I don't know where you got the comment from Eamo maybe it was from that long haired yeti Wakeman : ) or maybe he was joking in the heat of the moment because Jon is a very spiritual humanoid if not an all out religious guy. I know because I have met him and spoke with him. Honestly.
Have a listen to this
Jon Anderson has kindly decided to explain the meaning of life. "Right, this table," says the lead singer of Yes, gesturing towards the coffee table, "is the world as we know it. There are mountains, valleys, animals and interdimensional energies that we don't know about." He pauses. "Or maybe we do. Actually, I know a lot of people that do. Interdimensional energies," he nods sagely, "are a very powerful thing."
But back to the table. "The human experience is as big as that," he says, picking up an ashtray, "compared to everything else that's going on. The horrible stuff, the terrible daily shit that you read about, is as big as that. The people that live in Seville or Detroit - although it's tough in Detroit sometimes - or Calcutta - kinda funky! - South America, South Africa, all these people are getting on with life." He grabs a box of matches and rattles it. "This is the media, CNN, everything that's happening in Israel and Arabia. It's a very small part of life, but because we're connected to the media we think that's what life's all about, and it ain't."
He's completely lost me, so he tries a different tack. "If you start wondering about birdcalls and, erm, why birds are alive and what they seem to do around us, and trees and nature and so forth, which me and my wife Jane do... We're just such bird-lovers. We were there in the park today, just feeding the ducks. We were loving the baby ducks. And what's wrong with that?"
What indeed? Nevertheless, we seem to have strayed from the whole meaning of life issue. "Well, it was a beautiful moment. And you think life is a beautiful thing and you've got to live accordingly. You've got to magnify all your better feelings and better urges and better conscious ideas and that's your life's evolvement. There's only one reason we live. It's very simple. To find the creator. That's just my understanding," he adds quickly. "I'm still working on it."
I'm growing to like Jon Anderson - it's hard not to warm to someone who is willing to let you in on the meaning of life within minutes of meeting you - but he is a rock star from an entirely alien era. His conversation is pitched somewhere between David Icke and Smashey and Nicey. He is wont to say things like "In the early 90s, a lovely lil' lady from Hawaii came by who was able to ignite my third eye" with a deadly earnestness. He also claims to have been visited by angels in a hotel room in Las Vegas. They told him to remember William Blake. This was, understandably, "a very sobering experience". His personal philosophy ("I say to my beautiful wife Jane, I wouldn't have met you if I hadn't gone through my whole life to get to you when we met") can be as inscrutable as his lyrics, which in Yes's early-1970s heyday spawned a cottage industry in explicatory pamphlets.
If Anderson seems a little peculiar, it's nothing compared with the music of Yes. At a time when it is frequently claimed that progressive rock is back, in the shape of Radiohead, Elbow and the Mars Volta, it's certainly instructive to listen to the genuine article. A quick spin of early-1970s albums such as Close to the Edge or Fragile reveals that rumours of prog's resurrection are premature. No current band bears even the remotest resemblance to Yes. Their songs appear to last for months, packed with tricksy, neurotic riffs, lurching shifts in tempo and time signature and twiddly keyboard solos that stretch into the middle of next week.
That's before you get to the words, which beggar belief. They somehow contrive to be completely incomprehensible and deeply portentous. "As the silence of seasons on we relive abridge sails afloat," pipes Anderson on The Remembering: High the Memory, from 1974's Tales From Topographic Oceans, his Accrington vowels adding perhaps an element of pathos to the purple prose. "As to call light the soul shall sing of the velvet sailors course on." And that is one of his more accessible lyrics.
Unsurprisingly, Anderson is still big on their mystical significance: "I'm still working it out myself as my consciousness evolves." Yes's keyboard player, Rick Wakeman, a beer-and-skittles character who famously ate a curry on stage at Manchester Free Trade Hall during one of Tales From Topographic Oceans' more recherché passages,
has cruelly suggested that Anderson didn't have a clue what he was singing about.
Either way, the overall effect makes Radiohead sound like Bill Haley and the Comets. You can scarcely believe that anything this arcane ever found an audience. But it did. Formed in 1968, by the mid-1970s Yes were vastly successful, particularly in the US. They still hold a record for selling out Madison Square Gardens for seven consecutive nights in 1977. Their success bred staggering indulgence. Capes were worn on stage and mansions were bought in the countryside. Steve Howe would fly his Gibson guitar in its own seat on Concorde. When Yes could not decide whether to record an album in London or "in a forest at the dead of night" (the latter, it scarcely needs explaining, was Anderson's idea), a compromise was reached: the album was recorded in a Willesden studio decorated with bales of hay and a cardboard cow with electrically powered moveable udders.
Nevertheless, despite the loon pants, the mystical lyrics and the third eye, Anderson emerges from Yes's history as less a wide-eyed hippy than a hard-headed operator, perhaps as a result of a tough childhood spent working as a farmhand. He may be the only rock star in history to have been compared to three different dictators. His nickname within Yes was Napoleon, but departing drummer Bill Bruford went further, noting Anderson's similarity to Hitler and Stalin. When I mention this, he looks momentarily nonplussed - "Stalin?" - before sternly defending himself.
"I just wanted to build and grow and develop, so that there was a reason for why we became successful. Because I believed and still believe that success is only part of the story. It makes you want to get better and better so as not to let yourself down and not to let the people down who like what you do and you don't waste your success. So I would be very, very hard if I saw anybody in the band not having respect for their talent. I hated that. There's a lot of people out there with more talent, but just didn't get the break. I've seen them. I've heard them." He reels this off as if he's said it many times before. You suspect the other members of Yes may have heard similar monologues.
However, not even Anderson's cheerleading could stop punk rock, which left double concept albums based on Paramhansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi looking slightly de trop. In its aftermath, as Wakeman once put it with characteristic delicacy, Yes "were about as welcome as a fart in a Chanel factory". The subsequent years have been an endless cycle of acrimonious departures and reformations fuelled by financial necessity: in their pomp, the members of Yes apparently spent most of their money as quickly as they made it. Although their music has never undergone the kind of critical reappraisal afforded Pink Floyd, they can still pack stadiums with dutiful fans who subscribe to Homer Simpson's philosophy of music: "Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact."
"It's tough at the moment," says Anderson. "Everybody in the band wants to be appreciated for who we are, enjoyed by the media for what we are - 35 years is a long time to be a band. We'd love more people to come and see the band, and that takes good publicity and good promotion. Wheels are very slowly turning in that direction. There's going to be a 'Best of' coming out. The wheels are in motion to try and reassure us that we didn't spend the last 35 years going downhill."
Anderson suddenly sounds rather reflective and glum. Then, perhaps remembering one of his many "experiences with other conscious energies that have instilled a realisation that all is well", he brightens. "Still, we have survived. Nobody's dead yet. I'm amazed at how well we play on stage every night. It's a continuation of growth. It's part of a natural understanding that we went through the hippy 60s in order to enter the 21st century, in order to have the golden age, if you want to call it a word. We're still growing into that place of higher consciousness, we are becoming a global conscience. The idea is to unravel the onion and let go of the ego and evolve to that place where you perceive everything to be a beautiful experience rather than a daunting experience."
He's lost me again - we appear to be heading inexorably back towards the realms of interdimensional energies and loving the baby ducks - but Anderson seems happy enough. "The state of things at the moment," he smiles, "is incredibly beautiful."
Have a listen to his work with vangelis Eamon and hand on your heart tell me this man is a not a god !
"Close to the Edge," "Revealing," "Ritual," "Gates of Delirium," "Awaken." These are really epic pieces of music that would hold 20,000 people in the balance. We were playing in front of big audiences in arenas through the '70s, and people would just sit there and listen for 20 minutes each time, and feel the energy at the end of the piece. We were so convinced about the music, we played it like it was a symphony, and then we finished the piece totally exhausted. And the audience would erupt for about five minutes. It was an amazing experience to create music of that caliber and it still survives today. This is a wonderful thing that a lot of people are learning about Yes music. They might have found a song here or there and then they opened this door thinking, "My God, what the hell were these people doing?"
Anderson: Probably God. Or it could be we collectively. The audience and I, collectively we look for reality of being a true understanding of the beauty of life. We reach over the rainbow for an understanding of things.
You and I climb closer to the light.
This explains a little way Eamon of the great artist that Jon was and still is but to say he did not have a scooby do about his lyrical prowess is for me is a bridge too far. I can only hope the web page below elaborates things further for you: Blessings and salutations :
https://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/jon-anderson-of-yes
