Archive for the ‘Yes’ Category

Owner of a Lonely REMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIX

Sunday, November 17th, 2019

Yes
Owner Of A Lonely Heart (Wonderous Mix)
Owner Of A Lonely Heart (2 Close To The Edge Mix)
Owner Of A Lonely Heart (Not Fragile Mix)
Ever buy something that just leaves you confused about how the world works?

These remixes are from a CD single that I found  last week. It has left me with so many questions that will forever remain unanswered that I don’t even know where to begin with writing about it.

Why does this exist?
Who thought the world wanted remixes of “Owner of a Lonely Heart?”
Who thought that the world wanted remixes of “Owner of a Lonely Heart” in 1991?
Was this the part of a larger remix project that fell through?
What Yes fans in 1991 would be interested in dance remixes of Yes?
Who are those people and what drugs were they taking?
Did any club DJ in the world actually play these remixes for a dance audience?
Was said club DJ immediately killed for such a transgression?
Why the hell didn’t they recruit The Orb for this?
Why the hell did they recruit 808 State for this (yes really)?
Why the hell did 808 State say yes (to Yes)?

Those last two questions are the most pressing for me. Two of the three remixes on this single were done by 808 State. Not only that, at the time 808 State were at the absolute peak of their popularity and critical acclaim, coming right off the release of the ex:el album the same year. I assume that Trevor Horn, who produced this single, was responsible for getting  808 State and was able to do so because both he and 808 State were on ZTT Records at the time.

It’s funny how just one person can serve to be a connection between two acts that are so widely disparate in every way possibly imaginable. Trevor Horn is the Kevin Bacon of music, and not just in terms of artists he’s worked with, but in genres he’s crossed as well. You could probably connect a zydeco artist to a breakbeat DJ within six degrees by using Trevor Horn as a connecting point.

But of course, the most important question; are these remixes any good?

And to that I can firmly say; I dunno? Kinda? I guess?

They’re okay. The Wonderous Mix is very ambient and chill. It actually sounds like what I think a remix of Yes by The Orb would sound like. Most of it is original production and instrumentation that uses Anderon’s vocals and the guitar solo from the original tune as an accompaniment. It’s chill. I dig it.

Things radically switch gears for the 2 Close To The Edge Mix, which sounds less like a remix to “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and more like an original 808 State song that has a few samples of “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” If I heard this without knowing it where it was from, I would have never guessed the source material. It’s such a drastic deviation. It’s not terrible. If you dig this era of acid house then you’ll probably dig it. It’s just weird.

The Not Fragile Mix, on the other hand, doesn’t fuck around in letting you know that it’s a remix of “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” It doesn’t have the same structure or flow as the original, but elements from it are all over the thing. When the song’s signature guitar riff isn’t playing, you’re getting snippets of Jon Anderson’s vocals or quick explosions of the song’s notable synthesized sound effects.

Strangely (sadly), this is not the only Yes remix release. In 2002, Yes released the entirely unrelated Yes Remixes album. An even more baffling affair, that album tried to turn classic Yes prog anthems like “Starship Trooper” and “Heart Of The Sunrise” into standard techno bangers. I mean, say what you will about the remixes I’m sharing tonight, they’re not the greatest idea in the world, but at least the source material lends itself to remixes in theory. “Owner of a Lonely Heart” is a synthpop track. Synthpop tracks are remixed all the time into club-ready dance tunes.

Hella complex prog rock is not.

That album is a complete disaster in all the ways you might imagine (and then some). However, I at least I understand how that came into being. The remixes on that album were by The Verge aka Virgil Howe aka the son of Yes guitarist Steve Howe. Good old fashion nepotism giving the world something it never asked for yet again.

I assume that Yes Remixes is long out of print but don’t hold your breath for me to share that here. I like you all way too much to subject you to that.

Posted in 808 State, Yes | No Comments »

Live Tracks, brought to you by Grizzly Beer

Monday, November 4th, 2019

Live Tracks #2
In the above zip, you get live performances of:
Duran Duran – Rio
Fleetwood Mac  – Hypnotized
Romantics – Talking In Your Sleep
The Who – Behind Blue Eyes
Yes – I’ve Seen All Good People
Steve Miller Band – Fly Like An Eagle

Plus beer commercials! Let me explain.

Syndicated radio shows pressed to vinyl for national distribution are something that I sadly do not know much about. They aren’t the kind of records that one tends to easily find in used record stores (especially in Japan). That’s because they were never intended for any kind of commercial release, especially on the second-hand market. When one of these makes it to a used record store or online, I always wonder how it got out into the wild. Maybe a radio station unloaded its vinyl library without bothering to sort out the promos? Or perhaps a DJ snagged a personal copy for their own private collection, and they ended up selling it years later? Or maybe someone just stole it and sold it for cash. Who knows? And who knows how this one made its way to a tiny store outside of Ikebukuro in Japan?

Live Tracks was a syndicated radio program produced by DIR Broadcasting, perhaps most famous for their King Biscuit Flower Hour show. While King Biscuit featured complete (or near-complete) live concerts, Live Tracks was more of a sampler, a bite-sized one-song radio program with a single cut from a live concert. I suspect that a lot of the performances on Live Tracks were just repackaged performances taken from DIR’s substantial back catalog of King Biscuit shows. The radio host on these episodes doesn’t really go exactly when and where the recordings were taken from. Sometimes he gives rough dates (the Duran Duran show was recorded in Madison Square Garden in 1984), but other times he just says something like “here’s an old one…” so pinning down exact information on the songs is tricky. Pinning down much of anything on this show was hard, this episode wasn’t even on Discogs until I added it.

The live tracks of Live Tracks are quite good, recorded professionally and mixed well. Some sound a bit raw, but they capture the energy of a concert well. Just as interesting to me, however, is the wrapping that each episode comes in. The Live Tracks records were complete radio shows on disc. The DJ didn’t have to do anything other than drop the needle and let the show play. The band introductions are handled by DIR’s own emcee, and the LP even has its own commercials included.

For the episodes included on this LP, the sponsor is Grizzly Beer, a long-gone Canadian beer brand who apparently had a penchant for horribly inappropriate commercials. One features comments about college kids drinking beer, another drops in some absolutely cringe-inducing Asian stereotypes, and one even makes jokes about minors getting drunk on Grizzly. Holy shit that wouldn’t fly today.

Since an episode of Live Tracks is really just one song, radio stations got a lot of bang for their buck with each LP. This one features six episodes, each with an intro by the emcee followed by a Grizzly Beer commercial, another bit by the emcee, a complete song performance, and an outro by the host.

Given the format of the show, I had a hard time figuring out how to share it here tonight. I thought about just feature the live cuts, but then you’d lose a lot of the flavor of the beer commercials (which are seriously great). Also, the live cuts often fade in and out with the host, so it would be jarring to not to include them. So, I just went ahead and made the entire thing one zip file, cutting up each episode into separate tracks. I figured y’all would be just as interested in the historical wrappings of the episodes as I was. For the most part, the recordings sound good. There are few crackles here and there, a tiny bit of distortion at the very end of the Steve Miller track, but as a whole, these are well-recorded performances on a damn clean slab of wax.

Enjoy, and if you find a bottle of Grizzly Beer, for God’s sake don’t drink it, that thing is probably 30 years old.

 

Posted in Complete Albums, Duran Duran, Fleetwood Mac, Steve Miller Band, The Romantics, The Who, Yes | 6 Comments »

KRAUTROCK-POWERED MOTORCYCLES

Thursday, October 17th, 2013

The Tigers won. America won’t default. I’m functioning on very little sleep. This post is silly. I apologize.

Yes
Rhythm Of Love (Dance To The Rhythm Mix)
Rhythm Of Love (Move To The Rhythm Mix)
Rhythm Of Love (The Rhythm Of Dub)
City Of Love (Live Edit)
Fuck yeah, Yes remixes! Is synthpop Yes the best Yes? Probably not. But it is the “best” Yes.

I have a strange fascination with Yes that I still can’t really explain. I don’t know why. I only own a handful of Yes records, and I don’t even think I’ve listened to all of them. I actually know very little about the band, a fact that I’ve been wanting to remedy in recent months. Actually, I’ve toyed with the idea of buying all of Yes’ records and reviewing them all, in chronological order, simply as a writing exercise and as a personal quest to find out for myself what the hell they’re all about. I might still do it someday. Prog rock is hella big in Japan after all. This despite the fact that drugs of any kind are nearly impossible to find there. The wonders never cease.

Anyways, these remixes really aren’t prog rock. As I said before, this is synthpop Yes. Like all synthpop Yes, this song was co-written and produced by Trevor Horn, so sometimes I like to close my eyes and imagine Frankie Goes To Hollywood covering it.

Can you imagine a Frankie Goes To Hollywood/Yes collaboration!?! Oh man, why didn’t that happen? That’s the greatest tragedy of the 1980s.

Tangerine Dream
Streethawk (Radio Remix)
There was a TV show in 1985 called Street Hawk. It was about an ex-cop who fought crime with the help of a super-powered motorcycle. The theme song was by Tangerine Dream.

So…yeah. So…okay…so…I don’t even know where to begin with that entire statement. I need to let that sink in. Y’know what? Let me watch the opening credits to the Street Hawk TV show, maybe that will help me figure out how to put my thoughts to words.

HOLY SHIT HOW COME MORE PEOPLE DIDN’T WATCH THAT SHIT IT’S LIKE KNIGHT RIDER BUT WITH A MOTORCYCLE AND A SOUNDTRACK BY TANGERINE DREAM OH MY GOD.

Ahem.

Yeah, okay. I can’t comment on that. It speaks for itself. I got noting – maybe if I watch that opening again.

AND THE DUDE’S NAME IS JESSE MACH!? WHY? WAS “JOHNNY FAST” TAKEN?!

Wow. Okay, seriously, all of you need to read the Street Hawk wiki, because someone put a lot of effort into making sure everyone knows that Street Hawk is currently available on DVD (ORDERING NOW) and that at one point there were Street Hawk toys and even freakin’ Street Hawk novelizations.  And then check this incredible Street Hawk fansite. Because if you don’t, who will? Aside from the apparently millions of dedicated Street Hawk fans out there.

Wait a second, this site even has Street Hawk fan-fiction.

I have to go. I have reading to do.

Fuck your Breaking Bad nonsense, Street Hawk for life.

 

Posted in B-sides, live, remixes, Tangerine Dream, Yes | 3 Comments »

Welcome To The Trevor Horn

Monday, August 6th, 2012

I have huge news!

I can’t tell you it. But it’s really huge. And awesome.

When can I tell you the huge news?

Soon. But until then, hey some cool 80s music!

Yes
Leave It (Hello, Goodbye Mix)
One day I’m going to cave and actually listen to 90125, the Yes album that gave the world “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” and this equally good gem of 80s synth nonsense. It seems like the kind of stupid brilliance that I would fall in love with. But I’ve always wondered if actual hardcore Yes fans liked the album when it first came out. By all accounts it seems to be a very serviceable, above average synthpop record, but Yes was a prog rock band! Shit, there isn’t one song on 90125 that’s over 10 minutes long, fans of Tales from Topographic Oceans (the 2LP Yes album with FOUR 20 minute songs) must have been pissed at the time! However, their albums leading up to 90125 were allegedly so bad that maybe they took whatever they could get at that point that wasn’t outright horrible. I certainly know how that can be, as a Def Leppard fan I would settle for a post-punk revival rip-off record by them if it was halfway decent.

Or maybe all of their die-hard old fans were replaced with Frankie Goes To Hollywood fans, as Trevor Horn produced both 90125 and the seminal work of 80s excess, Frankie’s Welcome To The Plesuredome.

Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Happy Hi (Live)
Get It On (Live) 
Born To Run (Live) 
Warriors (Instrumental)
I have to give it to whoever is in charge of the Frankie Goes To Hollywood back catalog, they seem to be doing a pretty good job of re-issuing it. First there was the Twelve Inches two-disc compilation and now there’s the new Sex Mix 2 disc set that features even more rare and hard to find Frankie goodies (although I guess there’s a pretty severe mastering error on that one).

I give it up to them for going for the deep cuts and re-issuing long out-of-print and rare tracks, but I really think it’s time for them to go the distance and just put it all out. If there was any band that is deserving a full-on mega huge box set collecting everything it would be Frankie Goes To Hollywood. I want every remix, every edit, every alternate version, every live cut. Everything. Yes. It would be huge. Yes. It would be expensive. But I would buy the shit out of that thing and I be quite a few people who read this blog would too.

Until then, enjoy these live cuts and an instrumental track that have yet to see the light of day on any of the numerous Frankie re-issues that have been put out so far.

Posted in Frankie Goes To Hollywood, remixes, Yes | 4 Comments »