Remembering Peter Banks

[Mr. Holland]

Exactly 10 years ago today Peter Banks passed away. What an important part of the puzzle he was in starting off the best band in the world. Thanks Peter, for what you contributed to the Yes legacy.

[michelforest]

Exactly 10 years ago today Peter Banks passed away. What an important part of the puzzle he was in starting off the best band in the world. Thanks Peter, for what you contributed to the Yes legacy.

10 years already???

Yes, R.I.P. Mr. Banks, your life wasn't always easy, sadly.

[downbyariver]

I really don't feel like Yes would be the same without having had Peter Banks in it. Even if you assume that the other four of the original five would have still gotten together as Yes and produced two albums with their alternate universe original guitarist, and then assumed that somehow you'd switch guitarists at exactly the same time as in real life, and get Steve Howe anyway for album #3, which are a lot of assumptions, there's still the fact that when Steve joined the band, he was touring the Time and a Word material (Heck, he was on the cover of that album in some parts of world) that Peter Banks had played on the album, and was sort of expected to slot into the spot in a band that had developed around Peter Banks.

I think the Yes guitar sound as sort of completed by Steve Howe was started by Peter Banks, and if you threw Steve Howe in without Peter Banks having preceded him, he'd still have been a great guitarist, but it would have been a different sound in many respects. Steve seemed to take what Peter had done, what he had, and combined them and built on them. Without Peter, he's building on someone else or building blind. The two guitarists to my ear have a similar style of guitar, it's just that Steve was a talent who could sort of even transcend the style, but Peter is a key part of the final sound that Steve eventually arrived at, as it were.

I actually think that's even more true than like Steve and Trevor Rabin or something. There you had two very talented gentleman, with two very different styles, and I think at least on the first two albums he was with Yes, Trevor basically did his own thing (Although the sort of big guitar part that opens "Owner of a Lonely Heart" is at least vaguely reminiscent of the way Steve Howe's Asia's "Heat of the Moment", released the previous year). Maybe by Talk Trevor was a little influenced, mainly in the sense of trying something epic in scope like the 70s Yes, and of course Trevor played a lot of Steve parts live touring his first couple of albums adapted to his own style, and Steve played the bare minimum of Trevor's songs with no appreciable impact on Steve, but like Peter Banks to Steve Howe is much more of one guy taking in and expanding on the next rather than starting over completely.

When Peter Banks sued and claimed he'd come up with the opening chords of "Roundabout", I didn't think it was true, but it was at least a little plausible in that Steve was building on Peter's sound and one feels like Peter could have maybe come up with something like that under the right circumstances.

Though the move to Steve Howe was obviously what was best for Yes, it's kind of unfortunate that Peter Banks never really found another great band to be part of, except arguably the relatively short lived Flash. I really like the Prog Collective song, "Social Circles", he played on with Billy Sherwood and Annie Haslam. I don't know if that was or wasn't the last song he played on in general, but it was the last song he did that was sort of in my sphere of musical interest, and it was a good coda for him in my book. I know there's a lot of instrumental stuff that you can buy that was done later with Empire and solo, and some people enjoy that, but, for me, I think of "Social Circles" as sort of the song that is significant for me personally as his sort of comeback and goodbye, as it were. He still sounded good all those decades later.