The Last Days of 80s YES and WHY they broke up! – Documentary (1987-1988)
A deep dive into the fascinating and often forgotten 1987/1988 tour by Yes, which saw the band promoting Big Generator amidst fierce competition in a rapidly shifting music market. Despite their status as prog-rock giants, the tour struggled to capture the same magic as previous efforts, overshadowed by the rise of pop and alternative music. In a shocking move, Jon Anderson quit the band for the second time in his career, leaving Yes in disarray as the 80s came to a close. Join me as i uncover the highs and lows of a tour that marked the end of an era for one of progressive rock’s most iconic groups. #jonanderson #trevorrabin #documentary #80smusic #classicrock #progressiverock #yes
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#Days #80s #broke #Documentary
Originally posted by UC1A0zj5dQhszSeSesW4bsdg at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szKpXNnS-d4
I’m Running is one of Yes’s best, possibly the best. No clue as to why it is always overlooked.
Been thinking about the Rabin saga from a different point of view. I support Rabin. I understand why he doesn't want to do covers (70s Yes tunes)……but if not for Yes taking him onboard……would Rabin ever got as big as he did?
I would say it's a lot easier joining an established name band than starting from scratch.
To be sure…Rabin "saved" Yes in the 80s without question. 70s Yes would not last an album, neither would 70s Genesis, 70s Floyd…..they all had to change to a more pop sound.
33:53 is that my thumbnail I spot ????
I've heard Jon's ''In the City of Angels'' and have never understand why people say it sounds like a Toto album. Despite the fact that they appeared on a lot of L.A. records from 1974 to 1983 (classic yacht/soft rock records), even Jon's record is ''too soft'' to be a Toto thing. And beside this, they only play all together on one track (best one of that record for me) that sounds like a thing he would have done with Yes West. People really got confused, they should have heard it more without reading the names involved in it.
Talk was the best Rabin/Yes album. ❤
Looking forward to a ABWH and Union analysis if you are thinking of that.
I remember watching the 40th Atlantic thing. I thought YES did awesome. The Genesis thing, well it was like a bunch of dads jamming in the basement. I love it for what it is. XD
I had City of Angels. I listened to it a lot and enjoyed it. I had it on cassette so I don't remember ever reading the liner notes. I never thought about who it was making the music, I figured he knew people. Thanks for all the effort in this series. I have always loved 90125 and Big Generator. Thanks for all the insight, back then you knew there must have been issues, but finding details was difficult. If you happened to miss a month of "(insert instrument) Monthly" you might not ever have known.
Can concur as to the second half of TBT being a better show. Saw 3 shows of the tour, both nights @ BBA and a couple of months later the show @ The Nassau Coliseum. Honestly the first two weren't bad imo though certainly not as enjoyable as the previous tour's gigs. But that 3rd TBT, I still rank that in my personal top 5 Yes shows (I'm including ABWH) that I've been to.
When you say that "Roundabout" marked the departure of Jon in '79, was it because it was the last song played on the Tormato tour?
The 1988 show is an important section of the prog cinematic universe.
I'm going to have to bookmark this and come back later, it really is fascinating but it's kind of making me sad for what could have been
Trevor is simply the reason for Yes' success in the 80's! ❤ oh, and excellent documentary❤
And a battle it was to be!
Personally, my favorite era of Yes were the Rabin years! 90125 & BG, especially ❤❤
Unpopular opinion, 90215 is my favorite YES album.
Don’t care how much money they made- 80’s YES sucked- commercial claptrap. Only real YES- 1968-1978
Of course the broke up, as those decades of hanging together on long tours and recording studios is enough to drive any group of people apart. Rabin brought to the band something Yes should have done years before, a significant to their sound , beholden to their legacy but a bit more "with it" so far as musical trends were going. They'd been stale for sometime, Anderson's hayseed mysticism was now insufferable, and Rabin gave them back their edge: sharper guitar work, a real sense of melody that appealed to listeners eager for melodic hooks to go along with all the virtuoso party tricks. It seemed a good start to a good future, but it was too late, leaving Yes not a band but a floating crap game of players under contract to a corporate logo.
The real reason: Jon’s coke problem and his obsession with money. Sadly, the latter vice still exists to this day.
All the other reasons are crap.
I live near that critic Brett Milano…great guy and all around huge music fan. He loves weird old garage rock, prog, punk, local bands, noise rock and pretty much everything in between. He’s a very knowledgeable guy.
diehard (classic) Yes fans don't care much for In the City of Angels, just like they often didn't care for Rabin's Can't Look Away. I consider both to be excellent. I won't use the word 'masterpiece as such, but they're still excellent for what they set out to do. Yeah, Anderson's is 'adult contemporary pop', and Rabin's is solid AOR ("but that format's dead" — his management at the time), but both show solid craftsmanship, which Anderson would bring to Howe's material in ABWH and Rabin would bring to Talk. Neither are prog, but both are good albums for what they set out to be.
The late '80s was always going to be a weird time, and Yes may have had a harder time than others. There was something of a zeitgeist that made it hard for established groups to find their legs. Whereas the early '80s was much more organic and had a DIY (even post-apocalyptic) feel and fashion sense, the latter half of the decade is almost a completely different animal.
Early '80s heavy metal became hair metal. What was once literally just guys with long hair suddenly required perms and hairspray and makeup. The music wasn't anywhere near as hard, mostly just pop with guitar solos. The look and the sound had changed.
David Bowie wore a suit ironically during the "Let's Dance" period, but a few years later we started seeing musicians copying the "Miami Vice" Versace jacket with a t-shirt underneath. Note how Eric Clapton adopted that style around the "Journeyman" album/tour. (And check out how styled his hair is!) He also went from relatively tight blues bands to having a small orchestra onstage with him. Not jamming as a band. No, they're all performing well-rehearsed solos.
You can hear the stark contrast between the collaborative musicians on Michael Jackson's "Thriller" to the much more sterile and precise sounds on "Bad," like every instrument except the distorted guitars came from a sound library. That change in texture is all over albums from that period (e.g., Genesis and even Peter Gabriel, though he was already experimenting with new sounds before "So"). I think sometimes the shift is attributed to lineup changes rather than a larger musical shift. Pink Floyd is the most obvious one. Not only did Roger Waters (their primary songwriter) leave, but like Jackson, their whole sound behind the guitar parts becomes considerably more electronic (and that includes the vocals in the case of oddities like "The New Machine"). Part of that was the development of the technology (e.g., synths were getting cheaper and came with a broader and more maleable range of sounds, and MIDI was at a consumer level instead of just for mad scientists who spent hundreds of hours in the studio), but you can see it in their look during that period: Gilmour did the sports jacket with a t-shirt, and while he had a mullet, it was nothing compared to the one Scott Page, their sax guy, had on tour! Van Halen also changed their sound between the Roth to Hagar transition. Eddie's guitar parts were usually cleaner, sometimes with no distortion at all, and almost everything has some chorus on it, like he switched from satin to gloss.
That's what that period is: A mullet. Business in front; party in the back. It looked ridiculous because it tried to straddle two ethos that were in diametric opposition to one another. You are either trying to make a statement or you're trying to blend in. You can't have it both ways. But this period is full of musicians trying to be both artists and businessmen. They wear the sports coat but put on a t-shirt instead of a tie. You have established groups adding more and more backup musicians so they're less a rock band than an orchestra. You still have lead guitar, but now it's backed by state-of-the-art keyboards and even electronic percussion, sometimes drum machines, and always with a click track. The production is slick and polished, but it lacks spontaneity. What used to been created organically now comes across as something off an assembly line.
Sidebar: It's notable that a couple albums from that period have been remixed to tone down the elements in the instrumentation that made them so dated: Pink Floyd's "Momentary Lapse of Reason" and David Bowie's "Never Let Me Down," both ironic titles on this point. The latter album was indeed a letdown artistically and financially, and Bowie turned to hiding in plain sight as the lead singer of "Tin Machine," which conspicuously was a 4-piece with no keyboardist.
No matter who was in the band when this stylistic shift occurred, Yes would have had to adapt either way, and line-up changes were the most natural way for them to update. In other words, change coming from the outside would have resulted in a slow death from stagnation, whereas change from within the group via new blood with a new set of skills and preferences resulted in them reaching a new and larger audience. Anderson and Squire made the shift, but I doubt Howe could have. However, a band has to look both ahead and to the past. As is highlighted in this documentary, the album means charting new territory and exploring the strengths of the new line-up. But the subsequent touring requires the band to dip into older material. Sometimes the members and/or the set list just don't mesh with the established works, which is what happened here.
Plz. Not his fault…no one cares anymore , even when it was relevant. Do you really think that the Rabin version of Yes will be the version most remembered? I love Yes and appreciate everything they did. I liked 90125 and Big Generator, but that music had only a fleeting fan base that followed the groundbreaking music they made in the 70s that fans still love.
Once at a Howard Stern interview Howard said to Jon… “ Those guys have been making money from your talent for much too long”… Jon; ever the peace maker just laughed in approval…
Great series of videos my friend, waiting for the ABWH and Union !
277 concerts? Did not know I attended maybe 20 of them…
Excellent video AS ALWAYS, Jose. I love how you weave your own thoughts and humor into your informative and well-researched presentations. And I miss the days of $16 (face value) concert tickets!
who cares? 80s yes was a poor watered down version of what was the greatest band of all time, each successive version just got worse
It's was an awful period for music, and for Yesmusic. I was heartily glad when the Rabin era ended.
Great series of videos, thank you very much for making these. As I wrote in another comment about your previous video, I attended the show in Montreal on December 8, 1987. All in all, I've seen Yes live 12 times between 1984 and 2004 (including one ABWH show). The Big Tour was by far the worst Yes show I've seen. I absolutely agree with you when you say that the chemistry within the band was off. I was sitting in the 7th row of the orchestra that evening, and I could tell that Jon was in his own universe, he looked bored and the silly makeup he was wearing made him look even more detached from the band. Overall, the energy level was low. The small crowd didn't help. The arena was half-full at best, the newpaper reported around 7,500 tickets sold and the Forum could easily seat 15,000 for concerts. Big Generator was not nearly as popular as 90125, so that could explain the low turnout, but in my opinion, a lot of people in Montreal were simply turned off by Yes' more commercial sound. Montreal fans have always loved progressive rock and I know several people who saw Yes in 1984 and didn't want to go back in 1987 because it was no longer "prog" to them. One friend of mine called them "the new Styx" (and that was NOT a compliment!)
The set didn't work for me: not enough songs from 90125 (only 3), five songs from Big Generator and as you say in the video, these didn't sound as good on stage, unlike the material from 90125 that sounded amazing live. The classic songs were kept for the end but that lineup could never play them well: Kaye was the wrong keyboard player for that material. Listen to his playing on Heart of the Sunrise… Ouch! And they cut Roundabout to 5 minutes, something I really hated.
All this to say, I don't look back on that show with fond memories. I remember walking out of the Forum saying to my cousin that this could have been the last Yes show I ever saw. I just could not see a way forward with that lineup and that sound. Their appearance at the Atlantic show in May only confirmed this to me. When I heard later that Jon had left the band, I was not surprised one bit.
Thanks again for the great video. Very interesting and informative! Cheers!! ????
I actually like Big Generator more than 90125. Shoot High Aim Low is absolutely one of the highlights of that album. And just because I say it all the time now, I'll take this version of Yes over the cheap ass bastardization that's out there touring now. It's not Yes without Jon and/or Chris (RIP), Steve really needs to ………ahem Leave it. Pun very much so intended.
nicely done you did your homework.
I'm not convinced by the plot points in this narrative. There's a lot of opinion-stating based on…more opinion. And who wants to hear from the clueless critics who never understood Yes to begin with? The video image quality is very poor. People that like Yes like music. They watch Yes videos because they want to hear about the music, not the gossip.
WoW talk about behind-the scenes Intrigue ! Never knew about All That but Hey that’s R&R, right ? U did a great job in uncovering it & Presenting it in a Highly Entertaining manner Jose. Thanx Man !
Thank you for responding JCM! It is an honor every time. You are like a rock star to me and to receive a message from a famous, talented and brilliant person like you is incredible. Yes, I agree with your comments. Yes had a sort of hypnotic magic so to speak that just drew you in. Like Led Zeppelin, there are very few songs I don't actually like. That is, until recently….. It Is heartbreaking that several members are still with us, yet they can't or won't collaborate. Such a tragedy! I loved ARW but it was too short lived. I think their 50-year anniversary concert video from the Apollo is one of the greatest live shows by any band. I also hope you do a follow-up on the Talk album and tour in 1994. There is an excellent YouTube video Yes-Definitive Maryland Heights (Bootleg – Live – 1994) [Full Album] from the Talk Tour, that I listen to over and over again. As rough as the Big Generator Tour was, this was amazing. I also personally feel that the best period musically for Yes was from 2000-2004. They had the classic lineup together including Rick Wakeman. They might not have produced any new music, but I feel they were at their peak musicianship wise. The concert video Live at Montreux is considered by the band as their greatest live show ever recorded. I promise to contribute soon to your fund to help in your research. Have to get permission from the wife! Thank you again!
I absolutely love the Rabin lineup of Yes and I will never apologize.
I could be wrong, but that picture of “Stewart Levine” looked an awful lot like Joe Sample of the Crusaders……………….
Love the inclusion of Mychael Danna music at 42:00. A perfect underscore for that point in the story, and the closing credits.
Ive been having a fun time revisiting big generator. The back half gets a little weak, and when theres only 8 songs that really hurts a record.
Another home run. I personally stopped listening to prog for a decade because of the 80’s Pop Prog-era. Bad years for mature artists. But LOVE to watch these docs.