You wonder where they go sometimes, and then you stumble on a recording on an obscure label (of course, all labels seem obscure these days) and you think, “Damn!”
I treated myself to a new album this week. Peter Banks, Reduction.
Who?
Peter Banks. Let me do a little raving about Peter Banks.
Way back when my hormones and my ears synched in perfect openness and my future musical tastes became established, I discovered a small band (at the time) that I have since come to think of as seminal. Yes.
No, really, the band Yes. I’ve written about my affection for Yes elsewhere. For the purpose of this article, let me repeat only a couple of details. Yes becamse emblematic for me of everything that might be possible in the rock idiom (even though later I came to believe that they really weren’t a rock band, but only used the aesthetics of rock to advance a broader kind of music). The first tune I heard, late one night on the radio, was a short little thing called Sweet Dreams, which sort of nailed my brain to a plank and infused me with a euraka-like recogntion.
The guitar player on that cut was Peter Banks.
I have come to realize that some musicians are just rough fits for certain bands. There were two players in the early Yes that went on to do amazing stuff—Peter Banks and Tony Kaye. Kaye was the original keyboardist for Yes. (He reappeared later, with the Trevor Rabin line-up on 90210.)
Now, the first two Yes albums featured both these musicians. Banks left, replaced by Steve Howe. Kaye recorded the third Yes album—called The Yes Album—and then left to be replaced by Rick Wakeman. History proceeded.
You wonder about people like Banks and Kaye. Both left a band that later broke into the mega bigtime. What happened to them?
Well, the two of them formed a unit that many people heard as a kind of Yes rip-off, a band called Flash. Flash had a couple of hits, they were popular on the college radio circuit, and did a lot of touring. There was a Yessish flavor to their music, but really it was more that Banks, the leader, took the path that Yes veered from when he left.
I have Peter Banks’ first solo album, which had such players on it as Phil Collins, Jan Akkerman, John Wetton, and others. All instrumental, which is exactly my kind of thing.
Kaye left Flash, founded a band called Badger, which did a few albums, then a band called Detective, and then became a session player. I lost track of him until he reemerged with the reconstituted Yes in 1983.
Banks sank even further out of sight for me.
Then I stumbled on an independent cd called Instinct in 2001 or ’02. Instrumental again. I noticed a few other discs, and all I could think was “Where did these come from?”
So I broke down and bought another one, this one, Reduction. I’m listening to it now.
This will be one of my regular rotations for writing.
Here’s the thing. Banks didn’t play this well when he was with Yes. I’m sorry, but he didn’t. He didn’t find his own voice, his skill level, until he left. Then it was like, where did this guy come from? The playing he exhibited with Flash was rawer, gutsier than what he did with Yes. The playing on his solo albums is intrictae, sophisticated, nuanced. Nothing like what he did with Yes. Perhaps nothing like he could do with Yes.
I have the same reaction to Tony Kaye when I hear his other work. He was a basic keyboardist in Yes, competent but nothing memorable. With Flash, with Detective, with Badger, the guy would really play. When he rejoined Yes, it was like all that surprising skill disappeared.
Peters Banks seems to be doing all his albums in his own studio, completely solo, these days. So here and there you find some excess, some bars that perhaps ought to have been cut, a track that lasts maybe a minute too long, things like that. But nothing that, for me, diminishes from the work. This is a musician who has finally found his groove, so to speak.
Usually with bands you have the opposite reaction—there are musicians who simply never sound as good in any other context, that once removed from The Band they lose something. In this case, it may be that Yes and what it tried to accomplish was so specific that only the absolute perfect musicians for that aesthetic would work, and everyone else could only ever be just placeholders until the right players could be found.
Whatever. There are a couple other Banks albums out there. Not much. But if they’re as good as what I’ve heard so far (I’m listening to Reduction as I write this) then I won’t complain. Too much.