Now, those of you who know me at all know how much of a Yes freak I am. So if your eyes are now glazing over and you're looking for something else to do, I'll understand.
ANYWAY! I took a bunch of songs off the Yes albums that didn't sell so well, or weren't so highly regarded, but had what I consider to be some great tunes on them. Big Generator, Close Your Eyes, ABWH, Tormato, the like. Hearing these generally hidden classics reminded me of seeing Jon Anderson solo at the Flying Monkey a couple of years ago. GREAT SHOW!!
The coolest thing was that I had no idea what to expect. Was he going to have a band behind him, or what? Was he going to play a bunch of odd instruments, or have taped backing tracks? After all, of all the musicians who have gone in and out of the revolving door that is Yes over the years, he is the ONE that would NOT be considered a virtuoso musician.
So he came out with an acoustic guitar and held a symposium on how to write some of the most magnificent music of the twentieth century. He also played a little keyboard and something I've heard called a "music stick," basically a dulcimer with a small, triangular body held like a guitar. It served to remind that he co-wrote most of their music over the years.
We got to hear bare-bones versions of tunes like "Roundabout," "Starship Trooper," and "Owner of a Lonely Heart." It made me come home and dig out my old Yes sheet music books and take another look at some of these songs. "Yours is No Disgrace" has always been one of my favorite songs. It was a little startling to realize that it's only two verses. The live version on Yessongs lasts 15 minutes.
My problem is that I'm not actually able to play most of their music. I just don't have the chops. I've got sheet music for everything they did up until Drama in 1980. Every now and again I'll break out the book and stumble through a couple of things. I think once I figured out the opening lick to "Siberian Khatru." I've since forgotten it again.
What we got to hear that night was the versions of the songs as Jon Anderson himself presented them to the rest of the band. I know a lot of the "Classic" Yes material is credited to him and Steve Howe. I would guess that Howe took the basic musical idea and bounced it back and forth with Jon, or just sat down and messed around with it himself, until it was closer to the form we find on the recordings.
An instructive example is their reworking of Paul Simon's "America." You can see how the song changed from the Simon and Garfunkel version to Yes' version. Sometimes songwriting is a process as original ideas get hammered into shape.
I know in my experience that a lot of songs come as sort of organically complete things, written as they wind up with a beginning, a middle, and an end. After that, it's a matter of going back and cleaning up clunky lines, chord progressions that don't work, or whatever.
The process as described by a lot of Prog acts like Yes, Rush, Kansas, etc. is more like what I learned in classes at college. Classical composers like Mozart, Beethoven, Hayden, etc. would take a melody and wring more out of it. Rush starts out with a Neil Peart lyric, which he hands over to Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee. Lee has to sing it, so he goes back with ideas and suggestions on changes. He and Lifeson work off the rhythm of the lines and emotion of the imagery to build the music.
What it tells me as a songwriter is to not give up on a song just because it doesn't fall into place quickly. I've got notebooks full of verses that never went anywhere, but that I like and keep coming back to. Guess I'm going to go back to them again.
