Customer Reviews

Beyond and Before: The Formative Years of Yes

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

i just finished it,read it in 3 days ,its really great for a perspective on what became of peter banks and his life,this book is definately not a ripoff,it will bring back memories of rock when it was still great and this guy is a real rocker not a phoney,he really was screwed by the band with malice and should be apreciated and recognized for being one of the founding fathers of real progressive rock,one of the founders of yes and a great musician and performer.im glad i baught the book and was satisfied,i hope he makes some money off this book and my purchase,because its well worth it.now i must buy some of his cds,other than the flash cds i already own.

This book is very enlightening about the early days of Yes and the subsequent career of Peter Banks. It is also kind of poignant when you consider that Banks was essentially the "Pete Best" of the Yes story, and missed out on the fame and fortune that followed his tenure with the band. The rest of his musical career didn't seem to work out so well. Lots of "Spinal Tap" type stories.

I remember seeing Earth Wind & Fire and thinking to my self, "that guitar looks just like the one Peter Banks guitarist for Yes had." In the book I learned that it was that guitar! The book is as honest as it gets about the way the music business really was. You had no friends and the ones who got the writing credit received the checks in the mail. After Peter covers the Yes period you might want to stop reading about his afterlife but don't. It gets better and shows how artists got screwed by the labels. If you have a friend considering a career in music buy them this book. I recommend that Peter Banks makes friends with the New York state prosecutor.

If you know who Peter Banks is there's no sense in going over that again. If you don't know who he is, first, why are you reading these reviews and, second, the other reviews of this book cover him pretty well - better than I could, anyway. Having said that bit of nothing, I liked this book. I have an idea that it reads better if you read it aloud since it is obviously a dictated narrative. If things like punctuation and complete sentences are important to you, this book is definitely not for you. Like I said, it reads like talkin', not like readin'.

I bought this book 8 or 9 months ago probably, promptly got busy with several different things and didn't start reading it until Aug, '11. I read it off and on, in spare hours here and there for a week. It is interesting, enlightening and entertaining. It is more than the title suggests; the formative years of YES only account for about half of the book. The other half is about Peter Banks after YES, and that was interesting, too. I even used part of a 2 year old gift card to iTunes for the first time and bought a couple of Flash songs since I had never heard any before. For what it is worth, those songs were good and sounded like early YES. I guess it's hard to keep from sounding like yourself when playing and composing. (So Peter, if you read this review, I liked your Flash songs, I'm sorry I didn't hear them when they were new and I'm also sorry I never saw Flash perform live. And hopefully you'll get a royalty from iTunes from my purchase.)

No one else has mentioned this in any of their reviews so maybe this was only a problem with my book; the thing fell apart easily. I got the book and it looked very nice - nice and tight and snug. Good looking book. I started reading it and the binding broke when I opened it enough to read the inside bends of the pages. Pages started shedding like ... I don't know ... things that shed; fur, leaves, ... other things that get shed easily. So my only negative (besides that incomplete sentences and poor punctuations thing) is that this book was not manufactured well and it fell apart easily and quickly during a first reading, but, like I said, maybe it was just my book - the one that slipped through Quality Control's inspection.

Good book from page one to the end. Entertaining read. I liked it. But the book is not manufactured well so be careful where you keep those pages that are going to fall out just in case you want to re read it or pass it along to someone else.

The early Yes albums (Yes and Time and a Word) were trully unique. Peter reminded me a bit of Pete Townsend a bit with his stage qualities. However, the music was weak. Yes didn't appear to grow until the introduction of Steve Howe. Things became more melodic. Steve always had a way of coloring the dead spots in songs or between John Anderson's lyrics. Steve brought in more riffs that became integral and embedded into compositions. I've heard Steve say that everyone would Hedge Bets and show their riffs, and these would be developed. Steve has a a few recordings of many of the ideas that were formulated into the next Yes Recordings. It's interesting to hear these. I've also recently learned Chris Squire will be touring this year with the Syn. Unfortunatly, Peter sent a rather bitter memo on his website about it. I feel he may have been treated unfairly in the past and it is good he has a say in his book. I also want to see many more autobiographies of all Yes members. So far, Peter, and Rick Wakeman have the only biographies. Steve did publish a guitar book with snipits of history, but we need more. Yes is a gem.

-David Carlin
Philadelphia