Two years, three countries, a producer who walked out halfway, and two men who wanted entirely different bands. Trevor Rabin wanted to go further than 90125; Jon Anderson wanted Yes to sound like Yes again. Rabin has called it the most difficult album he ever made. Anderson left as soon as the tour finished and went off to make a record with Bruford, Wakeman and Howe. And yet what came out of all that is a better album than its reputation, with the finest vocal arrangements this band ever wrote.

The short version

Big Generator is Yes’s twelfth studio album, released in September 1987 on Atco — their last studio record for Atlantic. The line-up is unchanged from 90125: Jon Anderson on vocals, Trevor Rabin on guitars, keyboards and vocals, Tony Kaye on keyboards, Chris Squire on bass, Alan White on drums. Production is credited to Yes, Rabin, Paul De Villiers and Trevor Horn, with De Villiers engineering and Rabin taking over the desk and the mixing in the later stages. Eight tracks. Love Will Find a Way topped the Mainstream Rock chart and reached 30 on the Hot 100; Rhythm of Love got to 40 and was the band’s last American Top 40 hit.

Two men, two bands

The 90125 tour ended in February 1985 and the sessions dragged on for more than two years afterwards, which is where most of the mythology comes from — you will see four years quoted, and it is not right. What is right is that the record was built in three countries. It began in Italy at Lark Recording Studios in Carimate, near Como, where Shoot High, Aim Low was among the first things taped; the sleeve credits misspell the town as Caramati. Then London for Rhythm of Love, then Los Angeles for the rest. Horn started as producer and left partway through on creative differences, keeping his credit; Rabin picked up the desk. Underneath it all sat the argument that could not be resolved: one guitarist pushing forward into pop, one singer pulling back toward the seventies. Nobody won. Anderson walked at the end of the 1988 tour and formed Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe, which settled the question by other means.

The sound

Bigger, glossier and stranger than 90125, and much less certain of itself. The drums are enormous and gated, the production is state of the late eighties, and Rabin’s guitar is everywhere — inventive, muscular and occasionally mechanical. What actually lifts it is the singing. Anderson and Rabin trade and stack lead vocals across the whole record, and the group harmonies here are extraordinary: Beach Boys-grade arrangements, gospel touches, doo-wop shapes, executed flawlessly. Kaye also has more room than he had on 90125, Horn having departed. The songs are longer than the last album and reach in more directions, from radio pop to seven-minute pieces with real structure. It is an album pulled hard in two directions by two people who could both write, and the tension is audible on every track.

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The songs

Rhythm of Love opens on an orchestral introduction and then some of the best harmonies committed to tape outside the Beach Boys — a complex vocal ensemble that turns an otherwise ordinary late-eighties pop song into something genuinely odd and lovely. The title track follows: standard rock with low-key soundscapes in the verses, orchestra-hit stabs in the choruses, and a short, deliberately out-of-tune guitar lead. Shoot High, Aim Low is the Italian one and the album’s best argument — seven minutes, slow, heavy, Alan White at his finest, and lyrics with actual teeth. Almost Like Love picks up the pace with a Motown swing. Love Will Find a Way is Rabin’s alone and was the hit. Final Eyes is the quiet one and has its devoted partisans. I’m Running runs seven and a half minutes and ends in group vocals that will stop you where you stand. And Holy Lamb closes, written by Anderson for the Harmonic Convergence gathering of 1987, and it is the one place on the album where he sounds entirely himself.

Reception and legacy

A million-selling album that felt like a failure because 90125 had sold three, and the last Yes record ever to put singles on the chart. The knock against it has always been the same: this is not Yes, it is Trevor Rabin, and the rhythm section gets buried under eighties production. Both charges have some truth. The defence is that the songs are good, the playing is excellent, the vocal writing is the best of the band’s career, and that comparing the Rabin years to the Howe years is comparing different decades and different people. What is not in dispute is the cost. Rabin, in the Yesyears film, called it the most difficult album I have made. Anderson had already decided where he was going. Yes would not make another studio record for four years, and when they did it took eight of them.

The verdict

For people who already know this band, and unfairly buried. Start with Shoot High, Aim Low, which is the track that justifies the whole enterprise and would not have embarrassed any line-up of Yes. Then I’m Running for the ending. Then Rhythm of Love, and listen to what the voices are doing rather than the drums. Then Holy Lamb. 90125 is the one everybody knows and the better-known songs are there. But this is the more interesting record of the two, precisely because it does not work cleanly — you can hear a band arguing with itself in real time, and losing, and still playing beautifully.

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