Why did Yes want…Patrick Moraz? Part 1 – 549

Back in the days when Patrick Moraz was in Yes, I dug around for more music by him and acquired the Mainhorse album. Not impressed. I had never heard Refugee until this afternoon. Very entertaining. I can see why Yes would have been intrigued by his virtuosity. I heard so many keyboard riffs and sounds that we would later hear on Relayer, and even more so from his solo albums “i” and “Out in the Sun”.

It is apparent why Lee Jackson would have recruited Moraz in his attempt to recreate the magic of The Nice. I can also see why both Emerson and Moraz would move on from Jackson to work with better lead singers….

Even prog hasn’t been immune from the vagaries of fashion and jazz-rock / fusion was a growing thing in the pre Punk mid 70s. Mahavishnu, Return To Forever, Jeff Beck, Lifetime, Alphonse Mouzon, Billy Cobham, Jack Bruce, Weather Report, Ian Gillan Band, the mid 70s incarnation of Santana and even late stage Little Feat were either full on fusion bands or seriously taking that sound on board. Over here a band as unlikely as Deep Purple picked up Tommy Bolin partly (possibly mainly) off the back of his brilliant work on the Spectrum and Mind Transplant records which are as fusion as fusion can be.

So picking someone who could bring some of that fusion world into Yes was a natural choice. And it worked like a dream. for one album That record and the shows were (I would like to think) unarguably fantastic even for die hard Rick loyalists. Maybe a tougher, heavier, less lushly Romantic sound than the band that made Yessongs but wonderful nonetheless. And then Punk comes along.

To sell millions of records and go on selling them you can’t just sell to hard core fans. You have to pick up a lot of floating voters, casual rock buyer and inevitably some people who may only buy one or two of your albums and are not in for the long haul. To get those kind of fans you can’t be too out of step with the musical fashions of the day.

Fact is that in the UK, if nowhere else, Punk and New Wave wiped out a lot of the media and industry interest in this jazz influenced hybrid genre and suddenly bona fide rock bands (The Jam, Damned, Stranglers, Clash, Pistols, Pretenders, Elvis Costello etc etc) were scoring chart singles after a decade of serious rock bands (and especially those experimenting in longer musical forms) seeing singles and Top 40 radio as something a bit beneath them. And those hit singles pushed interest in albums which were also hits. So from industry point of view this was great news especially as a long of those bands could make records in a matter of weeks rather than months. (or years)

And so I think the change back to Rick might well have had something to do with that change in musical fashion. Not that Yes were ever going to make New Wave records (though they did take on board some of that directness and pithiness) but they would certainly have been expected to try for something playable on pop radio in a way that might not have been the case since Fragile or even before Fragile. If you as a band were headed down that road then Rick, with his session chops and his pre Yes day job of doing what was best for the song at hand and not necessarily doing whatever he fancied, was a much better choice than Moraz or Vangelis to see the band safely into the 80s. And that worked brilliantly too and they could still sell a lot of arena tickets even when the album they were touring wasn’t all that.

Anyway …. I am glad that what happened happened but I do wish Howe and Moraz had made a couple more albums together and ideally with Bill behind the kit. That would have been something.