Vocalist Jon Anderson prides himself in being known as one of the "Band Geeks"
By Dave Thompson
“I’m not going to release another album,” says vocalist Jon Anderson. "I’m just going to release all the music I’ve made over the last few years. There’s five hours of it, in various forms, and anybody who can piece it together in its original form will get an hour with me on Zoom.
“It’s a big puzzle. I’ve never figured out how to put it out. I had an album called 1000 Hands that I thought was going to be a Grammy Award-winning album, obviously not, and you start thinking, I’m not going to aim for that ever again.”
Rather, Anderson intended overseeing reissues from his remarkable back catalog, and unleashing peculiar, but so dramatically pertinent little singles like that same year’s “Screw.”
Thus spoke Jon Anderson the last time Goldmine met with him back in 2021 and, talking to him this summer, he insists that is still the case. And that despite having come out with the very thing he swore that he wouldn’t, a new album. So what gives?
Anderson is unrepentant. “I meant what I said, and I still do. Except ...”
Except, about halfway through the intervening three years, an introduction to the Blue Oyster Cult’s Richie Castellano (“who’s a quite brilliant musician”) set him on course to completely upend his intentions. As they say, “the best laid plans of mice and former Yes singers …”
He explains, “A friend of mine, John Amick at Sirius Radio, sent me a video of a band called Band Geeks.”
Launched by sometime BOC bassist Richie Castellano, Band Geeks are a six piece originally comprising Andy Graziano, Rob Kipp, Andy Ascolese, Chris Clark and Ann Marie Nacchio. First conceived as an audio-only podcast, the project then morphed into a YouTube band — Castellano has been active on the platform since 2007, and there are some astonishing performances up there.
A solo re-creation of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” video and all. Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On.” And, back in 2017 or so, “Heart of the Sunrise.” That’s the video that Amick sent Anderson, and the singer was blown away. “I loved the way they played, because it sounded just like Yes.”
And that’s the — Oh, how do we put this without offending anyone? The “real” Yes, the classic Yes, the starship-trooping, close-to-the-edging, all-good-peopling, roundabouting Yes. The one you hear a mere snippet of, and suddenly time simply falls away, and you’re back in the dorm room or wherever it was, hearing Close to the Edge for the very first time, and wondering how anyone, the band included, could ever improve upon it.
“So I heard them in this tiny studio playing the hell out of ‘Heart of the Sunrise,’ and it was brilliant. I’ve been doing solo shows over the years, working with different musicians and styles of bands, but I thought wouldn’t it be great to have a band that sounds exactly like Yes?
“So I called up Richie the bass player, and I told him, ‘You play just like Yes did in the ’70s.’ They played with such reverence for the material, and sounded exactly as good as the band. I told him how much I loved ‘Heart of the Sunrise,’ and did the band know any other Yes songs? He said they did, they loved Yes, so I said do you want to go out on the road playing Yes Classics and Epics? And he went very, very silent.
“It freaked him out a bit!”
The live show utterly captured Band Geeks’ own understanding of what made that era of Yes so exquisite, and why it remains so special to Anderson as well — the seamless interplay between music and lyric, musicians and singer; the effortless ease with which the most complicated signatures and rhythms can be brought in line with deathless melody and startling imagery.
Anderson recalls the very first rehearsal that he witnessed as “mesmerizing.”
With the band based in New Jersey and Anderson in the hills of central California, the singer witnessed these earliest maneuvers via Zoom.
“We’d talked about what we would be doing because I wanted to play the songs that I knew the audience would want to hear — ‘And You and I,’ ‘Starship Trooper,’ ‘Awaken,’ ‘Close to the Edge,’ and Richie was so excited.”
Now he was watching as the band ran through “Gates of Delirium,” and “it was amazing!” “Yours Is No Disgrace” followed, and Anderson was wondering whether they needed even bother rehearsing any further. “Everything was already perfect.”
The tour that followed reflected that, and Anderson reflects, “It was the best. We only did 12 shows, because we wanted to see what it would be like onstage together. But audiences loved it, and it was like heaven for me.”
A few months passed, then Anderson struck again. “Around last November, I called up Richie again and said, ‘Why don’t we do an album together?’ ” One that would reflect both Anderson and the band’s devotion to a certain phase in the singer’s career, that period when Yes, it appeared, could do no wrong.
Once he’d picked himself back up off the floor, Castellano agreed, and the ensuing album sessions, Anderson insists, were among the easiest he had ever been involved in. And the most inspiring, too.
The entire album fell together in less than three months. “I had some songs that I really liked, and that I thought the band would really perform well. Richie had some songs, and I added to them, and I had some and he added stuff. He added some incredible music to one or two songs that I’d had for many years.”
Anderson recalls one classic example, during the creation of “Counties and Countries,” sending Castellano the song, and then a fragment of another song, “and about two weeks later this beautiful piece of music came back, this magical event, orchestra and all, and that’s what I enjoyed because you never knew what was going to happen next, and it was fun.”
Even their working methods harkened back to Yes. “It was very much like that, because I’d just come up with ideas, things that popped out of my head, the only difference was, we did it through Zoom. We’d get together every couple of weeks and talk about ideas, and then try them.”
Maybe the sessions were not quite as intensive as in old days when Anderson would pop out for a moment, then return to find Chris Squire and Bill Bruford jamming some incredible pattern of their own devising. Gradually their bandmates would find their own place in the pattern, and lyrics would just appear in Anderson’s head. But it was close. No wonder that Anderson describes working with Band Geeks as feeling like “coming home.”
Not that Anderson will say a word against those later incarnations of Yes with which he was involved. Just that he knows what people want to hear when they buy their tickets to see either Yes or his solo show, and Band Geeks deliver. There’s one track on True, the 16-minute epic “Once Upon a Dream,” that could pass as Yes, if they’d made a more conventional follow-up to Close to the Edge than the topographic fishpond that they actually came out with.
Even if the mantric opening vocal chant does sound as much like a latter-day Sparks number as it does anything else in Anderson’s catalog.
Anderson does not respond to that observation, and who can blame him? Instead, he continues documenting what, right now, feels like one of the most collaborations of his entire past few decades.
The album done, it was back on the road at the end of May this year, with a two-part, two-hour set again devoted to “Yes Classics, Epics and More”: “Perpetual Change,” “I’ve Seen All Good People,” “The Calling,” “Heart of the Sunrise,” “Roundabout” and “Owner of a Lonely Heart” were added to the repertoire in the classics and epics side of the show; “Shine On,” “Thank God” and “True Messenger” previewed the new album. The songs, he says, “that people want to hear done, and done properly.”
They even opened with Stravinsky, just like back in ye olden days, while the backdrop was straight out of the Roger Dean sketchbook.
It was a seamless set, even with the new material inserted into the running order (and “Counties and Countries” played during the intermission, “while I go for a lie down,” quips Anderson) but that was the idea behind True from the outset.
Essentially, he says, what they wanted to do was “make the record that everyone is waiting for, but which Yes hasn’t made yet. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve created the album that Yes would have made if they were together.”
Which is an interesting comment because it strays very close indeed to the one topic that Goldmine was advised, ahead of time, not to raise. Would Anderson ever consider rejoining The Group That Insists on Still Calling Itself Yes? The one with one remaining classic-era member, and which was last seen opening for Deep Purple.
Goldmine complies, but not necessarily through an exaggerated sense of obedience. It complies because there is no reason to ask it. Because Anderson really doesn’t need to. It is true that his past returns to the band have hit the occasional high point — “It Will Be a Good Day,” from 1999’s The Ladder, is a number that Anderson himself often cites as a favorite, and has contemplated adding to some future Band Geeks repertoire.
But truly vintage fans regard even “Owner of a Lonely Heart” as a latter-day interloper, and were you to poll even a handful of the audience attending Anderson and Band Geeks’ recent live shows, and ask if the band omitted any favorites — oh, and can overlook the occasional outliers who might demand “Don’t Kill the Whale.” (This writer is one of them. Sorry.)
Without question, it will be that brief, but so magical 18-month period during which The Yes Album (released in February 1971), Fragile (November 1971) and Close to the Edge (September 1972) not only cemented Yes’ international renown, they also blueprinted a skein of prog that is still being spun today.
There’s room for later material too, of course — among the current set, “The Gates of Delirium” comprised side one of 1974’s Relayer; “Awaken” dates from 1977’s Going for the One. But classic Yes, epic Yes, is a beast of a very specific nature, and that is why True is such a breathtaking album.
It doesn’t sound like a band trying to emulate Yes — goodness knows one Rush is more than enough. It sounds like Yes always ought to have sounded and, for a while, did sound. And for further details on that, check out “Shine On,” the first single from True.
All the ingredients are in place, with even the irreplaceable Chris Squire being somehow, magically — not replaced. But definitely something more than echoed.
Anderson’s voice, meanwhile, scarcely even registers the fact that over half a century has passed since Close to the Edge, and while the touring schedule isn’t quite the marathon outing that Yes might have devoted to a new release, still close to 30 dates in 90 days isn’t bad for a frontman now approaching his 80th birthday (October 25 is the big day).
He laughs off the observation. You’re as old as you feel, after all, and “I can’t believe I’m as excited as I am about everything. Life, touring, the new album and going on tour and getting ready to perform this new album. It’s what motivates me now, just as it always has.”
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