Old Enough to Forget

The first time I heard "Owner of a Lonely Heart" on the radio, I was smitten. "What in the heck was that?" It was one of those HOLY SHIT songs that seemed to come out of nowhere. KISM from Bellingham had a strong enough signal to reach over into the suburbs where I lived. The song quickly worked it's way into heavy rotation, but I don't remember hearing it on the two big stations in Vancouver. It took me a while to find the record after first hearing the song. There was a record store across the street from where I worked and I looked for this new Yes album, and all I found where the old Yes records, nothing new. Of course this only happened once, and I'm sure this was all compressed into the span of a couple of weeks, if that. Soon the song along with the bleeding edge orchestral blasts that were unlike anything I'd heard before was everywhere. This was Yes? Yes. Of course there was no internet back in the day, just word of mouth and the burgeon...

As a teenager I knew more about Yes from their Roger Dean album covers than I did about their music. When I eventually upgraded my old Sound in the Round record player to a stereo that could go loud in the late '70s, the receiver also had a built in 8-track player. While never a fan of the fade out and click in the middle of a song, I did have a couple of cartridges I'd picked up, and I actually had a copy of Fragile , that I have no recollection of getting and played it a few times and remember not getting it at all - although "Roundabout" was as awesome as it was perplexing. Then the tape got eaten and that was that, and I didn't really think about Yes until the fall 1983 when the radio station across the line played this weirdly cool song called "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by ... Yes. Well, I remember thinking "That was cool." However, the classic Howe lineup wasn't my jam. I liked the Trevor Rabin era, and am still partial to his work wit...