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“All I wanted to
do was perform
great music
that
was
different
.”
But he heard “all the great records” on Radio Caroline, the
infamous shipboard pirate rock and roll radio station, as well
as Radio Luxembourg. In
, e Beatles and their rst sin-
gle, “Love Me Do,” changed his life. Anderson and his brother,
Tony, had just started their own band, e Warriors, and they
attended one of e Beatles’ rst concerts in Southport just
north of Liverpool. “[ e crowd] screamed only at the end of
each song,” he recalled. “Six months later, we went to see them
again, and we couldn’t hear a damn thing. It was so exciting.”
In
, Anderson was working in a bar above the legendary
Marquee Club (where the Rolling Stones rst performed live in
). ere he met Squire. “I was cleaning up and went over
to say hi. ere was only him and me in the bar. We started
talking and felt an a nity. He invited me to meet his band
[Mabel Greer’s Toyshop, which included another future
Yes-man, guitarist Peter Banks] in the basement of the
Lucky Horseshoe Cafe. Before we even started rehears-
ing, the drummer le the band. We looked in
Melody
Maker
[a weekly music magazine] and saw an advert from
a drummer with a Ludwig drum kit and his own van. We said,
‘Okay, he’s in.’ at was Bill Bruford; the rest is history.”
Yes fans might be surprised that the band’s early repertoire
included songs from
West Side Story
(“We did a very wild
rendition of ‘America,’ ” Anderson said) and “Paper Cup,”
a lesser-known Jimmy Webb song performed by e Fi h
Dimension. “Our songwriting wasn’t that good at that time,”
Anderson said. “We became well known in London and at
universities as the band that puts on a good show.” (In other
moments of cross-pollination, Billy Joel opened for Yes, as did
the J. Geils Band.)
Yes released its ambitious rst album in
, the same year
that King Crimson released its in uential proto-prog classic
In
the Court of the Crimson King
. “Chris and I saw King Crimson
one night at this bar called the Speakeasy Club,” Anderson
recalled. “ ey played their whole album, and I said to Chris,
‘We need to rehearse more, because these guys are amazing.’ ”
Yes’s third release,
e Yes Album
, featured three of the
band’s signature songs, “I’ve Seen All Good People,” “Yours Is
No Disgrace,” and “Starship Trooper,” and paved the way for
their next album,
Fragile
, which was their critical and commer-
cial breakthrough.
“We found a farm in Devon that Steve eventually bought,”
Anderson said. “We worked there together, all in the same
house. We wrote as a unit. We ate together. en we went on
tour to perform some of the songs before we recorded them.
We had just gotten Rick in the band, and it was like this very
powerful energy; something going on that was out of our con-
trol. We found ourselves musically and discovered what it was
like to be a successful band.”
Anderson’s barometer of success is not how much money
you make or how many albums you sell, he explained. “It’s
when you know you’ve got something that is really going to
sustain you. Until then, we were trying to nd out who we
were, musically. When you nd out who you are, thank the
gods, you don’t give a damn about the rest; you just believe that
no matter what, from now on, you’ve got it made. Making it
KEVIN NIXON
RAVINIA MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER 3, 2018 – MAY 11, 2019
26