“ALL I KNOW IS THAT I HAVEN’T FOLLOWED THE GENERAL VEIN OF THE STYLE
of guitar that people have been playing,” confessed Steve Howe in his first Guitar Player
interview back in April of ’73. That’s a bit like Columbus offhandedly acknowledging
that he didn’t generally sail normal trade routes. If ever a guitarist was at the precipice
of a brave new world of discovery, it was Steve Howe in 1973. At the time, Howe was
three years into his tenure with Yes and—alongside singer Jon Anderson, bassist Chris
Squire, drummer Alan White, and keyboardist Rick Wakeman —was pioneering an inventive
style of music that would be christened, for lack of a better term, progressive or
“prog” rock. In an era largely defined by the blues, Howe’s fretwork ignored stylistic
guidelines, careening wildly between the sophisticated harmonies and chromatic phrasing
of jazz, the polyphonic melodicism of classical chamber music, the greasy grit of
country, and the raw, driving gnarliness of surf rock. Not merely a breath of fresh air in
a climate of Clapton clones, Howe was literally a whole new ecosystem of musical growth.
His ringing intro to “Roundabout” introduced the beauty of natural harmonics and nylonstring
melodies to the rock masses, while his extended southern-fried runs of “I’ve Seen
All Good People” owed more to Jimmy Bryant than Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix. Instead
of pyrotechnic lead guitar pentatonic-spasms, Howe’s solos were compositionally balanced
and harmonically challenging. Given the chance to step out on his own, Howe
was more likely to offer intricate solo guitar vignettes like the baroque-ish “Mood for a
Day” or the jaunty Travis-picked “The Clap” than to play behind his back.
Although certain factions of the music
press chided what they perceived as Yes’ selfindulgence,
tuned-in fans readily accepted
extended multi-part tracks like the 18-minute
“Close to the Edge” as the natural outgrowth
of virtuosic musicianship and an omnivorous
appetite for sonic exploration. If the
rise of punk rock in the mid ‘70s supposedly
sounded the death knell for the “dinosaur”
proggies, someone forgot to inform significantly
large portions of the music-listening
public. Between 1976-1981 Guitar Player
readers voted Howe “Best Overall Guitarist”
five years running, permanently retiring him
from the category and enshrining him in the
Gallery of the Greats. Likewise, Yes was fresh
off selling out multiple nights at Madison
Square Garden at the time of their split over
artistic differences in 1981.
Hardly going the way of the dinosaur,
Howe next surfaced with bassist/vocalist John
Wetton, keyboardist Geoff Downes, and drummer
Carl Palmer in prog alumni “super group”
Asia. Their 1982 self-titled debut offered a
more concise distillation of prog’s learned
tendencies and became a chart-topper worldwide.
Despite pop success, Howe would leave
Asia after a second album and join forces with
former Genesis axe-slinger Steve Hackett in
the highly-touted but short-lived GTR.
Howe ultimately reunited with his Yes
bandmates, first in 1989 as a member of
Anderson Bruford Wakeman and Howe, then
in 1991 with the eight-man incarnation of
Yes (who had re-grouped with guitarist
Trevor Rabin replacing Howe in 1983) for
the Union album and tour. In 1995, the classic
Howe, Anderson, Wakeman, Squire, and
White line-up of Yes reconvened to track the
Keys to Ascension album. Since then, Howe
has maintained his place as the guitarist in
Yes despite other personnel shifts within the
line-up. He’s also had an extremely prolific
solo career releasing over a dozen CDs and
DVDs and embarking on numerous tours,
often with sons Dylan and Virgil handling
drums and bass respectively.
1 SAY YES TO MUSICAL
OPPORTUNITY
Born April 8, 1947 in North
London, Howe’s first guitar
was a Christmas present
from his parents at the age
of 12. “My parents had a
weird collection of music which consisted
of Mantovani, Lawrence Welk, dance music,
and Les Paul and Mary Ford. I got the razzle-
dazzle music with Bill Haley and the
Comets. My older brother liked jazz, and
he’d bring me a Barney Kessel album saying,
‘Stop listening to Bill Haley. This is good
guitar playing’,” recalls Howe of his early
wide-ranging musical exposure.
He first began performing with the Syndicats
in 1963, playing R&B covers at local
pubs and youth halls. The band recorded three
singles with legendary underground outsider
Joe Meek as producer before disbanding. Next,
Howe joined the In Crowd and also appeared
as a session musician on Keith West’s hit
“Excerpts from a Teenage Opera.” West and
Howe then joined forces in psychedelic rockoutfit
Tomorrow. Their single “My White
Bicycle” wasn’t a chart-topper but would
become an underground classic and touchstone
of British psychedelia. As a member of
Tomorrow, and then Bodast, Steve made the
rounds of hip London nightspots like the UFO
and Middle Earth, and his various musical
interests were given the opportunity to coalesce
into his singular style. Legend of Howe’s
fretboard prowess spread and—in one of the
rare instances in his career when he’d forgo
musical opportunity—he rejected overtures
to join both Jethro Tull and Keith Emersonled
combo the Nice. The unfulfilled promises
of a record deal for Bodast would ultimately
lead Howe to accept an offer to replace
departed Yes guitarist Peter Banks.
Despite being largely associated with Yes,
Asia, and GTR, Howe’s career has been a
revolving door of bands, side projects, one-off
collaborations and guest appearances, all seemingly
motivated by musical not financial
reasons. Alongside multiple solo releases Howe
has guested and/or collaborated on recordings
by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Dixie Dregs,
Queen, Martin Taylor, Paul Sutin, Billy Currie,
Billy Sherwood, and Oliver Wakeman.
2 DON’T JUST BE THE
GUITARIST, BE THE
STRING SECTION
When Howe first joined Yes
in the spring of 1970, he
relied mainly on a mid-’60s
Gibson ES-175D. As the
band expanded its sonic horizons, Howe’s
stringed arsenal grew accordingly: a Portuguese
acoustic vachalia can be heard on
“I’ve Seen All Good People” and “Wonderous
Stories.” For the title track of Close to
the Edge, Howe alternates between a Coral
Sitar and a Gibson ES-345. A Rickenbacker
12-string enlivens the solo section of
“Awaken,” while “And You and I,” “Siberian
Khatru,” and “The Gates of Delirium”
benefit from one of Howe’s signature
sounds— a delay-drenched, overdriven
Fender steel guitar.
A short list of the other stringed instruments
Howe has recorded and/or performed
with includes Fender Stratocasters and Telecasters,
a Gibson E-5 Switchmaster, ES-295,
L5, and EDS-1275 double-neck, various
Steinberger electrics, Martin acoustics,
Dobros and mandolins. On Yes’ fall 2008
tour Howe was able to pare down his cache
to a mere “dozen” instruments with the help
of a Line 6 Variax.
3 DON’T BE A
SONGWRITER, BE
A COMPOSER
I once read an online post
comparing Howe to his successor
in Yes, Trevor Rabin.
It concluded that while Howe
and Rabin were both great guitarists, Rabin
was more valuable to the band because of his
songwriting skills. I have to respectfully disagree
with this assessment. Although Rabin
was a fine musician and co-writer of Yes’
biggest pop hit, “Owner of a Lonely Heart,”
the band’s greatest musical legacy is its contributions
to the progressive rock canon. In
this respect Howe, as co-composer of tracks
like “Roundabout,” “Close to the Edge,” “The
Revealing Science of God,” and “Awaken,” is
largely responsible for Yes’ unique and singular
sound. Perhaps Howe was not the go-to
guy to pen and produce a breezy pop single,
but as an architect of music that is pioneering,
innovative, unprecedented, and arguably,
unequalled in the history of rock, his contribution
is indispensable.
4 GET A MUSICAL
EDUCATION, BUT
DON’T PICK A MAJOR
Howe’s special brand of guitar
gumbo liberally mixed
ingredients from multiple
musical sources. A top-shelf
example of this is Ex. 1, the intro to Yes’ “Siberian
Khatru.” Here, Howe sets a classic country
faux-pedal-steel lick against a slightly dissonant
open E-string and propels it along with
some funky scratch work. The riff cycles
through the C and D chord changes, cascades
down a series of thirds, and finally ends on a
D to E major second implying the top of an
impressionist-sounding Dmaj9 chord.
For a second helping of Howe, dig into
one of the main guitar themes to Yes’
“Awaken” and “Magnification” and catch the
flavor of Ex 2. Here, his Howe-liness lays
down the baroque-sounding melody in Wes
Montgomery-approved octave voicings but
articulates them with a hybrid picking technique
straight from the country. Notice how
the harmonics help define the underlying
harmonies, especially the D/E, suggesting
an E Dorian modal jazz setting. Part classical,
part jazz, part country. Pure Howe.
5 SET UP COOL
CHANGES, THEN
PLAY THEM
The three-chord vamp as a
backdrop to an extended guitar
solo was a staple of early
’70s rock and, on the dramatic
ending to “Starship Trooper” (subtitled
“Würm”), Howe throws his hat in the ring.
Ignoring standard issue barre-chords and
diatonic scales a la “Stairway to Heaven” and
“Freebird,” the Howe-miester pushes the
envelope by grabbing the unique 5th-in-thebass
chord voicings of Fig. 1. To sophisticate
matters further, Howe doesn’t merely settle
for blowing over a G pentatonic minor—
instead he weaves between G pentatonic
major (for the G/D), Eb major (for the Eb/Bb),
and G Dorian (for the C/G), much like the
integrated lines of Ex. 3.
The studio take is actually two separate
solo tracks panned left and right then alternated
at four-bar intervals, but subsequent
live versions prove Howe able to navigate the
difficult changes for sustained periods. This
multiple-key-center solo approach is directly
copped from jazz, and is something many of
Howe’s contemporaries didn’t dare attempt.
6 BE PRO-OCTAVE
Journeyman guitarists are generally
adroit at kicking a lick
up an octave simply by playing
it 12 frets higher, but
Howe’s penchant for whipping
a phrase through three
octaves at Mach 3 speeds suggests a much
deeper understanding of fretboard mechanics.
I believe the underlying logic behind many of
these runs involves organizing the guitar’s six
strings into three separate pairs of perfect
fourths, E-A, D-G, and B-E. Play through Ex. 4a
using only your first finger to quickly find a G
in three different octaves on the first string of
each two-string pair. Now turn your attention
to the first bar of Ex. 4b—the first five notes of
a G blues scale laid out on the lowest string
pair. Give the suggested left-hand digits due
diligence and you’ll discover that beginning
this simple two-string pattern on the corresponding
octaves of the two remaining pairs
(the circled notes that correspond to Ex. 4a),
you can replicate the phrase across three octaves
rapidly and without changing fingerings.
By incorporating a first-finger slide to the
G octaves of the previous example, Ex. 5 highlights
Howe’s cool multi-registered riffage
on Yes gems like “Machine Messiah” and
“Heart of the Sunrise.” Again, heads-up on
the fingering. You’re simply duplicating the
same exact pattern in three different octaves,
one for each of the three string-pairs.
This “three for the price of one” deal can
also be put to good use on mind-bending solo
runs like Ex. 6, where a two-string phrase
detailing the root (A), third with chromatic
leading tone (C to C# ), and seventh (G) of
an A7 chord gets the tri-octave treatment. In
this example—which, incidentally, vibes
Howe’s shredding on “I’ve Seen All Good
People,”—we’re working the octaves (once
more represented by the circled notes) backwards
and leading with our third finger.
Taking a cue from Howe’s marathon lead
break on Yes’ epic re-designing of Paul Simon’s
“America,” Ex. 7 is our final three-octave triumph.
Again it works from the highest
register down and leads with the third finger,
but now a tasty countrified pre-bend has been
added for your listening pleasure.
7 BE MOTIF-ATED
If you’ve ever been enthralled
by the first movement of
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
then you understand the
magic of motifs—short,
catchy, repetitive musical
phrases that serve as building blocks for larger
works by providing compositional unity.
Howe was certainly familiar with the power
of the motif, whether to inject a quick burst
of suspense before the chorus on Asia’s charttopping
single “Only Time Will Tell” or to
serve as thematic links unifying the four protracted
cuts on the Yes concept double-album
Tales from Topographic Oceans. Ex. 8 recalls
Howe’s motif-laden electrified 12-string runs
on “Awaken.” Here a Baroque-ish ornamentation
of a D major arpeggio is cycled up the
neck through the keys of F, G, and C respectively,
ratcheting the drama up a notch with
each modulation before resolving to Em via
rapid-fire descending thirds.
8 BE CONTRAPUNTAL
Ex. 9, an excerpt from Howe’s
lead break tour de force on
“America,” is another example
of the guitarist’s penchant
for motivic development
through multiple key centers.
This time he’s introduced the added element
of counterpoint—a second musical line
playing concurrently with, but seemingly
independent of, the primary melody. Classical
guitarists and pianists have contrapuntal
chops in spades but rockers and jazzers often
miss the boat when it comes to getting their
axes to do two things at once. The Howester
pulls off his multi-line mayhem by
flat-picking the lower notes and grabbing the
high ones with his ring finger.
9 GO SOLO
Steve Howe’s multi-faceted
talents are an invaluable asset
to whatever band he’s with,
but they also serve him well
as a solo artist and performer.
Many of Howe’s most admired
recordings are his solo compositions
like “Mood for a Day” from Yes’s Fragile, “The
Clap” from The Yes Album, and “Sketches in
the Sun” from the self-titled GTR release.
Howe’s technical prowess and flair for
arrangement have placed him among the elite
axemen in any genre who are able to give
unaccompanied concert performances—
something he’s done on a regular basis since
the late ’70s! Ex. 9 is an excerpt of Howe’s
steel-string re-imagining of Yes’ “To Be Over.”
The song was originally recorded as a group
performance in 1974 and revived by Howe
as part of his solo set during Yes’ 2002-2003
tour. Again, dig the motivic development and
contrapuntal bass line.
10 BE
TIMELESS
While assessing
his own playing,
Howe once informed
Guitar
Player, “I don’t
know whether I’m about 20 years ahead or 20
years behind.” Howe was certainly never a
trendy player. By contrast, his embrace of the
guitar’s rich heritage and distinctive approach
to its interpretation has continually pointed
a way forward while creating a unique, compelling,
and enduring body of work. He has
influenced countless musicians in all genres.
And he’s still going strong. Currently Yes are
out on tour with a reunited Asia as special
guest, and the amazing Mr. Howe will be performing
with both bands. The musical legacy
of Steve Howe is, in a word, timeless.
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