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facts about prog rock band Yes that live rent-free in my head!
Number One
Their 1971 song "Roundabout" was featured heavily in anime series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and is currently well-known as a meme song.
(this is not so "fun" of a fact because everyone in a certain sphere of the internet already knows it.)
Number Two
You know the iconic new wave hit "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles? Did you know that Trevor Horn, lead singer of the Buggles, was briefly in Yes?
After the success of that song, the Buggles happened to secure management from the same guy who was managing Yes. Then, in urgent need of a singer and keyboardist after the departure of Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman right before a tour, their manager decided to merge Yes with the Buggles! And then proceded to tell no one about it, so all the fans were extremely confused when Yes started touring and two of the band members were completely different guys.
So Trevor Horn briefly became the lead singer. He did vocals for their 1980 album Drama* and also produced three of Yes's albums in the 80s, including 1983's 90125 (think "Owner of a Lonely Heart"!).
*not a great album in my opinion, but the opening track, "Machine Messiah", is really good.
Check out the Todd in the Shadows video on "Video Killed the Radio Star" for more.
Number Three
Speaking of Trevors who worked on 90125, the guitarist for that album (and for that whole era of Yes) was a guy called Trevor Rabin. I recently found his name in a very unexpected place...
No wonder the CRJ song has such a banging guitar solo...!
Number Four
Yes's 1973 album Tales from Topographic Oceans not only has my favorite title, but also my favorite lore. The entire album is based on frontman Jon Anderson's sudden fascination with a number of Hindu texts that he read about in the footnote of a book. He led the band through creating an epic double album in which each of the four songs - each twenty minutes long! - was based on a different type of Hindu scripture.
Crucially, Anderson later admitted that he did not really understand these scriptures at all. It shows!
Number Five
The ambitious project of making every song on Tales from Topographic Oceans twenty minutes long resulted in a lot of musical padding. All this padding left keyboardist Rick Wakeman extremely bored on stage during the tour, especially since they were playing the album in its entirety every night. One night, Wakeman was so frustrated that he got his keyboard technician to bring him a curry, which he then ate live on stage.
This is my favorite Yes Fact.
Number 5.5
While I was fact-checking those last few, I came across yet another great story from Tales from Topographic Oceans. Anderson wanted to record the album in the country (or in the forest at night, apparently), but that didn't end up working out. So, he did the next best thing: paint their recording studio like a farmyard. They even had a model cow with an electronic udder! Of course, the whole thing was a disaster: all their plants died, the cow got graffiti'd, bits of the studio fell apart, etc.
Wakeman didn't really have a good time during the recording process, either. He was even bored enough to wander into the adjacent studio to play synth for Black Sabbath, who was recording at the same time. (They paid him in beer.)
Number 5.75
I just found out that Wakeman calls TFTO "Tales from Toby's Graphic Go-Cart."
Anyway, this interview with him is great.
Number Six
Yes's longtime bassist, Chris Squire, was nicknamed "Fish," both because he was a Pisces and also because he liked to take very long showers. The nickname came about after Squire's showering habits accidentally flooded a Norwegian hotel room.
One of the songs on Fragile is named "The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)" after him.
More to come... maybe...
* Most of the info on this page is taken from the Wikipedia pages for Yes and those of the songs/albums I mentioned, as well as the Todd in the Shadows video & Wakeman interview linked above.