Yes - Relayer

Yes are touring this next year, but I can guarantee that it won't be fire. It might be passably ok though.

dunno if I've posted this in this thread before but I'm gonna post again because holy shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqR0AP7A_l4

When the pedal steel hits in To Be Over, I'm flying

so over xmas staying w/ny sister in hastings we met up for the evening w/her oldest friend, who she was at school with in the mid-70s and stayed close to ever since — she’s one of my oldest friends too, we all arrived london at the same time and looked after one another in those long-ago days. and we talked abt all of that — including memories of the time the three of us and others (probably her older sister, certainly her older brother, who was driving; a couple of others long forgotten) drove from shrewsbury to stafford in june 1977 to see YES at fabled 70s mega-venue the BINGLEY HALL: the GOING FOR THE ONE tour

anyway since I am spending the weekend packing up the flat I have lived in for 32 years to leave the quarter I have known for 40, and bcz I was therefore in a melancholy and backward-looking mood, I spent 20 mins hunting out and then jigsawing together, on spotify, the setlist for that show, from the relevant albs — my actual-real first rock SPECTACLE. a thing that amuses is that you can now go onto the internet and discover exactly what some act played, and in what order, 46 years ago…

• support act was donovan! (no one cared and the crowd was restive 😔)
• set design was by roger dean! (it was meant to be elfin caves but it looked like torn multi-coloured tights 😔)
• and I quite enjoyed it — tho as always w/music probably as much for the social element as the sound. I had schoolfriends who LOVED yes but they weren’t with us and I was p unfamiliar with the new material. probably I enjoyed the banter in the car there and back as much as the show tbh. we had a giant shopping bag full of ham and chutney sandwiches!

anyway it’s what I’ve been listening to all weekend so here’s a youtube of the actual live material of that tour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9kdRt5bUvA

is this music good or not? i don't know!! patrick moraz possibly wrote more of it than historians allow! routine wakeman deprecation inserted here (he was on-stage in his dumb cape) (everyeone else was in a cape also i think but they looked good not dumb) (here bcz a turrican thread abt a difft alb seems the right place for it)

lol

given a certain poppy zip in parts of GFtO (title track especially) i'm about to attribute as much as possible to Moraz

i feel like moraz (?) was shunting howe a *long* way out of his too-pretty too-fey comfort zone: i never hate how but he's often p wild on this youtube (and of course on GFtO title track) -- i remember he was jerking the steel pedal around on-stage like crazy haha

(which is maybe why he agitated for moraz to get the boot) (howe also a bit of a dick when it comes to teamplay, if the oral histories are a guide)

there's a reason Relayer sounds like they opened a door to wonderful possibilities and then CERTAIN MEMBERS slammed that door shut toot sweet

(it was all of the members except Moraz lol)

i think this tour they were relatively on the same page but next album tormato sowed the seeds of destruction, howe and wakeman and his dumb biotron or whatever it was were filling up every possible space on jon's increasingly twee songs and the sides were drawn. the moraz period plus the yes/buggles version really deserved a second album. i believe the yesshows album documents that tour you saw and some before and after. the funniest thing to me is comparing squire's still proggy outfits in this period to his new wave skinny tie fit on the drama tour

it's been too long, i'd forgotten what a stone cold banger Parallels is as a set opener

dave q on tormato lest we forget: The 120 Days of Shameless Bids for Publicity!

i love moraz on relayer but he had the wrong style for the wakeman stuff when they played the hits live (as they always did). weirdly white was bad at what made bruford great and he was much more accepted, anti-swiss discrimination or some such

"he had the wrong style for the wakeman stuff" = not content to play 30 mins of pisspoor filler arpeggios during the solo spots 😂🤣

(tbf tho i hate him -- rightly and justifably -- everyone is p on point live chops-wise at this time, not always the case by any means)

the tension between the spacey open vocal on the chorus of Parallels and the vroom vroom of the bass says this is maybe Yes's grooviest era

i mean playing in the style of the records, that wembly (?) or big london show they did on the relayer tour, moraz sounds bad on the old stuff but the sound system at the gig was dire tbf. i really like moraz on record, i'm neutral to wakeman in his first go round with yes but yeah he def got worse as the years went on

somewhere (presumably on ilx) i read that moraz had great difficulty staying in tune live -- which is an equipment issue of course not strictly a chops issue -- which wd def fvck up the many passages of keyb sound-colour in the hits, plus of course the fans will always be rise-of-skywalker abt the songs they feel they know and own

as with wembley, bingley hall is also a huge hollow echoey space but i wasn't remotely competent to judge such matters at the time and in fact don't recall this aspect of things one bit

I'll take Wakeman's live fiddly arpeggios over Moraz' "squeeeeee!!" pitch wheel fusionisms. Though I like both keyboardists fine in Yes.

ACAC (all capes are cool)

i listened to a fair amount of the relayer tour live shows this afternoon and
(i) yes there are definitely tuning problems tho it's hard to pin down who's causing them
(ii) moraz has a jazzy tuning palette at figners end that definitely fvcks with anderson's and howe's normal pretty-chords zone of engagement (the kind of thing that can be kept tidy in the studio bcz there you can add the keybs late in the mix)

#notallcapes

Moraz probs would have worked better with Broof on drums. Yesshows is the best live albums of theirs don't you think? Who the hell is doing the weird yelps during the freak out part of Ritual Nu Sommes De Solei!?!

i only started down this long road yesterday -- i do not yet have well developed opinions!

im only really discussing patrick moraz bcz this is the relayer thread and i feel it is incumbent on us all

Yesshows is great, always assumed White was the yelper but i have nothing to back this up

anderson's and howe's normal pretty-chords zone of engagement

That's not entirely fair, they wrote "The Ancient" on Tales, and the weird cadenza in the middle of "Sound Chaser" is 100% Howe.

Wow this remastered footage!!! (With Moraz)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeEqWLpcwiY

hell yeah, that is awesome. are there any full shows out there with Moraz? I don't think anything was released officially but there's probably a good quality boot out there. I did recently see a cool video of him soloing at the end of "Long Distance Runaround" and he plays a lot of quotes from the Refugee album. it's really neat. wonder how many in attendance recognized what he was doing.

That whole QPR show is on YouTube it's AWESOME

wow yeah you aren't kidding. what a crazy setlist too. Moraz definitely has his hands full.

I hope the entire QPR set gets remastered by this dude. Great job!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz3jBBKSkTk

dope af