Published on Jan 16, 2004
What do you get when you cross a Buggle with a Yes? I’m not sure
either… but it has pieces of Yes and pieces of Buggle sticking
out of it, and a half-life of about six months.
For a band that changes members more often than most of us
change hairstyles, this is by far the most radical venture of all.
Yes, minus lead singer Jon Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman,
join up with Buggles vocalist (and producer extraordinaire) Trevor
Horn and keyboardist Geoff Downes to form… can you stand the
suspense?? The Yuggles? No, they kept the Yes name and for the most
part the Yes approach to musicality is fairly intact, but this is
not your father’s Yes, my son.
Which is not to denigrate the Buggles’ contribution to the rock
music genre… far from it. As an example, “Video Killed the Radio
Star,” while not as flamboyant as your basic Yes song, is far more
precisely perceptive of the future course of rock music than
Anderson et al ever attempted to be. The highly focused Buggles
element of this hybrid group virtually eliminated the Yes tendency
to wander a little too close to the edge, and helped start the
Yes-men down what would eventually become the ‘YesWest’ style of
music for long-time Yes bassist Chris Squire, and the fast trip to
Asia that guitarist Steve Howe and Downes would take shortly after
this version of Yes folded.
This is the only Yes album without Jon Anderson’s guiding hand
and it shows in many ways: the good, the bad and the ugly.
The Good: With Howe, Squire and drummer Alan White in
attendance there is enough ‘Yesness’ about
Drama to make it an unquestioned member of the Yes catalog.
Songs such as “Machine Messiah” and “Tempus Fugit” have the diverse
richness of a Yes song without Anderson’s tendency towards being a
bit overcooked. Horn and Downes add an almost machine-like
precision to the music and give it an ’80s production quality that
is distinctly Horn.
“Machine Messiah” tears into itself with Howe’s characteristic
guitar cutting through the haze like a phaser set on kill and the
high-strung vocals are all well within Horn’s range, which is
always a good thing for a singer (more on this later). “Machine
Messiah” is a tale of human kind’s enslavement to machine rule. The
lyrics tell of a chance to “unlearn our lessons,” to escape the
domination of machines in our society. This is surely a Yes song by
all accounts and without Anderson going on and on about how this is
all to do with the sun and various moments in time it clocks in at
just over 10 minutes!
“Tempus Fugit.” The unmistakable Squire bass pushes this along
at quite a clip. But although Squire makes a large contribution to
the quality of this tune, it is the staccato vocal delivery and
crisp harmonization which puts this song at the top of the
Drama ‘must hear’ list for me. Trevor Rabin fans who insist
that the harmonic wall of sound that partially characterizes later
’80s Yes music emanated in some kind of virgin birth directly from
Rabin’s rear end (where apparently the sun also rises) might also
give a listen.
The Bad: “Into the Lens.” Yes Trevor, you are a camera. Now
shut up.
The Ugly: “White Car.” Proof that short is not necessarily
better… and the intro sounds like the start of the theme to
some Disney animation that I just can’t place.
That the distinctive Yes sound depends heavily on Squire’s
backing vocals becomes even more evident on this album. Squire’s
voice mixes extremely well with Horn’s tenor and Horn sounds enough
like Anderson that it is almost like Anderson is still there.
Strangely, it is not therefore the absence of Anderson that makes
Drama so different, but the absence of Wakeman and the addition of
Downes. For without Wakeman’s classical flourish, the texture of
the music has a much cleaner feel. Not necessarily “better,” but
that is a subjective observation at best…. so, cleaner it is, and
that alone may be the most noticeable difference between
Drama and its ’70s ancestors.
All in all a great little album. So why only one? What ever
happened to this version of Yes? Well, while the album is called
Drama… the tour should have been called Trauma. Rumor has
it that Horn let Chris Squire convince him to try to sing like Jon
Anderson on tour. Whether or not you like Anderson’s style of
voice, it is probably a safe bet that most males over 13 should not
try to reach those crystalline highs for any prolonged period of
time. Pity Trevor Horn; he tried. By the end of the tour his vocal
chords were apparently abused beyond salvation. I don’t think he
ever toured again.
Many Yes fans were unimpressed and disgracefully unforgiving of
Horn’s attempts at live Yes music and the resulting angst left
Drama lost and alone wilting in the Yes garden, spelling the
end for this short-lived hybrid group.
Drama as a time capsule is as much a part of the early ’80s
rock sound as
The Turn Of A Friendly Card by the Alan Parsons Project. To
ignore it and dismiss it out of hand as “that album without
Anderson” is tantamount to ignoring the importance of
Fragile as a part of the ’70s Yes era. However, with six
tracks and only 37 minutes of music, this is only a taste of what
might have been a great album.
A crisp and clean precursor to commercial Yes(West) and Asia,
it’s a B- only because there isn’t enough of it.