Asia 'The Definitive Collection' album

The definitive Asia is back on album and on stage as the reunion of the original lineup of the progressive rock powerhouse that was the first supergroup of the age of MTV takes place this summer. With the four founding members--Geoff Downes, Steve Howe, Carl Palmer and John Wetton--heading out on tour to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the band’s formation by playing together for the first time since 1983, Asia: The Definitive Collection (Geffen/UMe), released September 12, 2006, brings together all of Asia’s hits and key tracks plus the never-before-on-CD 12” remix of 1985’s “Go.”

The album’s 16 selections, each digitally remastered from the original master tapes, span all four of Asia’s Geffen albums. The package also includes extensive liner notes, archival information and photos.

In 1981, singer-bassist John Wetton (via King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and his own group U.K.) teamed with Yes guitarist Steve Howe. Next on board was drummer Carl Palmer, from Emerson, Lake and Palmer. They then enlisted keyboardist Geoff Downes, an original member of The Buggles who had replaced Rick Wakeman in Yes. When the quartet’s self-titled debut arrived in 1982, it was an instant smash. Quadruple platinum, Asia shot to #1 and stayed there nine weeks. Not only was the album one of the most successful debuts in history but only a handful of albums, such as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, have been #1 longer. The Definitive Collection includes its hits “Heat Of The Moment” (#4 pop) and “Only Time Will Tell” (#17 pop) as well as “Sole Survivor,” “Wildest Dreams” and “Here Comes The Feeling.”

The band followed with 1983’s Alpha, which went Top 10 and platinum, boasting “Don’t Cry” (#10 pop) and “The Smile Has Left Your Eyes” (#34 pop) plus “The Heat Goes On” and “Open Your Eyes.” The Definitive Collection also adds “Daylight,” the non-LP b-side of “Don’t Cry.” After the exit of Howe (replaced by Mandy Meyer), and a short stint with Greg Lake replacing Wetton, Asia issued Astra in 1985. Its “Go” and “Too Late” were Album Rock hits while “Voice Of America” and “Wishing” became fan favorites. The members then went their separate ways, with Wetton, Downes and Palmer returning for 1990’s Then And Now, a gold greatest hits package which also introduced new songs, among them “Days Like These” with Toto guitarist Steve Lukather.

Since the original Asia toured for only a couple of years, 2006’s reunion tour (sponsored by Sirius and VH1 Classic) promises to reach fans who missed the group the first time. Meanwhile, Asia: The Definitive Collection will remind all fans of a music that is as distinctive and exceptional today as it was 25 years ago.

Liner Notes

Reaching the pinnacle of success in the music business has often been compared to being struck by lightning. In both cases, the odds are about the same, and the chances of lightning striking twice in the same spot are practically non-existent. But once in a generation, the impossible happens. A supergroup emerges, created by veterans of classic bands looking to meet the challenge of their collective legacy. In their brief but remarkable career (as the original line-up), Asia more than lived up to that challenge. Responsible for one of the best-selling, best-loved debut albums of all time, Asia reached even greater heights than most of the world-renowned acts that preceded them. And they did so not by resting on their laurels and taking the safe, expected musical route, but rather by creating a sound that is theirs and theirs alone.

The Asia story begins with singer/bassist John Wetton. Late of the groundbreaking King Crimson, the latter half of the 1970s found Wetton adrift. Following the breakup of that band, Wetton bided his time serving as a sideman bassist for Roxy Music and Uriah Heep. While session work paid the bills, it failed to satisfy Wetton’s creative hunger, as the full range of his talents as a singer and songwriter were denied expression. A backstage meeting with legendary A&R man John Kalodner after a Roxy Music show proved to be a turning point when Kalodner, recognizing Wetton’s wealth of untapped potential, pledged that he would one day make him a star.

Meanwhile, Wetton fronted the progressive fusion trio UK, but when they too split, Wetton was once again without a suitable vehicle for his gifts. With his career at a crossroads, Wetton severed his ties with his record label and management. Linking with Yes’ manager Brian Lane, and with the support of Kalodner, Wetton set about forming an outfit in which he could achieve his full capacity as a musician, songwriter, and frontman.

Steve Howe, legendary guitarist with Yes, also found his career in flux in the early part of the ’80s. Yes had been one of the most highly acclaimed and popular attractions of the 1970s, but by decade’s end they were in shambles. During preparation for an aborted album, singer Jon Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman quit the band. While many acts would have folded under the strain, the remainder of Yes regrouped in a London studio in early 1980. Recording in an adjoining room were “Video Killed The Radio Star” hitmakers Geoff Downes and Trevor Horn, better known as the Buggles. A chance meeting between the Yes men and the Buggles led to a song collaboration, which in turn led to an invitation for Downes and Horn to join Yes. Although the new wave rooted Buggles duo seemed strange bedfellows for the venerable proggers, both men were enormous Yes fans and the underrated 1980 album Drama should have quashed any doubts about the restructured unit’s viability. Yet fan reaction to the new lineup was poor, and after completing the Drama tour, the band was at loose ends. Howe recalls, “After Drama, Yes disbanded somewhere around January 1981. A few months went by, and then the phone rang one day and [Yes’ manager] Brian Lane said he’d been speaking with John Wetton, who wasn’t doing anything—“‘Do you want to get together and try to get something going?’ We met in a small and poky rehearsal room and we spent a day in there just with a guitar and an amp, and a bass and an amp. We sat there and John really blew me away completely by playing the most incredible bass stuff.”

The meeting proved fruitful, and those early sessions produced rough demos of several songs which would eventually be recorded by Asia, including “Here Comes The Feeling.” With strong potential already evident, Howe and Wetton began searching for compatible bandmates. Howe recalls, “John Wetton and I played with a few other musicians and picked the best of what we had. We didn’t have a supergroup concept in mind. It just happened that the quality of the musicians I needed and wanted to play with were of this ilk.” After jamming with several drummers, Wetton and Howe found the perfect fit in Emerson, Lake and Palmer powerhouse Carl Palmer.

Palmer told Modern Drummer magazine, “I got a phone call asking me if I would like to come and play in a band that had Steve Howe in it. Well, I’d known Steve for a long time, and I’d also known the manager [Lane] for a long time. I came and played; there was John Wetton, Steve Howe and myself—no keyboard player. I wasn’t too happy with that because I felt that, with the amount of technology available (today), not to have a keyboard player (was) a bad idea. So I suggested we have a keyboard player, and Steve Howe, having played with Geoff Downes in the last configuration of Yes, suggested we try him. It seemed good to me, so the four of us played and decided to be a band after about a week because it felt good.”

Downes: “When Yes broke up, Trevor [Horn] and I decided to go back in and make another Buggles album . . . I think we were about halfway through it when John [Wetton] gave me a call and said would I be interested in playing with them. Not being one to pass up an important opportunity . . .”

Although the last member to join, Downes immediately jelled as a writer with John Wetton. Both men came from families heavily involved in church choirs, and they envisioned a band that could translate the emotional power of massed singing to a rock context. Wetton explained, “It was harmony vocals on the chorus, the way that the vocal would be presented. In your face.”

With the progressive era behind them, the band intentionally set out to create something new and different, regardless of the hopes and expectations of their many fans. The key, as Howe told Guitar Player, was to simplify the music they had always made. “In this group, we’re taking, in many ways, the same sort of material and not de-commercializing it; not expanding and extending quite so much. In other words, we’re keeping the music as fresh, as energetic and as to the point as we can.” Wetton: “I figured that in order to survive in the 1980s, you have to stop being a band of the 1970s. You have to condense more and be more direct: cut the soloing. So you play for four minutes instead of the eight you used to play.”

Work on the debut album, the self-titled Asia, progressed quickly, drawing upon material from the early Wetton/Howe rehearsals, as well as newly penned Wetton/Downes compositions. Yet the best-known track on that album—the song which would propel Asia ahead of their collective past and to the forefront of modern rock—was something of an afterthought. Wetton: “We wrote two songs while we were recording, one of which was ‘Heat Of The Moment.’ We did it one night after we’d finished and put it down on a demo. It didn’t come out too well and nobody liked it much, but we decided to keep going at it, and soon realized we could turn it into something . . .”

Turn it into something they did, and “Heat Of The Moment” became Asia’s debut single. While expectations were justifiably high for a group with such a noteworthy pedigree, what happened next was unprecedented. Asia’s “Heat Of The Moment” entered the charts higher than new songs by established acts like Foreigner, racing into the American Top 5 and besting the chart peaks of all of their prior groups. The debut album performed even stronger, reaching #1 on the Billboard album charts on May 15, 1982. It remained perched atop the charts for an astonishing nine weeks, and spent many more weeks in the Top Ten. The second single, “Only Time Will Tell,” reached the Top Twenty. No fewer than six of its nine tracks received enough airplay to make the national charts, and the group received a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist of 1982.

Asia burst out of the speakers with a sound that was at once commercial and challenging, hummable yet edgy; occasionally simplistic, yet always thoroughly musical. One listen to Palmer’s intense drum break in “Wildest Dreams” or the intricate, Howe-led intro to “Time Again” revealed the new outfit’s progressive roots, yet Asia’s true strength lay in the already finely integrated group’s unique take on rock. As Palmer explained to Modern Drummer, “We have tried to create a sound collectively rather than project as individuals.” Where many of their contemporaries relied on synth-pop chicanery, Asia placed the emphasis on well-written, intelligent songs. “Asia would not have succeeded had it not been for the fact that songs were concrete,” Wetton reasoned. “They hit the radio like a ton of bricks when everything else on the radio was A Flock Of Seagulls and Human League. Asia hit the radio and people went, ‘Oh, that’s what real music sounds like. Yeah, okay. Let’s forget about these hairdressers. Let’s get on with the real thing.’”

In just six months, the album Asia sold five million copies, and a tour which had originally planned to focus on small college venues became something much larger. But refusing to rely on the proven set pieces of their old bands, Asia was left with little more than forty-five minutes worth of original material to perform in concert. Rather than remaining on the road, Asia took a short break, then began working on their next LP, Alpha (1983). As Geoff Downes recalled, “When Steve went back to his family, John and myself carried on, and essentially prepared the second album on our own. We stayed on in America for a few weeks, rented a villa in Los Angeles and wrote songs like ‘The Heat Goes On’ and ‘Open Your Eyes.’ When we got back to England, we got our heads together, and spent a few months on what was effectively the next album.” Wetton: “We had a writing relationship which was insatiable. Whenever we sat down together, something would happen. It was going like an express train.” As on the first album, Alpha’s best-known track came together on the spur of the moment. Downes told the Source radio network, “‘Don’t Cry’ was the last song we wrote for the album. We actually wrote it in a bit of a hurry, because we felt we didn’t have the right track to kick the album off with . . . I had an idea, John had another idea and we cemented them together.”

Another of Alpha’s highlights was a song that had its debut during the tour for the first album. “The Smile Has Left Your Eyes,” issued as the second single off Alpha, was the only song on the album that Geoff Downes didn’t have a hand in composing. But as his writing partner revealed, the song could not have happened without him. Wetton: “He [Downes] was going through a complete emotional turmoil over a girl . . . and I identified so strongly that I went home and wrote the song in five minutes. Boom! Sat right down at the piano and there it was. If anything’s straight from the heart, that song is.” Meanwhile, the majestic “The Heat Goes On” continued a theme from their debut single, and nearly equaled its predecessor’s peak on the rock charts. Yet while Asia appeared to be on top of the world, internal unrest was slowly gnawing away at their unity.

A confusing series of personnel shakeups culminated with Howe’s departure from the band midway through the sessions for the next album, 1985’s Astra. While the loss of such a talent was unfortunate, the Wetton/Downes partnership (abetted by lead guitarist Mandy Meyer) continued to blossom resulting in twenty-five complete new songs, the best of which were pared down to a ten track album. Paced by the single “Go,” which following in Asia’s tradition was the last song to be written for the record, Astra (originally titled Arcadia but changed when Duran Duran’s offshoot band purloined that title) presented a sleeker, more modern Asia, while retaining the big choruses and keyboard washes that defined the band’s sound. But the album was out of step with a 1985 music scene dominated by frothy dance pop and more traditional American sounds, and Astra was sadly and unjustly overlooked. Following promotional efforts for Astra, the members quietly dispersed.

Several years went by, which saw both Wetton and Downes release solo projects with Howe forming GTR (produced by Downes) and Palmer reuniting with Keith Emerson in the Geffen act, “3.” Asia appeared to be a dead issue, until Wetton received a call in 1989 from an English promoter, interested in booking the band for a stadium tour of Germany. Wetton readily agreed, and soon Carl Palmer was back on board. Geoff Downes, then ensconced in a project with Greg Lake, initially declined to participate but gave the reunion his blessing, and the show was on. The tour was a major turning point in the history of Asia. Wetton: “The response was absolutely tremendous. We were playing to German audiences of 35-40,000 . . . We were just overwhelmed by the fact that people recognized the songs. It gave us the confidence to start all over again.” The resurgence of interest did not go unnoticed by Asia’s venerable record label and soon, Geffen Records came calling, interested in releasing a hits package, Then & Now (1990). With the future looking brighter than it had since 1982 and his commitments to Lake’s project completed, Geoff Downes reclaimed his rightful place in Asia. Downes: “To be honest, that was the thing that changed it. I had a call from Geffen saying they were putting together this compilation—would we be interested in putting some new tracks on it? They wanted to see whether the interest was still there . . . They seemed very up for it at the time.” When the newly recorded single, the anthemic, uplifting “Days Like These” raced to the top of the rock charts, it seemed to confirm Asia’s triumphant return. Sadly, while the magic was still there, the reunion would not hold, and by 1991 Asia had fizzled.

Nearly twenty-five years after their inception, Asia is no longer that new band forged out of the ashes of other classic groups. Rather, they have become a rock institution, with a legacy of classic music, and a sound, image, and fan-base that are entirely their own.

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Asia - The Definitive Collection