.k.a. the Trevor Rabin years) and where throwing ideas around for a new studio album, Horn brought "We Can Fly From Here" up. Soon the idea was born to turn the original ideas into a long-form piece rivaling their early to mid-70s work, to be further developed from The Buggles' original demos. Oliver Wakeman, the keys man at the time was gently asked to leave to make place for Geoff Downes, because the latter was supposed to have a "greater sensibility for the material". Duh. Also brutally ironic, considering that Wakeman the Younger had suggested to contact Horn to begin with. The songs he developed finally ended up on From A Page, as mentioned in the intro. And so, BugglYes was reborn, or almost. 

Having recruited David Benoit from a Yes cover band to replace Jon Anderson a couple of years earlier, the first version of "Fly From Here", the long-form suite, featured him singing on the album that was named after it, 2011's Fly From Here. But the BugglYes were not quite done yet, and Horn still didn't have this song that was so close to his heart, in the form that he - secretly or not so secretly - wanted. After having unceremoniously fired Benoit for falling ill (history repeating itself for Yes vocalists), Horn - parallel to the band touring with Jon Davison - returned to Fly From Here and recorded replacement vocals for the entire album, including its centerpiece "Fly From Here" suite. The result, complete with new mixing and guitar and keyboard overdubs, was released in 2018 as Fly From Here: Return Flight. And, finally, after almost 40 years, the BugglYes had finally won. Their baby, the first song Horn and Downes wrote together, was finally out - with Horn on vocals and Downes on keyboards, like back in 1979. To be honest, I prefer the original 2011 version of the suite and Benoit's vocals, which seem more emotional and expressive, whereas Horn's vocals are more robotic, perhaps wilfully so, perhaps not. 

So, the album of the day. At four tracks it is probably more of an EP, though at 40 minutes length it's having classic album length. It captures the journey of the BugglYes' work on "We Can Fly From Here" from the relatively rudimentary first demo which is supposed to be Yes, but it's not obvious who besides Horn and Downes is playing on it. Even the drums could easily be a drum machine. Then, off to a live version from the same year's Drama tour, followed by the more elaborate demo Horns and Downes cut in 1981 and finally the suite from Fly From Here: Return Flight in slightly altered form. Some of the transitions of the suite were really iffy and not particularly thought out, glued together with an old piece of chewing gum and some duct tape. So I worked on the suite to get rid of some of these pretty bad transitions and tightened up the thing by eliminating some slow spots and redundancies (including the first part of Steve Howe's "Bumpy Ride" section, which was really badly integrated into the piece). "Fly From Here" is now coming in at a little over 19 minutes, almost five minutes less than the original. I think it works better that way. 

Looking at the journey of the song from its admittedly wobbly beginnings, I'm mightily impressed with The Buggles' version of the song, which probably convinced Yes in 2010 that there was something there. On the suite you can still trace back its opening parts to the demos from 1980 and 1981 and make some other fun observations, like how it takes the chord progressions of "Machine Messiah" at one point in a callback to Drama (starting from the "Sailor...sailor beware" section at 12.50 and re-appearing several times in the four minutes that follow). Spending an entire LP's worh of time on a single song and its progression can only work if that song is worth it, and I think that "We Can Fly" in all its incarnations is worth it. 

I'll let you discover if you agree. Ready For Takeoff in 3-2-1... 

A lost page from the book of Yes...

I'm a bit of a weird dude when it comes to Yes. Bit of a contrarian, maybe. I mean, I like Jon Anderson just fine with his beautiful high voice, and his penchant for unicorns'n'elves'n'shit. But I prefer Yes' other vocalists. Except for Jon Davison, now that dude totally sucks. But yeah, those other guys. This has, of course, to do with my own history with Yes. My first Yes album was that unloved album of the tail end of their classic era, Drama. So I'm down with the BugglYes. And I thought that Fly From Here, an album involving both ex-Buggles, was a really strong Yes album, so I'm down with Benoit David also. Unfortunately, of course, both of these dudes didn't last. The BugglYes called it quits after that one totally underrated album, and the David-led line-up...well, that is another matter entirely. Recruited in the band to replace an ailing Jon Anderson who didn't want to go out on the road (something that Anderson took really badly, who'd hoped they'd wait for his recovery), David got his pink slip pretty soon after Fly From Here when he developed his own health problems with a respiratory illness. But the band wasn't done doing him dirty! To add insult to injury, quite literally in this case, they revised Fly From Here a couple of years later and replaced all of David's lead vocals with those of producer and Drama-era singer Trevor Horn. That's some cold shit right there. But Yes have stopped being a band a good long while ago, they are, and have been for a long time now, a business endeavor, and if you're not a part of the ongoing business, then you're a problem. 

Another person who wasn't around long enough to see Fly From Here, but was involved in its making: Oliver Wakeman, who replaced his dad Rick, who left when Anderson went/was forced to go, for touring with the group. He was working on possible songs for a studio album before he left/was forced to leave and be replaced by Geoff Downs for being "closer to the material" that had its roots in the Drama era. Most of the material he worked on was replaced by that other, old/new material from the BugglYes. But a couple of years later, Wakeman reworked some of this material, with the authorization of Yes, adding newly finished piano parts to a David composition from the time (and a lead vocal from a later, unrelated album) to three Yes outtakes/early songs from 2010. So, he basically had enough material for an EP, but Yes, never ones to fail to monetize their fan base's faithfulness, added a double live album already issued in 2011, so they could market the whole thing as a mini-boxset. The live album is fine, with Benoit in fine vocal form and the set list having some songs rarely played at the time. But still, Yes were and are the kings of recycling and reselling. The 'new' music coming out of this project is well worth hearing, though, as all four are very fine songs.

Which, finally, brings us to the One Buck Record of the day. From A Page (A Single Page) owes its subtitle to the fact that I greatly condensed the mini-boxset. There's the four studio songs, plus a selection of my favorites from the live album, which of course includes the Drama tracks "Tempus Fugit" and "Machine Messiah"; old favorites like "And You And I" and "I've Seen All Good People", a really good version of "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" and a lovely rendering of "Onward". 

We will be seeing Yes again on these pages, but for now, dear reader,turn the page to From A Page (A Single Page)...