Yeah, I had a feeling I'd be alone on this one! Perhaps 'worst thing about the group' is a bit hyperbolic, but I really do feel he was a niche singer who did certain things well and others not so well. For instance, I like his style on something like 'Do You Really Want to Hurt Me' or his cover of 'The Crying Game'. But when they toughen up and do something harder, he gets lost in the wash. For instance, I'm not a fan of the way he does Church of the Poison Mind, which I think requires more of a growler voice, or Time (Clock of the Heart), where I wish he could do different parts of the song in different styles (the 'time won't give me time' bit doesn't work for me as he does it). Obviously your mileage may vary!
As some know, I’m no fan of digital music but have always said it CAN sound fantastic, it’s just that they don’t seem to be mastered to sound as such. But wow, the Eric stuff is quite stunning, like Steve’s Razor & Tie work on the comps they put out. I have almost all the Eric comps and as Grant says, they are wonderful!! Superb mastering they are.
Aaaa...I must be specific: The CDs starting with Volume 12 sound fantastic. The ones before that are spotty and contain needless noise reduction and EQ.
Talk about "early installment weirdness." I'd forgotten how different the Simpsons looked when they premiered on Tracey Ullman. Bart and Homer look downright evil. But I do remember that their voices were different...and they weren't as funny as they would become when they got their own show.
I'll concede that Boy George wasn't the most versatile singer ever -- not, say, like a McCartney or Roger Daltrey or Elton John in their prime. But for most of Culture Club's stuff, and certainly their singles, he was perfect.
I used to watch Tracey Ullman specifically to see “The Simpsons” clips. I thought they were hilarious. I also used to watch MTV’s “Remote Control” to see the animated cartoon “Stevie Washington: Angry Youth”...and also to see Kari Wuhrer
Just took a gander at Vol 15. What a tracklist! Can't wait to A/B these with the crap versions I have. Gonna be a fun evening
I felt "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" was one of the most vile songs of the year. Can't explain why, just hated it, and to think this was in the top 10, and for me, far more deserved the #1 spot.
OOALH was their attempt to remain relevant .It did to some degree but not true Yes.I remembered I liked it at the time.The video was pure crap at the time but so many were.
I bought the 90125 the minute it came out I liked the song so much. It was the first Yes album I ever bought. I think some people may not have like the song because it mentions "free will", and that doesn't sit well with certain groups, if you know what I mean. I know a couple of people who didn't like the song because it sounded industrial to them with all the screeching sound effects. The song, and many other cuts on the album were a far cry from the progressive sound they had throughout the late 60s, 70s, and early 80s. Most of the new songs were shorter and more radio-friendly. But, that was the 80s. A lot of veteran artists from the 60s and 70s went that route to survive.
Also, back in late 1983, a blast from the past released a single that was an Al Green cover. The artist of that remake was freshly divorced and had started on a new journey. The artist collaborated with a superb team of producers Terry Britten, Carter, Leon "Ndugu" Chancler, Wilton Felder, Rupert Hine, Joe Sample, Greg Walsh, and Martyn Ware. That single is "Let's Stay Together". It went by sort of unnoticed here in the U.S., but that was only the warm-up. The following is the single edit. Let's Stay Together - Tina Turner
I always loved "Owner of a Lonely Heart", even though I otherwise didn't like Yes until years later. Out of character for them, but then what was in character wasn't always great. I've always felt 1984 was the best year of the '80s for music (which isn't saying very much from my point of view, but never mind), and this was a great start to the year. Yes, I know it was recorded earlier. Amusingly, Yes were reportedly impressed with the video for...well, I can't say because it's a future #1, but it's by a hard rock band from California that's named after two of its members...yeah, you know the one. Anyway, they reportedly approached that band's management about using the director for that video, only to learn they had done it very much on their own with minimal professional input.
Well, this was the most-unexpected comeback in quite awhile. Yes were broadly regarded as over-the-hill prog rockers who were about as out-of-touch with contemporary music as you could get. Of course, their sound had evolved quite a bit since their early-'70s heyday, but most people hadn't heard it - unlike their proggy compatriots Genesis, Yes had been off the radio for the most part for years. The band returned with a decidedly hard rock sound, but one much, much edgier than most of what passed for hard rock at the time - less Led Zeppelin imitators and more like a hybrid of New Wave, blues and hard rock, largely courtesy South African addition to the band Trevor Rabin, working as guitarist and co-writing most of the cuts on 90125, the band's astounding comeback album. Much if not most of 90125 had began life as a project for a kind of Yes spin-off band called Cinema, comprised of Rabin and former Yes members Chris Squire and Alan White (Steve Howe and Geoff Downes went off to form the briefly mega-successful Asia). Trevor Horn was brought in as the singer for Cinema, believe it or not - it didn't work out, but he stuck around as the producer, a unique and as it turns out inspired choice for a hard rock band. Squire recruited back original Yes keyboardist Tony Kaye - Squire thought his simpler playing would complement the new material. Kaye wasn't really interested in learning new keyboard technology though so it was a bad fit - Rabin ended up handling most of the keyboards. The band was still clinging to the name Cinema, but there were legal hassles - other bands were using that name as well. Atlantic didn't care for the vocals, split between Squire and Rabin, so Squire patched things up with original Yes vocalist Jon Anderson - who was free at the time - and he came onboard as the lead singer. Already 300,000 pounds in the hole for recording costs - a staggering sum - their manager played a tape of the mostly-completed album to label co-founder Ahmet Ertegun, who with the promise of an Anderson lead vocal, liked what he heard enough to finance the completion of the album, now credited to a reconstituted Yes. What Drama, if you'll pardon the pun... Named after its catalog number, even visually the album was a huge departure from their Roger Dean-graced album covers of the '70s. Worked up by Garry Mouat at Assorted Images on an Apple //e computer, it bore little resemblance to any hard rock album covers, looking more like the highly-designed, boldly graphic New Wave and synth pop covers by acts like New Order and Eurythmics. "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" began life back in the late '70s with Trevor Rabin, who'd been noodling around with it for years. Nearing the end of the 90125 recording sessions, Trevor Horn was pestering the band to record a hit, and when he heard Rabin's demo - while he didn't like all of it - he liked bits of it a great deal. Following some intensive re-writing, which Jon Anderson also contributed to, and the introduction of cutting-edge '80s production, including both a Synclavier and a Fairlight CMI sampler, the band had produced the most high-tech, shrink wrapped hard rock song ever recorded. They'd out-Genesised Genesis and out-Peter Gabrieled Peter Gabriel. Questlove has stated that "Owner" contains the first use of a sample as a breakbeat, as opposed to a sound effect (a sample of "Kool Is Back" by the jazz/soul group Funk, Inc.), and while I don't know if that's true or not, it's certainly the biggest hit anybody had had with something like that up until this point. "Owner" sounded like nothing else on the radio at the time, and it absolutely skyrocketed up the charts following its November release. It really had something for everyone. The production was high tech enough to enchant most synth pop fans. There was enough blues in its foundations to give it a real soulful swagger. Anderson's vocals and the screaming guitars meanwhile advertised it as white boy hard rock compatible. So "Owner" got picked up by an amazingly broad range of radio stations and appealed to a bizarrely diverse audience. I flipped the hell out for it. I got the single and - once the next hit single was dropped - scored the album itself. 90125 is also home to one of the first if not the very first 12" single I ever bought, for "Leave It", which includes an incredible, mostly instrumental, Synclavier re-imagining (link) of the song and is the most 1984 thing ever. You should check it out - it's amazing. The video for "Owner" is fantastic as well, starting out as another of those atrocious "vintage band performs its latest hit in crappy '80s outfits" clips before Jon Anderson halts the proceedings and the real video begins. It's a well-directed, surreal, anti-authoritarian work, again not far-removed from the kind of stuff Peter Gabriel had turned out ("Shock The Monkey"), although perhaps a little corny in comparison. Still, it was better by far than most of the dross aged bands were horking up on MTV. Our local music video station was obsessed with the clip - they played it constantly. Yes quickly - and somewhat bizarrely, given their age - became MTV darlings as a result, no doubt helping to flip both the single and the album completely over the top in America. The band actually produced multiple versions of the surreal video for subsequent single "Leave It" - MTV ran all of them back to back at least once, a brilliant promotional tactic for such a venerable act. The runaway success of 90125 elevated Trevor Horn into the same league as Hugh Padgham and other superstar '80s producers. For Yes though this would be the band's career peak, their first and last #1 single and last Top 10 album in the US (although it remains their biggest seller here, going triple platinum back when that really meant something). By the time the band started recording its oft-delayed follow-up Big Generator in '85 though the magic had largely faded and the group's internal squabbling turned the whole affair into something purely Spinal Tap. Horn eventually got fed up and walked, leaving Rabin to largely complete the album at his home. After blowing $2 million the record finally dropped in the second half of '87 to dismal reviews and a third the sales of its predecessor, with none of its singles making it to the Top 20. So a big if brief comeback for maybe the biggest prog act of the '70s. Another group of prog rockers though would enjoy an even bigger - and much more prolonged - comeback in the '80s, enough to make them one of the biggest acts of the entire decade. Whoda thunk it?
I never got the people who were pissed off by the change. I expected artists to do something new, and figured they were morons if they couldn't. What could have been more tedious in 1984 than stoned hippies in macrame vests still performing Moog-drenched endless jams 10 years after the heyday of that crap. It was fine when it was new, but it didn't hold up all that well and we certainly didn't need any more of it by the mid-'80s. If you wanna hear an old Yes album...play an old Yes album. Nobody is stopping you.
I don't want to jump ahead, but I thought it was crazy how they did a series of videos for "Leave It", one being where they showed a blank screen during the whole song. That was far out! Anyway, I loved Yes as a kid. I loved when my local radio station played the long versions of some of their songs late at night, especially "Heart Of The Sunrise". I lost interest after the "Fragile" album. I know "Close To The Edge" is popular around here, especially since Steve did a mastering of it, but it was lost on me. By then, radio had also stopped playing their music around here. I stuck to pop and R&B. I did pick back up on Yes with the "Tormato" and "Drama" albums, though they were spotty.
Well, imagine if, say, AC/DC had changed. The fans would be calling for their heads. When they did "For Those About To Rock" it was different enough that a lot of their fans complained. And, I knew several Def Leppard fans who were very disappointed with "Pyromania" because they felt they had moved in an even more pop direction that they had on "High & Dry". That doesn't even get close to what they would think later. A lot of longtime Van Halen fans cried foul when...well, i'm jumping too far ahead. BTW, I love that "hippie crap" from the late 60s. Great stuff. It came out when rock music was at its most creative and influential state. The Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Grand Funk Railroad, Traffic, Santana...all great stuff!
Yeah, kind of my history with Yes as well. I liked the early stuff - my uncle was a fan, had all those records, and rock radio played it constantly into the early '80s - but a little went a long way. I eventually made do with the CD of Classic Yes, even though it had a kinda crappy live recording of "I've Seen All Good People", which is one of my Yes favorites in its studio incarnation.
I liked it too, but it belonged to a time and place. Just repeating the same crap over and over again for a decade?
It always sounded to me, to a certain degree, like an aping of The Police sound, with Jon Anderson seemingly doing his best Sting impression. There was at least one single out by them in this period that was piggybacking off their "Every Breath You Take" success and keeping the fires burning from their Synchronicity album. One wonders how a Sting cover of "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" may've sounded like. And to think Yes' biggest hit, up to that point, was "Roundabout" some 12 years before: A portion of the midway instrumental break - one singular guitar note, backed by organ - was looped over and over again for a news sounder for a Liberty, NY radio station in the late 1970's which I'm familiar with from the summer camp I stayed in within a few miles of Liberty.
Really? I've never thought they sounded even remotely like The Police. No faux Jamaican accent, for starters. If it was close to any existing major band it would probably be Duran Duran and their own edgy sound, but there was something even sharper about this reconstituted Yes. "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" was really unique. Although it was made up of familiar parts, I don't recall ever hearing anything quite like it before. I think that's part of what made it such a massive, out of the blue success. It really catapulted Horn into the big leagues - for awhile he was probably the hottest producer on the planet after Quincy Jones, given he'd enjoyed enormous success in a variety of innovative styles/genres. Deservedly so, I might add.
I wasn't going by the SFX used in the song, I was going by the basic guitar/bass/drum arrangement used. Anderson may not have used a faux Jamaican accent, but his vocal range (and timbre) was not too dissimilar to Sting's.
Yes is a band I always think are crap and then I listen to an album and realize I really like them: this is true regardless of the album or era they recorded in. As for "Owner of a Lonely Heart", I think it's another iconic classic -- not my favorite of the year or anything; I'm more into up-and-coming alternative bands from this time; but a petty good single. Trever Horn's signature sounds date it a little, but no more dated than anything else Yes had ever done.
Like many in my age bracket, "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" was my introduction to Yes. When it hit toward the end of 1983, it sounded sleek, modern and catchy. The various sound effects and other seemingly left of center production choices really enhanced the overall sonic picture. Although I now prefer the band's early 70s releases, "Owner Of a Lonely Heart" stands as an example of songcraft, musicianship and technology coming together to create something special.
