ASIA: CONTINENTAL DRIFT?

ASIA: CONTINENTAL DRIFT?

FEATURES

Sylvie Simmons

It is no coincidence that supergroup rhymes with gloop. Supergroups are what Rolling Stone puts on the pages it can’t flog to Camels and condom companies. Supergroups always contain at least two people who were in, related to, or close personal friends of Yes, ELP or Genesis. Supergroups are richer, older and more cosmic than mere mortals, and unless you’re on a jogging high or you’ve got more pot than braincells, they’re usually more boring.

But this world of Ours has its surprises. Like, for instance, there’s 10 million guitar players in China, but none of them are in Asia. Asia is a supergroup by any definition—virtually a Shakespearean supergroup-within-a-supergroup, what with its founding members John Wetton, Steve Howe, Geoff Downes and Carl Palmer being graduates from the supergroups of the ’70s: King Crimson, U.K., Yes (two of them!) and ELP—but if you listened to their latest album and you didn’t know who it was, you’d probably think it was pretty damn decent stuff.

Then, if you go back and listen to their first two albums afterwards and listen to it again, you’ll exclaim: “This is actually (with one or two exceptions which you will detail) rock.” Even more of a surprise considering all that’s gone on in this supergroup since ’83’s Alpha—John Wetton getting the boot and being replaced by Greg Lake (whom, incest fans, Wetton had replaced in King Crimson 12 years ago), who got the green weenie after a mere two months to make way for Wetton’s prodigal son bit; Steve Howe taking his guitar and setting up shop with ex-Genesis Steve Hackett, making way for 25-year-old Armand “Mandy” Meyer, ex-Krokus (!)—or maybe not. I got the impression of some pretty weird tension within the band, after a couple of hours talking with drummer Carl Palmer and bassist vocalist John Wetton, and there’s nothing like a good bit of bile to get the juices flowing...They didn’t want to speak to me together—something about not wanting their quotes attributed to the other fellow—but I’ve stuck them together anyway.

f7 would rather have a hand of bad musicians |playing great material than a band of great. musicians playing rubbish. I

-Carl Palmer

Both of them, I must say, wqre very pleasant, very honest—35-year-old Palmer in a Swiss policeman sort of way, straight-faced and neutral, 36-year-old Wetton on the level of a man kind-of-selfconsciously baring his soul—and where you come into this long and edited conversation is where John and I have been talking about nukes; he’s anti, and stuck two songs to that effect on the new album, which didn’t amuse his record company (who wanted them off to make way for blandishments) and he’s saying, “We’ve sort of covered most of the rest of the demands the record company wanted—you want a single? OK, you give them the single, and that’s about as far as I’ll go. Because I.don’t think anyone outside really knows enough about what goes on in the band’s tiny little craniums to come in and interfere.” But Carl Palmer told me only 45 minutes ago that the record company had come in and interfered, firing Wetton. John nods.

How the hell can a record company kick you out?

“I honestly don’t know,” John sips on his decaff. “I still don’t know to this day. It’s something that since I came back to the band I haven’t really felt inclined to talk about with the band.”

I would have. I’d have wanted to know who stood up for me, who put the knife in, and then I’d read those small ads in the back of Soldier Of Fortune...

“No, I didn’t want to rake over the old coals. Half of me just says forget it. But the amount of turmoil that it put me through was rather annoying and extremely costly in legal terms--and we spent a lot of money in the first place making sure that the contract between the four of us and our record company was water-tight. If a contract can be broken that easily, what’s the point of having it in the first place?”

So what was it? Not turning up for the gigs? “I’ve never failed to show for an appearance. You can ask my insurance company.” Throwing up in airport lounges, smashing the record company offices or dating the president’s wife? “No.” What about drugs?

“Someone said they thought it was heroin. I don’t take heroin, I never have taken heroin. Look at my arms. I don’t even take caffeine!”

I heard you’d become a prima donna, and, with Steve Howe, the band just wasn’t big enough for the both of you.

“Prima donna? I don’t think so. I am difficult, yes. I think Steve—be was used to being treated like a superstar because of the Yes thing, and he expected it to carry on with Asia, and it wasn’t quite like that. I honestly can’t answer this question. If someone from the record company, the management and the band was absolutely honest, they could tell you. I was caught in the middle of it...It was a little bit of a shock. I was in the south of France at the time. I’d just come back from an American tour and Geoff (Downes, keyboards and ex-Buggle) called me and said, ‘I think you’d better get back to London,’ and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and he said, ‘Someone wants to get you out of the band, they want Greg Lake to be in the band.’ So I drove all the way back, arrived in London and Monday morning—the meeting lasted five minutes—I said goodbye.”

At which point he wrote some songs (“In fact two of those are on this album”), demoed them, and touted them to the majors who were gleefully anticipating having him as a solo artist. Meanwhile Downes, Howe, Lake & Palmer were over in Tokyo doing a show called Asia In Asia, transmitted live via satellite to fourand-a-half million homes, probably including yours.

“It was pretty good,” says Palmer. “But there was an element of rock ’n’ roll which was missing, due to the voice. Greg Lake is not a rock singer; John Wetton is more so. Greg Lake crooned a little bit too much for me, a bit like Frank Sinatra would have done, or Johnny Mathis, and it’s not rock ’n’ roll. You’ve got to cut things off and make it sound tougher. Apart from that, I thought it was pretty good. I was pleased with my performance.”

It didn’t look good,” says John, who was watching it, like you, on TV. Sour grapes? “I was trying to look at it in an objective way. Yes, there was a little bit of seething going on—because I thought if they really had the balls to do that then at least they shouldn’t have used my material, because that’s almost like admitting that I was an important part of the band. And when I said that to Carl when I rejoined the band he said, ‘Come on, they were 50 percent Geoff’s songs as well.’ Not all of them...”

Did Palmer find it fun playing behind Greg Lake again?

“I found working with Greg really hard,” says Carl. “Asia was not right for Greg Lake. I never wanted him to be in the group—which a lot of people might have thought I was the instigator; I never really wanted Wetton to be out of Asia; there were certain things that had to be put right but that was too drastic a measure to me. Greg’s voice, though similar to Wetton’s, is lower in register, Wetton is a more sophisticated writer, and his bass playing was more to this group’s sound. Greg Lake is either one of two things: a folk singer with an accoustic guitar, or he has to be with an instrumentalist like in ELP. Having Keith Emerson playing with him was fine, but being in a group like Asia is not for him. He knows it’s not, that’s why he’s back in ELP.”

And why isn’t Carl Palmer?

“I was never asked. They knew I wouldn’t go anyway. You see, in ELP I was the youngest one in the band and I was the one most prepared to learn. Because they were five years older than me, they would rather appear to know what’s going on than ask questions like I did. And, while they’re both good musicians, they probably found me a little overpowering...

“Plus I wouldn’t side with Greg Lake and I wouldn’t side with Keith Emerson. I was me; individually they didn’t like that I couldn’t be pulled either way. That s probably why the group was together all those years, because I was really a strong balancing factor.”

As for the music, “the change they’ve made is good, but it’s not drastic enough for me. I’m not into conceptual pieces of music 20 minutes long anymore. I’m into four minutes of absolute bliss,” which he reckons Asia is. “A concentration of everything.

“I said to them, ‘If you want to carry on with the name, use my younger brother’—he’s 30 and a very good drummer—but they didn’t pick up on that. But then they kept saying they were looking for a drummer with the initial ‘P,’ which I thought was a bit silly. If you’re going to start again, use a brand new name like we did. I’d have liked them to have had that amount of conviction in what they were doing. They’re digging up something that is 15 years old and has been dead for six years'.”

(You notice I did not take the obvious cheap shot.)

So was Wetton brought back because Greg Lake was even more unbearable?

“A lot of decisions,” says the diplomatic Mr. P., “were made by the record company. We have a very interesting contract...the reason John was brought back into the band was they— and thank God they did!—owned up that they had made a drastic mistake, this was the singer and that was it, and to try and bring in somebody who sounded like him was silly. A certain amount of success had changed John’s way of thinking, and maybe he had got a little bit difficult to deal with—mind you, there will be no trace of that whatsoever today. The group could have dissolved but it didn’t—OK, we don’t have Steve Howe, but that situation was totally different. John’s was more of a personal thing, and Steve Howe’s was more musical...” John says Mandy reminds him of the Trevor Rabin/Yes situation, Carl says he doesn’t, that “Trevor Rabin saved Yes, Mandy Meyer is not saving Asia.” As for the age difference, they’re now (according to Carl): “a bunch of old dinosaurs and one up-and-coming dinosaur. It’s good to have some young blood. And it’s brought the average age of the band down!”

Didn’t John have any qualms about rejoining, especially as things seemed set for his solo thing?

“I didn’t have any choice...I got a phone call from Geoff saying, ‘Let’s go out and have lunch together and be old pals again.’ Which of course we can never be, not after something like that’s happened. I can never classify anyone in the group—apart from Mandy, who’s had nothing to do with it—as a friend again.”

That’s a pretty sad situation for a band to be in, isn’t it?

“It’s called a record contract...The only other choice I had was to languish. See, if the system that surrounds the group wanted to get really nasty—I’m not saying they would do that, but they could hold me to my contract, let me record

songs and not release them. I don’t want to find myself in that situation. And having had it from the band that it wasn’t really their decision, I agreed to come back and just stay at arm’s length. I still have to write with Geoff, but apart from that it’s very much at arm’s length.”

Hmm. Peculiar stuff. But apparently that strange and all-encompassing record contract didn’t get in the way when the band (“yes, it was very much a band decision”) fired Steve Howe. "Let’s just say,” says John, “he didn’t want to make the record that we three wanted to make,” which was using a lot of computer technology and new, experimental sound stuff (apparently in the past they’ve just gone in the studio and played, just like a real nonsupergroup, and simply overdubbed the vocals; this time they’ve gone over-the-top with digital recording, synclaviers, even a flaming Philharmonic Orchestral).

Palmer: “Steve doesn’t really have the experience in condensing his music to four minutes. Some people can’t write songs—/ can’t—but Steve wouldn’t own up to that. And you can’t let one person

dictate what the band’s going to be. I don’t care how great a player is, a great player does not make a band. I would rather have a band of bad musicians playing great material than a band of great musicians playing rubbish. And he probably knows now that his guitar was not that compatible with keyboards—in his new group there’s no keyboard players. That’s probably why Mandy Meyer fits the group from a sound point-of-view better.”

Swiss, 25, ex-AC/DC soundalikes Krokus. I’d have put Meyer bottom of a list of around 200 Howe-replacement possibilities.

“But, you see, we needed someone like that,” says Carl, “because that was an element we were missing: a supportive role from the guitar. We had a lot of frills and sound textures coming in from the keyboards and guitar before, but we were lacking some solidity. Mandy’s sound is lower, more meaty, more ZZ Top-ish in style.”

“We met in the middle,” says John. “We wanted someone who played with the group, as opposed to someone who just comes on and plays a solo, and Mandy has spent years bashing it out at the front of the stage in heavy metal bands, and he wanted something that was more sophisticated.”

So will we see headbanging triple-frontof-stage line-ups from Asia now? “The one thing we don't want to look like is the four-guitarists-at-the-front sort of thing, shaking their dandruff over the front row! I think it’ll look quite good,” says John, “because this time we’re going for a much starker stage set.”

TURN TO PAGE 55

Asia was not right for Greg Lake. ”

-Carl Palmer

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 51

So we get to talking about how the British press and even some of the American press refer to them as boring old farts, and it doesn’t seem to bother them, they pontificate quite rightly about the fashionconsciousness of the British and the warming tendency of the Americans to keep buying their records. “If you make a successful product,” says sensible Carl, “you don’t suddenly stop making it and start making something new and trendy if you’ve got something that is always going to sell and has a certain reputation. That’s stupid. Then again I say that, but the best groups have always come from Britain and they always will, because there’s so much spice out there, so much challenge, so much going on.

“But what the British have not managed to do is learn how to keep the good stuff, like ourselves, when they get rid of the bad.”

If they decided to give up music and get an honest job, like being a rock crit for instance, what would they say about Asia?

“I would stress”, says Palmer, “the point that people should forget who’s in the band and what they’ve done before, forget about anything they’ve ever read and just listen to the music. Your own ears will tell you.”

“We try and make music that we like, that we would buy if another band had recorded it,” says John. “And that means something that’s pretty musical, well recorded, good quality and doesn’t ramble on for hours.” Unlike this feature, so I’ll allow a final word to Wetton.

“If I were a rock critic I’d say, even if you have preconceptions about Asia, listen to this record. Because you might end up liking it.”