ROB SHANAHAN
“We’re quite happy where we are, but we can’t please everybody all the time,” guitarist Steve Howe (left) says of the current version of Yes.
When the guitarist Steve Howe joined Yes, a promising young English band at the forefront of a growing progressive-rock movement, in 1970, he could hardly have known that “Perpetual Change,” the last song on 1971’s “The Yes Album,” would come to symbolize the group’s ever-changing fortunes over a career that has now spanned more than 45 years.
Howe, the first outsider enlisted into Yes, contributed mightily to that breakthrough album, and to the two career-defining records that followed: “Fragile” (1971) and “Close to the Edge” (1972). Soon after the latter disc of intricate, impressionistic epics came out, drummer Alan White joined the band, completing a seminal lineup that included Howe, bassist Chris Squire, singer Jon Anderson, and another then-recent arrival, the flamboyant keyboardist Rick Wakeman.
Those heady early years were followed by patches of turbulence, conflicting visions, and even competing factions of the band. Wakeman quit and rejoined Yes multiple times. More controversially, Anderson — for many fans, the spirit of Yes embodied — departed in 1980; returned in 1982 for the album “90125” and its chart-topping single, “Owner of a Lonely Heart”; then left again in 1988 for a brief run with Howe and other ex-Yes members as Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe.
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