Last year, Yes hit the half- century mark as a band that has been touring and recording music. Aside from a hiatus that ran from 2004 to 2008, some lineup of the group has existed for the past five decades.
Guitarist Steve Howe was not a founding member and came aboard in 1970. While his initial stint with the group was for 11 years, he spent the 1980s as a cornerstone in a number of other groups including Asia and GTR before rejoining Yes two other times, with the most recent reunion coming in 1995 and lasting to the current day.
This year, Yes is headlining The Royal Affair tour, which also features John Lodge of the Moody Blues and Carl Palmer’s ELP Experience, plus Howe joining Asia for a special performance.
Rival faction
Making things more interesting for fans is the fact that a rival faction, Yes featuring Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin and Rick Wakeman, is also active, although that group hasn’t announced any tours of the states for this summer. And while he declined to comment about the current scenario regarding the two factions, Howe is enthusiastic about delving into Yes’s deep canon and being on the road with his group that is rounded out by drummer Alan White, keyboardist Geoff Downes, vocalist Jon Davison and bassist/keyboardist Billy Sherwood.
“We’ve been playing ‘Astral Traveller’ and ‘Time and a Word’ over the last nine years, because this lineup has basically been a development from what Chris (Squire), Alan (White) and I started in 2008 and pushed along through various changes. So basically, from that period, we were able to draw from our experience. But of course, this has a different and lovely shape to it that gave us a chance to show the development of the music,” he explained.
Chet Atkins an inspiration
While Howe was very much influenced by the sounds of American rock and roll artists like his peers growing up in late 1950s England, it was country legend Chet Atkins who resonated the most for the then-teenage London native.
“There was a huge guitar boom. In 1957, I was about 10 and it was monumental. Every record was a guitar and every one was an instrumental. It was an amazing time, besides the general rock influence. At the time, I got influenced by The Shadows, The Ventures and Duane Eddy, who I still love today,” he said. “But as soon as I heard Chet Atkins when I was 13 after buying a record called ‘Teensville,’ because it had a guitar hanging on the front in the picture — that was it.”
Howe may not get mentioned in the roll call of influential guitarists that emerged out of England in the late 1960s — Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck — but the reed-thin string-bender was no less impressive. In addition to Atkins, inspiration also came from Les Paul and a coterie of post-Charlie Christian guitarists — Tal Farlow, Kenny Burrell and Herb Ellis. Most interestingly was a love of country music that led to his embracing and incorporating pedal steel into what he was doing, starting with the 1972 Yes album “Close To the Edge.”
Musical hiatus
While the 1980s found Howe stretching out in a more commercial direction with Asia and GTR, Yes was and continued to remain his creative mothership. And despite his deep ties to the group he’s most associated with, the septuagenarian Rock & Roll Hall of Famer felt his musical hiatus was a necessary and rewarding decision that he made.
“It’s like (former Yes drummer) Bill Bruford said, ‘How can you keep playing the same songs with the same people?’” Howe said. “I do think you do need variety in your career to make it worthwhile and coming back to Yes after I’ve done other things has always been great fun. It’s not been like a monotony, where I’ve always been in Yes for 50 years. That’s not been the case at all and I’m really glad. I think it’s musically much more helpful and exciting to have moved away and come back and find out how the ball continues to keep rolling.”
