Oil Well – RSC 060 CD
1 Sound Chasero 12:13
2 To Be Over 9:21
3 Close To The Edge 20:33
4 And You And I 9:55
5 Round about 8:25
6 I See All Good People 7:12
All songs by Yes.
Tracks 1,2,3,4,5 recorded live in Boston, MA December 11, 1974
Track 6 recoded live at Greeensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina November 12 1972
Lineup:
Jon Anderson - Vocals
Steve Howe - Guitars
Patrick Moraz - Keyboards (track 1-5)
Rick Wakeman - Keyboards (track: 6)
Chris Squire - Bass
Alan White - Drums
This rare bootleg is a clone of: Close To The Edge - (Alegra CD 9018)
This Oil Well version has a fine cover, fine quality. Limited to 200 copies only. Due to its rarity and good quality, this disc is recommended.
All songs recorded live at Boston Gardens, December 11, 1974, 1974 except "I See All People" recorded live on 12 November 1972 at Greeensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina and released officially on: "Yessongs" (4 May 1973)
Read below for more informations!
Quality content:
© Official released material:
Track 6 has been released officially on: "Yessongs" (4 May 1973)
Live at Greeensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina November 12 1972 has been released officially on: "Progeny: Seven Shows from Seventy-Two" (2015)
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Yes live at Boston Garden - 11th December 1974Recorded live at the Boston Grardens, Boston, MA for the 'King Biscuit Flower Hour' programme on 11th December 1974. Excellent quality radio broadcast. This is a really great sounding recording of Yes from the Relayer Tour back in 1974. This recording appears to have originated from a pre-FM copy intended for broadcast in 1975. Whenever Yes played a Northeast US tour date the response was overwhelming, and this Connecticut gig is no exception.
This is classic Yes, with many of the band's cornerstone songs performed in this show, first heard 34 years ago. "Close To The Edge," "Soon," "And You And I," and "Roundabout" are clearly the highlights and are placed at key points during the show, around less well-known tracks, such as "The Gates of Delirium."
Yes, one of the most successful of all the progressive rock bands to come out of the UK, is featured here in their 1974-1976 incarnation, with Patrick Moraz on keyboards during Rick Wakeman's "sabbatical." It was 1974 and the band was at its commercial peak with albums like Fragile and Close To The Edge dominating the charts both here and in Europe. As with their contemporaries ELP and King Crimson, Yes had taken the musicality of prog-rock and brought it to the masses. In retrospect, the prog movement of the '70s was the fore-runner to the popular "jam band" movement of the late-'90s and early-'00s. Vocalist Jon Anderson is in fine form and was probably at the peak of his vocal prowess when this performance was recorded for the King Biscuit Flower Hour in 1974.
This line-up of the band, which featured original members Anderson and bassist Chris Squire, as well as guitarist Steve Howe, drummer Alan White, and keyboardist Moraz remained intact until Wakeman returned to replace Moraz in 1976. The Close To The Edge-era line-up reformed in the late-'90s and has toured on-and-off since then. They are currently planning a North America tour for summer 2008, which would have the distinction of celebrating the band's 40th Anniversary.
A sad life truth is that, for far too many people, massive success changes everything. Despite making more money than would last the average family many lifetimes, they go through it like water; they gradually begin to believe all the positive press and massive sales, becoming legends in their own mind; and, perhaps worst of all, they lose the very edge and innovation that garnered them their success in the first place. Sadly, too, these things often don't bother fans: as long as their heroes continue to tour and play the music that meant so much to them in their youths, the majority of audiences are perfectly happy to accept artists who, by resting heavily on their laurels, have lost everything that made them great in the first place.
This is, of course, not always the case, but listening to Yes' archival box set Progeny: Seven Shows from Seventy-Two, it only serves to demonstrate just how far a group that helped define progressive rock—at its best and its worst—has fallen in the ensuing decades, as internal conflict, egos and a loss of the fire and creativity that made its early days so enduring have turned the group into a pale shadow of its former self, releasing new material that's a far cry from the greatness of its glory days and largely touring on the shoulders of its classic era from 1971 to 1977, when the band released such groundbreaking records as The Yes Album (Atlantic, 1971), Close to the Edge (Atlantic, 1972) and Relayer (Atlantic, 1974).
And groundbreaking records they most certainly were, along with other albums including Fragile (Atlantic, 1971)—which garnered the group its first major hit in "Roundabout"—the controversial two-LP concept album Tales from Topographic Oceans (Atlantic, 1973) and Going for the One (Atlantic, 1977), the final album in what is considered the group's "classic" period...and by which time problems were already beginning to surface.
Still, these were all albums that, each in their own way, helped change the musical landscape of the early-to-mid-'70s and beyond—a time when it seemed like anything was possible, and that both the music industry and fans were open to such possibilities. Yes albums sold hundreds of thousands of copies—in some cases, millions—and the group packed increasingly large venues, putting on shows that were filled with complex compositions, mind-boggling virtuosity and unrelenting creativity. It's not hard to imagine why such success would go to the heads of many of the group's members, but the shame is that, as time went on after these glory days, there would only be the occasional reminder of Yes' past innovations, counterbalanced with far more material that might be considered good from bands of lesser stature, but from Yes?
Bruford quitsWhen Yes hit the road in support of Close to the Edge in 1972, it had to deal with the crushing blow of losing one of its founding members, drummer Bill Bruford, who left the band on the cusp of its biggest success (and a major tour) to join a new lineup of King Crimson that would release three studio albums, each with slightly altered lineups but all including the power trio of the group's only remaining original member, guitarist Robert Fripp, along with bassist/vocalist John Wetton and Bruford. While it might not have been a big deal to replace some drummers, Bruford had already distinguished himself with both a unique sound (in particular his snare drum and the overall way he tuned his kit) and mathematically precise way of playing. And so, while Alan White was no stranger to the big time—having already racked up major gigs on albums by ex-Beatles John Lennon and George Harrison, along with those of rising stars Joe Cocker and soon-to-be-ex-Spooky Tooth keyboardist Gary Wright—he had some might big boots to fill.
White was certainly no slouch back in the day. Though his kit sound was more conventional, causing some Yes fans to bemoan to loss of Bruford (some, still, to this day), his ability to learn Yes' compositionally challenging music in just three days before hitting the road with the group remains a feat of Herculean proportions. Close to the Edge, after all, was an album with just three tracks: the side-long title epic (created by splicing together a number of separately recorded movements), along with two tracks on the LP's other side that both hovered on or near the ten-minute mark.
And that was just three tunes in a live set that also included two songs from The Yes Album (the alternately folky and rock-and-rolling "I've Seen All Good People" and an extended encore of the album's instantly attention-grabbing opener, "Your is No Disgrace"), along with two from Fragile (the particularly complicated and episodic "Heart of the Sunrise" and, of course, the group's hit "Roundabout").
As well, the sets were fleshed out with solo features for both guitarist Steve Howe—who, replacing original guitarist Peter Banks on The Yes Album, helped signal a new direction for the band—and keyboardist Rick Wakeman, who replaced founding keyboardist Tony Kaye and completed the puzzle that became Yes' classic lineup by being capable of matching Howe's remarkable stylistic breadth and outrageous virtuosity light-speed note for light-speed note.
That's nine songs in shows ranging from 95 to 103 minutes, with White playing on seven of them alongside, in addition to Howe and Wakeman, group co-founder/bassist Chris Squire—whose bright but thundering Rickenbacker bass tone and ability to be both anchor and contrapuntal partner became a touchstone for generations of bassists to come—and fellow co-founder/singer Jon Anderson, whose soaring, high-pitched (but never shrill...always beautiful) vocals combined with Howe and Squire to create what some compared to the similarly sweet harmonies of America's Crosby, Stills & Nash.
There have been, in the history of rock music, groups for whom listening to multiple shows from the same tour could yield significantly different (and magical) results, in particular prescient jam bands bands like the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band, but also groups more closely affiliated with Yes like King Crimson—which, with Bruford in tow, made spontaneous improvisational forays such a big part of its shows that recent mega-box sets including Larks Tongues in Aspic (40th Anniversary Series Box) (Panegyric, 2012), Starless (Panegyric, 2014) and The Road to Red (Panegyric, 2013), which collectively presented over 30 shows recorded across a twenty-month period, sold in the thousands at at time when most artists are struggling to achieve similar numbers with less expensive single-disc releases.
Yessongs
But given Yes' less improv-heavy disposition and greater tendency to detailed compositional constructs, is there really value in hearing seven shows recorded between October 31 and November 20, 1972—sets that were almost identical, with the exception of Howe occasionally flipping his solo medley of the countrified "Clap" and more classically oriented "Mood for a Day," and one show where, for technical reasons, that medley was placed between "I've Seen All Good People" and "Heart of the Sunrise" rather than between "Heart of the Sunrise" and "And You And I"? The answer, surprising though it may be, is an absolute, unequivocal—and, with no pun intended—yes. The group's arrangements may not have changed from night to night, but beyond the more obvious differences in Howe's and Wakeman's solos from one show to the next, it was how the entire band interpreted the material that makes Progeny such a vital and important addition to the Yes catalog.Yes, there was a live album at the time—the triple-LP set Yessongs (Atlantic, 1973)—which, in addition to documenting this tour by collecting what were considered some of Yes' best performances, also included a couple of tunes from Bruford'a final tour with the group. But, as superb as the performances are on that live album (since reissued as a two-CD set), it was sadly marred by muddy sound and a mix that did not replicate the positioning of the band members across the soundstage and, consequently, didn't serve the individual players' work as well as it should have.
What a treat, then, to discover that while Progeny may lack show-stopping tracks from The Yes Album like "Starship Trooper" and "Perpetual Change," or Fragile's medley of "Long Distance Runaround" and "The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)"—the latter a feature for Squire that positioned him as creative and virtuosic a partner as Howe and Wakeman—the seven shows presented here are orders of magnitude better, sonically speaking. And by mixing the band as it was on stage—with Howe to the far left, Anderson next followed by White, Squire and, on the far right, Wakeman—the delineation between the musicians is much greater, making Howe and Wakeman's parts, in particular, that much clearer than they were on Yessongs, revealing so much more about the chances they took each night and making every performance different and worth hearing, This was a time when the group was still young and hungry. Just looking at the photos in the box set booklet, which includes liners by Syd Schwartz and co-producer Brian Kehew, it's clear that this was a band that was happy and having fun...a far cry from today's Yes where, at least for some members, it looks like a stage on which they'd rather be anywhere but.
Squire's tone is finally captured as it was live; massive at the bottom end and crystal clear at the top, he proves himself adept at taking fixed arrangements and breathing new life into them, night after night. Considering that early in the tour the bassist had to perform such difficult music while, at the same time (with his back to the audience) helping to guide White through these knotty compositions only serves to demonstrate how well he had internalized this music, and it's that kind of internalization that allowed him—and the rest of the group—to take the music out of its glass box and turn it into a living, breathing thing.
Anderson's voice
And what of White? He joined Yes with mighty big shoes to fill and, while his kit tone isn't as distinctive, on these performances he plays with a fire and commitment that more than makes up for it. By the time of these seven shows, White had become completely familiar with the material, affording him the same opportunity to extemporize while, at the same time, hitting every cue with laser-like precision. Beyond his work on Relayer, in fact, his playing on Progeny may well be his finest recorded moments with the group. Ever.
That the performances on Progeny are so stellar doesn't meant there aren't a few warts. Howe loses himself at one point during that frenetic introductory segment of "Close to the Edge" in Greensboro, NC, and it's a bit of a tough slog to find his way back...but find his way back he does. Wakeman was plagued with technical problems throughout the tour, in particular somehow managing to turn his keyboard arsenal into a radio receiver so that, in the Toronto, Canada show it comes through loud and clear during his solo segment. During another show, Anderson's voice cuts out and at yet another, during Howe's solo feature, his acoustic guitar suddenly becomes much brighter and more strongly positioned on the far left of the soundstage. And while the three-part harmonies are, for the most part impeccable, there are a few clams to be found, here and there.
But overall, this is a collection of Yes at its transcendent, majestic, grandiose...and, yes, hard-rocking best. For the more casual fan there's Progeny: Highlights from Seventy-Two, a two-CD set that cherry picks from the seven performances to create a "best of" replication of every evening's set list, as well as a three-LP version of the same compilation. But for those who are committed Yes fans, Progeny: Seven Shows from Seventy-Two is an essential document of Yes when it was young, with a powerful fire in its belly and innovation oozing from every pore. It's an essential addition to the group's sizeable discography—capturing, as it does, the band before it began to implode from within with personnel problems and artistic differences; and before it became a bloated but pale shadow of its former self, during a period of peak creativity when Yes was one of but a few groups who ruled the prog world...and beyond.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/yes-progeny-seven-shows-from-seventy-two-by-john-kelman.php
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