Yes’ Steve Howe sat down with Classic Rock and revealed the band’s worst record he made.
The rocker shared his picks of records, artists and gigs of lasting significance during the interview. “Can I have a few?,” he said when asked about the worst record. “Let me see if I can think of one. There are a few movements I played on ‘Tormato’ [Yes, 1978] that I regret. It makes life difficult when I try to listen to that album, so I’ve only got myself to blame for that. But I did manage to get a few right along the way, didn’t I?”
The musician made it clear that ‘Tormato’ isn’t one of his favorite albums in earlier interviews as well. Howe criticized ‘Tormato’ as ‘too intense’ and said it was ‘trying too hard.’ “[It’s] not that satisfying to listen to, at least for myself. I can’t talk for everyone else. But there are some nice moments in it, and I think there should have been someone else there helping us with that one a little bit. We’d always had a really good engineer, and we were a bit lost at sea with actually the tonal landscape and the space,” he explained.
It turns out Howe’s comments about the band needing extra help were more accurate than he realized. Producer and engineer Brian Kehew worked on the 2004 reissue of ‘Tormato.’ He found out that the album’s poor sound was due to a simple mistake. Kehew explained that the issue started when the band parted ways with their longtime producer, Eddie Offord, in the middle of the album’s production, causing a communication breakdown.
“Offord had started the album,” Brian Kehew said. “He had done most of the Yes records, and I know from working on his tracks that he used Dolby A a lot. These tapes don’t say Dolby A, but ‘Tormato’ is a famously bad-sounding record. They parted ways with him mid-course, and somebody else finished the record.
“So, I’m looking at the tapes and it doesn’t say Dolby A anywhere on them. It’s typical that they note that when encoded. I said, ‘Hold on a second, let me put Dolby on this,’ and everything – except for some of the later overdubs – sounded amazing. I went, ‘Aha!’ I think we realized what happened. They went to somebody else, and the other person didn’t see Dolby on the tapes,” he added.
‘Tormato’ was a shorter album compared to the band’s other albums. Yes moved away from the long instrumental pieces that were present in albums like ‘Tales from Topographic Oceans.’ Instead, the band focused on shorter songs like ‘Onward’ and ‘Don’t Kill the Whale.’ The longest track on the album, ‘On the Wings of Freedom,’ lasted 7:47, much shorter compared to many of the band’s other songs.
