BIG GENERATOR

What is one of the great powers of music and art?--the stimulation of memory. Roughly contemporaneous with the 1987 release of Big Generator was the October 19, 1987, Stock Market Crash. In one day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 508 points, 22.6% of its value . . . . There are some among the membership of ProgArchives.com who consider Big Generator (and the earlier 90125) on the level of that dark day in October of 1987. A review of Big Generator these years later can reveal quite the contrary.

I'd like to assert that Big Generator's eight songs move through a variety of Progressive Sub-genres:

Symphonic Prog: "Shoot High, Aim Low"; "I'm Running"; "Final Eyes"

Progressive Metal/Psychedelic/Space Rock: "Big Generator"

Crossover Prog: "Rhythm of Love," "Love Will Find a Way"; "It's Almost Like Love"

Prog Folk: "Holy Lamb"

It would appear that, although a product of four laborious years in studios in three different countries, Big Generator is a "group effort," born of an ample supply of internal dissent. If one watches the 1991 video interviews with the eight members of the touring version of Union, Chris Squire states Alan White and he basically played their rhythm section parts over four years. The recording process began in Italy, with Trevor Horn again the producer. Yet, this time, Trevor Horn left and Tony Kaye remained . . . . The recordings moved to London, and then to Los Angeles, where the entire project received the final production approval from Trevor Rabin.

Jon Anderson had more expansive musical designs focusing on Trevor Rabin's diverse compositional and instrumental prowess, something that might hearken back to the Seventies. But these designs would have to wait until the end of the Big Generator tour in 1988, and Anderson's departure: the occasion for Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe.

And, yet, on Big Generator there are "microcosms" of the Seventies' "expansive musical designs": "Shoot High, Aim Low," "I'm Running" and "Final Eyes." In "Shoot High, Aim Low," Squire and White deliver a rhythm section suggestive of the paradoxical title of the song. Anderson and Rabin share the lead vocals, narrating this "mind-numbing" Nicaraguan quest. On the keyboards, Tony Kaye provides the song's "backbone."

To a degree, "I'm Running" further evokes the band's previous larger scale works. The music, especially Squire's bass, has mesmerized me since 1987. To me, the keyboards are the result of something of a "committee" consisting of Kaye and Rabin. With his well-known voice, Anderson sings, "A simple peace/ Just can't be found." That is the nature of the Human Condition. To paraphrase the Buddha, "all existence is sorrow; the cause of this sorrow is desire . . . ." And, yet, every day, we desire. The song incessantly lays bare our daily struggle for transcendence. This pursuit may be grounded in the natural as suggested by the opening appeal to the jacaranda bush or tree. Jacaranda is cosmopolitan, and can be found in tropical and sub-tropical regions from Southern California to Brazil to South Africa. So, whatever the goal towards which humanity runs, it begins with nature.

But is this ultimate goal synonymous with Nature or based upon a reality that begins with the "stuff of the Universe," and is informed by the One and All? We are propelled by desire:

I've heard the thunder Underground Tunneling away At the very soul of man

The key is what choice we make regarding the nature of our desire:

See through science Part of a back door A door made up of doors To an endless time To a new world

This leads us to "Holy Lamb" and its assertion, "And all we need to know/ Is that the future is a friend of yours and mine." With the realities of global warming, Covid-19, the world's stockpile of thermonuclear weapons, political/economic instability, and world hunger, the Holy Lamb is "the one to lead us to the New Jerusalem." Without reference to "the One and All," humanity hurdles on an ominous track.

If I may, I'd like to differ with Trevor Rabin on his dislike for "It's Almost Like Love." It appears to me that Kaye's keyboard lines constitute the structure of this song with the rhythm section of White and Squire. Rabin's guitar hardly illustrates any disapproval of the proceedings. And, here, the lyrics demonstrate a somewhat more grounded idealism than those of "Holy Lamb." The presence of the horn section only accentuates Kaye's Hammond Organ.

Big Generator surpasses its predecessor in being more of a group effort. Somehow, though, this did not satisfy "Maestro Anderson" (what Bill Bruford later in the pre-Union tour tape I mention above would call him). In the 34 years since Big Generator's release we have witnessed a "truly perpetual change" of what we have called "Yes." Might I suggest that a fine manifestation of this change would be something of a renewal of that relationship in 1973 that led to the lyrics to Tales from Topographic Oceans?"