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Produced by Joseph Cottrell, Jeffrey Crecelius and Ken Fuller
In the week of the 40th anniversary of 90125, Mark and I looked at Trevor Rabin’s 90124 which contains a lot of source material for the classic from 1983. 90124 appeared in 2003 on the 20th anniversary of the globally-successful Yes album and contains all of Trevor’s demos of songs such as Hold On, Changes, Owner of a Lonely Heart and Cinema. A truly fascinating listen, there are also demos of later Yes songs like Where Will You Be, Walls, Love Will Find A Way and Miracle of Life.
- How did the songs we know so well come about?
- Do any of he demos sound like the finished songs?
- Is the collection worthwhile?
Let us know if you agree with us!
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- Jeffrey Crecelius
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Theme music
The music I use is the last movement of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. This has been used as introduction music at many Yes concerts. My theme music is not take from a live concert – I put it together from: archive.org
6 replies on “90124 vs. 90125 – 605”
I’ve long been dubious that the scat-singing demo of “Owner” on 90124 is an authentic recording from the early 1980s. Given that the pre-Yes verses were so very different from what Jon Anderson ended up singing, it seems hard to believe that the original demo has the melody that Jon ultimately used. I wonder if Trevor rerecorded a “new” demo using Jon’s melody in order to lay more claim to the final structure of the song…?
(Now that we’ve had 90124, 90125, and 90126 [the ABWH catalog number], I remain on the lookout for others in the sequence.)
90127 was used for U2’s “Under a Blood Red Sky” on Island Records in late Nov. ’83, after 90125. I noticed as soon as I bought the album!
I was going to comment the same exactly – I also suspect that this bit was thrown in as part of the never ending ping-pong with Trevor Horn about who invented what on Owner. First, it doesn’t sound like Trevor’s timbre or singing style of the 80’s, nor does the guitar sound or recording or sounding quality of the 80’s. Different from the rest of the material. Finally. it is performed wisely half step lower, with the acoustic quitar tuned down accordingly, which suggests that a later Rabin would need to sing it a bit lower (in recent years). Even so, it sound like a much more recent Trevor Rabin singing voice to me.
I’m also surprised with the lack of mention of at least the possibility that Chris Squire and Alan White would also have something to do with the transformations of the debated songs (except for the intro of Changes), and that it would be either because of Horn and Anderson that transformed the songs. I mean, those two had a certain experience and influence (being a rhythm section) of arranging and transforming songs and, in my opinion, it is quite noticeable when you compare the final with the demo versions.
Fair points, thank you Miguel. You are right that Chris and Alan made significant contributions.
I think people might be over-analyzing here. I’m pretty sure it’s an early 80s demo.
The demo (except all those Minimoog parps) sounds tonally to me like Rabin’s solo albums he recorded in the UK around the turn of the decade. In fact, he must have had a full demo of the song because it was one of the tracks he put together when it was in the development deal with Geffen. When Geffen let him go, he started touting around those demos, and was discussing a deal by RCA who thought his initial version of Owner was a hit. More crucially, Horn refers to that demo in his book when they started to rework the arrangement.
There’s a huge amount more to say about Owner and its provenance, and a lot of assumptions are made about who wrote what, based around a) people’s assumptions about what Anderson’s contributions were and b) what Horn and Rabin have said about it, which is contradictory.
I’ve put some of this in my piece about 90125 in the next issue about Prog, based on conversations with Rabin, Anderson and Phil Carson (the unsung hero of the whole era) but the creation of the album is a potential rabbit hole that we could all spend years disappearing down, considering all the different phases it went through!
I was under the impression “Cinema Demo” was a mistitle on this CD. The intro is the same as “Make It Easy” which ended up being used live prior to “Owner,” and the liner notes for this CD mention “Don’t Give In.”