“I’m in my wardrobe.” Jon Anderson, the unmistakable voice of Yes, is having a dilemma when I call in for our interview. He can’t find a certain jacket and he needs it ASAP. “I have to wear it for making a video for a song from my new album. But I can’t find it,” he finally sighs.
The album that Anderson is referring to is his new solo record, 1000 Hands, and it is dropping next week. Originally begun thirty years ago, it ended up out of sight, out of mind, as other projects nudged ahead in importance. “Before you knew it, I started getting involved in other projects and tours and years went by,” Anderson explained. Then producer Michael Franklin took an interest and before they knew it, the album was coming back to life. “Michael knew everything I wanted to do and how I wanted the music to sound, so we agreed to go for it.”
1000 Hands is undeniably magical, spiritual, surreal in all the right places. In other words, Anderson has not changed his stripes. He still holds true to peace, love, unification and higher awakenings in both body and mind. All the elements that were the thread of Yes. Having met bassist Chris Squire while the singer was working as a bartender above the famous Marquee Club in London in the late 1960’s, Yes was a catalyst of what was to become known as Prog Rock. With extended excursions into surrealistic atmospheres of notes that transformed into dreamy, conscious-traveling anthems of where music could go, Yes changed how records and concerts could be experienced. From Fragile to Close To The Edge and even into 1983’s 90125, the band was forever exploring realms in rock & roll’s outer universe.
“The main thing about Yes is that we’re all very, very different characters and I think that’s probably one of the reasons why it has been so successful and has been for years,” Geoff Downes, who has been playing keyboards in Yes since 2011, told me during a 2015 interview. “All these different personalities kind of converged in the middle somewhere and I think what made the music so great is you had all those different personalities and different influences that actually, when you put it all together, it created something that was completely unique.”
Anderson released his first solo album, Olias Of Sunhillow, in the summer of 1976 during a band break following their Relayer tour. He has recorded with Jon-Luc Ponty and Vangelis, as well as his former bandmates on solo and collaboration projects. In 2016, he teamed up with Rick Wakeman and Trevor Rabin as ARW for a very successful tour that, according to Wakeman, was brought about following the death of Squire in 2015. “Jon, Trevor and myself have always wanted to play together, to play Yes music, and just sort of finally got round to doing it,” the flamboyant keyboardist told me during a 2016 interview. “And I think that’s been helped in this very bizarre way by the sad tragic death of Chris Squire, because something that hit us all was our own mortality, I suppose, and if we don’t do this now, which is something we really want to do, there’s a chance it might never get done. So it just sort of kicked us into action and we’ve just had a wonderful time.” But following the tour, the gentlemen went their separate ways once again.
Which brings us back around to 1000 Hands. With a guest list a mile long – including Chick Corea, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, Steve Morse and Yes-mates Steve Howe, Alan White and the late Squire – Anderson has forged from the past something mystical and timely for today’s chaotic world. I spoke with the British legend recently about his new opus, meeting Squire and his love for the ukulele.
You’re home during all this coronavirus
Oh I’ve been home about three months. I’m home with my lovely wife and we live up in the hills away from everyone with little bunny rabbits running all around all the time and lovely birds singing. It’s a beautiful day and all is good. I’m in my studio every day singing and working on this wonderful new project I’m writing that I’m excited about and I have the album coming out that I recorded a couple of years ago. Actually, I started recording it thirty years ago.
That’s a big gap between starting it and it coming out
Yeah, when I started it I was in Big Bear near LA and Chris Squire and Alan White were in LA so I got them to record on a couple of tracks. Then I went on tour and did some solo touring and thirty years later I thought, I’d better finish that album! (laughs)
What were a few of the songs you did in the beginning?
“Activate,” “First Born Leaders,” “Makes Me Happy.” That’s where I was thirty years ago.
And you rounded up some more musicians to play on it when you started back to work on it
Yeah, because this producer friend, Michael Franklin who lives in Orlando, has so many musicians that he knows. When I first started the album, I was going to call it Uzlot, which is a North English way of saying “a lot of us.” But he said, “Who would you like to play on the album?” And I said, “Well, I love Billy Cobham, he’s one of the greatest ever drummers.” And he says, “Oh, I know Chick Corea.” And I said, “Well, get Chick Corea as well.” I had just worked with Jon-Luc Ponty so we got Jon-Luc Ponty to get involved. And even got Steve Howe to play on it, just on the last track. So it was a kind of wonderful experience to get all these great people coming to play on the album. It was fantastic.
Were they able to come and actually be in a studio with you?
No, they’d be in a studio with Michael in Orlando and then Michael would send me a surprise. I used to get a surprise every other day: “I just recorded Zap Mama on this track.” And Zap Mama is my favorite girl vocalists. They are from Belgium. So they sang on it. They were actually doing a show in Orlando and he got them to get in the studio to sing on this track. So every other day he’d send another track: “Guess who I got to be on that? I got Ian Anderson.” I said, “What! That’s amazing!” And that’s what happened, you know. It was over a two year period that he was able to get the album finally finished and mixed and it was kind of released last year while I was on tour with musicians from Orlando and toured around but we never got it released properly. We just couldn’t find a record company who understood what we were doing.
And of course, the coronavirus hasn’t helped any
No, that’s true. The coronavirus is like a powerful message for us to remember that we’re all the same, we’re all living on the same planet and we’re all connected for the first time in history by the internet so it’s made us all realize who we truly are here on this planet. It’s a bad thing but then a good thing for change because we do need to change our perception of life while we live here and everything. You can tell the politicians and the politics of the world are stuck. We’re not going anywhere collectively, not going higher in our state of consciousness. A lot of us want to and are ready to but the people we’ve put in place to help are not helping, which is the way things go sometimes.
It’s also been kind of rejuvenating – families are sitting down again together for dinner, nobody is rushing off to somewhere else – it’s given us this connection again.
Yes! And I just love these marches around America and around the world where people of all races are getting together and saying, “No more! We’ve had enough!” And it reminds me of the sixties when Yes first started. We were sort of “Peace to everybody, peace and love, make love not war.” I still believe in that. I’m a hippie (laughs).
Was there anyone who you wanted on the album that didn’t get a chance to participate?
There was the Beach Boys. I remembered when I was working in Big Bear thirty years ago, I went down to LA to NAMM, which is a big music equipment festival, and I’m up there with a couple of friends and I’m on the guitar and we were actually singing “Help Me Rhonda” for some reason and there was Bruce Johnston in the audience. I got to know him and I went up to North California where the Beach Boys guys hang out and we all got together for dinner and they were beautiful. I wanted them to sing on the album very much but it wasn’t meant to be. That’s life. Next time!
“Twice In A Lifetime” is such a beautiful piece of music, even without the vocals. What did you hear first in the creation of that song?
Well, I actually wrote that with a friend of mine who was in my first band in the sixties, Brian Chatton. He was the keyboard player. I went on to go with Yes and he went on to do session work and he performed with BB King. He sent me these beautiful chords and I just sang this song one day and I thought, you know, it’s such a beautiful melody, we don’t want to make this into a band thing, it should just be very orchestral and violin player and that’s what we did. We actually made it into a very beautiful piece of music.
“Makes Me Happy” has this great island feel to it and as soon as it comes on you just smile.
Yes, that’s the truth. My wife Jane sings on it. Once a year we go to Kauai and I’ve got my ukulele so I am always playing ukulele here. When I did my solo show, I played guitar and I played piano and sang songs. But then I’ve got the ukulele out and I’d sing a couple of ideas and then towards the end of my solo touring, this was about five years ago, I actually sang “Day In The Life,” the Beatles song, on ukulele. It sounded really terrible! (laughs) But I just loved doing it. But the guy who is really one of the best ukulele players in the world is Jake Shimabukuro. He is terrific. We’ve actually done that song together for a record he is doing this year. He’s actually working with Willie Nelson as well. He’s a beautiful guy.
If there is an underlying message on this record, what is it?
Peace, love, love is all it is, love is everything; the only reason we live is to find the divine within.
You’re not changing your stripes then
No, no, no, no, no (laughs). Just getting stronger into the idea that the reason to live is to give, love everywhere you can and be very open for the trials and tribulations of life; but remembering the only reason we live is to find the divineness within us all. Everybody’s got it. It’s just a question of spending that time in meditation or prayer to connect with that beautiful oneness of being.
Did you immediately click with Chris Squire when you met him?
Yes. I was working in a bar in London over the top of the very famous rock theatre called the Marquee Club. Everybody but everybody went to the Marquee Club and played there. Jimi Hendrix played there, The Who played there and I’d be in the bar upstairs and I’d be serving drinks and cleaning up and Pete Townshend would walk in. You wouldn’t believe the people that walked in that bar. So I just knew that one day I’d find a band to sing with cause I’d been in my first band for five years and left them in Germany because they wouldn’t get out of bed and rehearse. They were very lazy. So I left them and I was crazy, of course; I was on acid and things like that but eventually I got to London to work in this bar above this famous rock club.
So I’d got in there early to clean up and tidy up, and the manager said, “There’s a guy over there and he’s looking for a singer in a band. His name is Chris.” So I went over and talked to this guy, who is like 6’4, and me being very small, I’m only 5’6, – 5’5 now, I’ve gotten shorter (laughs) – so I looked up at him and we talked about Paul Simon and the Simon & Garfunkel album that was out that year and we were just digging that kind of music. And Chris said, “You know, my band is a good band but we need an extra singer, somebody really good. Can you sing?” I said, “Yeah, I can sing, of course I can sing. Look at me.” (laughs)
So I joined the band and the day I joined the band, the drummer left to go and work with a band in Paris, because he was going to get paid; we had no money anyway. And we were in this dungeon underneath the Lucky Horseshoe Café in the center of London. So we were rehearsing without a drummer and we picked up a magazine looking for a drummer and we found Bill Bruford and now we had a band, you know. Bill has a jazz groove sort of vibe, not a rock drummer, but just a very, very good drummer. And all of a sudden the music starts to hit different sorts of levels. So me and Chris became very, very, very close and we wrote some songs together and then I left the band and kept going.
Chris once told me when you made the first record it was very exciting to do and that you wanted to make a good impression. So why did you choose to put a cover of a Byrds song on it?
I don’t know. I really didn’t like the way my voice sounded at times and in the studio it’s a different sort of game and you try out many different songs on your first album. When I listen back to it, I like it now but I didn’t like it then cause I thought we should be better than this, we’ve got to be better than this.
Which song in the Yes catalog do you think was the hardest to transfer to the live stage?
They were all very, very hard work but the thing about “Close To The Edge” was when we first performed “Close To The Edge” it seemed like it took an hour to play it, even though it’s seventeen or eighteen minutes. It felt like a long time, because the audience was so quiet, you know. That made us become more intent on making it sound really, really good. In those days the audiences were very quiet, they would listen and then clap at the end and cheer at the end of each song. They would listen intently to what we were playing so it made me want to make sure that the music was really better, and sometimes better than the record, if possible.
I didn’t like it when things were a little bit loose. They used to call me Napoleon because I was small and I was very, very strong and demanding. “How dare you play so badly!” That sort of thing. “You know you could go and drive a bus!” or “You’ve got a choice. We’re very lucky to have a record in the charts, play well!” And I did that for ten years. I just drove everybody crazy. And that’s the way my life was, you know.
Yes was making this mind-blowing music and you probably knew early on that you wouldn’t get radio but you did it anyway.
That’s funny you should mention because when we were doing the Fragile tour and we were touring America, we were playing a lot of universities and they would play the whole “Roundabout,” eight minutes long. The radio stations were called FM radio in those days and it blew my mind that they would play the longer pieces of music, like “Starship Trooper” and things like that. So to me, I started thinking, okay, what we need to do is do longer pieces of music. So that’s why we did “Close To The Edge.” But what happened was, right in the middle of us making that album, the business in America changed and because the FM radio stations weren’t making any money they all became AM, playing only records that lasted four minutes. And that sort of blindsided me because we went on tour but ever so gratefully the audience listened to the longer pieces of music anyway and they listened intently. We would play in front of 10,000 or 15,000 people and you could hear a pin drop and we’d be playing “Close To The Edge” and into Topographic Oceans and “Awaken.” When we performed those pieces of music, the audiences, thousands all around the world, would listen and it was kind of amazing. We weren’t pop stars. We were just musicians. And there were a lot of bands very much like us, you know.
I understand your father was from Scotland. Did you take any inspiration from any of that traditional music?
It’s funny you mention it because my dad, when I was born, he named me after a musical singer called John Roy The Melody Boy. Isn’t that wild? I hated it! But that’s what I remembered when I was a kid, cause I’d say, “Why am I called Roy?” And he said, “I’ve told you, Jon. You’re named after John Roy The Melody Boy so you better get singing.” So I would sing on the farm with my brother. We would go delivering milk and we would sing Everly Brothers songs all day long and that was in the fifties. Now, people say to me, “How come you can just sing melodies so easy?” – which I do every day – and I said because I was named after a musical star called John Roy The Melody Boy. It’s so funny.
Steve Howe plays on “Now & Again”
Michael sent him the tape of the song and said, “There’s a section in this song open for you to play the guitar. Can you do it?” And he said, “Yeah, okay, no problem.” When I heard it, all I wanted to do was sing and I sang about me and him used to sing together and I’d write songs with him so much, some of the great Yes songs, and it made everybody happy and I just wanted to thank him for being such a good guy.
Do you think you guys can do something else together?
Yeah, I tend to think that dreams come true.
How long has it been since you talked to Bill?
We did Close To The Edge and I thought it was like a phenomenal idea to do this album. Three weeks later, Bill called me up and said, “I’m leaving the band.” And I said, “What? Why are you leaving the band?” I started thinking, is something wrong with our band? He went to join King Crimson, another band that we loved, and it broke my heart. But we got on with life and Alan White joined the band. So I hadn’t seen him for years and bumped into him in New York twice. Then we went to the Hall Of Fame about three years ago and there was Bill. I haven’t seen him since then. He stopped playing drums and teaching drums and music but he’s still the same beautiful guy.
You have worked with so many artists in your career. Is there anyone outside of the Prog community that you hope to one day collaborate with?
Yes, I’ve always said the same thing for the last thirty years: Stevie Wonder. There’s a new guy around and I don’t think you’ve heard him but I’d love to work with him as well because he’s like the next generation Stevie Wonder and his name is Jacob Collier. Please, today, do yourself a favor, write his name down and just watch him. He’s as important to the music world as The Beatles were in the sixties. This guy, he’s twenty-five, he does some Hip-Hop beautiful things but he also sings with a full orchestra. Google his songs, like “Hideaway,” and he sings it with an orchestra; there’s about four or five other songs that he’s done with an orchestra, but he writes all the music on the orchestra. He’s doing very Hip-Hop pop stuff now at the moment but the last few years he’s been writing and performing with all the greats. He’s actually been working very closely with Quincy Jones. He’s from the north of London and he’s just such a beautiful, beautiful soul and he has come to save the world.
The music that you went on to create with Yes and what you do with your solo music, where did that come from?
It’s because I listened to some classical musicians like Stravinsky and Jean Sibelius. These people just blew my mind! How did they create this kind of music? And Mozart. How did they create this music? I remember going to see Amadeus and sitting there, and I was the only person in the theatre, it was an afternoon matinee twenty years ago, and I was in tears all the way through. I thought, that’s what I want to be! I want to learn! Which I’m still doing now! It was mesmerizing.
When all this virus gets gone are you going on tour?
Yep, I hope so. We were going to be touring now with these young kids from the Academy Of Rock, a group out of Boston, but we couldn’t do it so we might do it next spring. But next spring/summer I’ll be doing the 1000 Hands tour. We’ll see!
Portrait by Deborah Anderson; live photos by Leslie Michele Derrough
