The new Yes release that came out on Record Store Day presents an entire concert the British progressive rock band performed on November 15, 1972. A 3-LP set, Live at Knoxville Civic Coliseum, Knoxville, Tennessee captures a period of transition for Yes. Right after the band spent months squeezing in recording sessions during the Fragile tour in order to record Close to the Edge, it was time to go on tour again. However, there was one major complication: Bill Bruford, who had been the drummer for the group since the first album (CTTE was the fifth), decided to join forces with King Crimson.
Replacing Bruford presented an interesting challenge for the new drummer, Alan White, who passed away on May 26, 2022. White had to learn, at warp speed, songs that were extremely complex. Knoxville presents a show from early in the tour, and the band is in fine form. Bruford was a brilliant drummer, but White’s heavier sound and more aggressive attack seemed to fit the larger venues the band was starting to play during this tour. Already an aggressive bass player, Chris Squire became that much more animated, and the band as a whole rocked considerably harder than before while retaining their epic sweep.
Almost everything on Knoxville stems from The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to the Edge. With their extreme use of dynamics, songs like “Heart of the Sunrise,” “I’ve Seen All Good People,” “Roundabout,” “And You And I,” and “Yours Is No Disgrace” begged to be played live, and what you hear on these tracks (and also heard on Yessongs, which was mostly recorded later in the tour) is the kind of live energy that’s can’t be captured in a studio. A definite highlight is “And You and I.” On the CTTE version, Howe mostly sticks to acoustic guitar (plus some steel guitar when things get epic), but the ringing sound of his electric guitar has its own appeal here. (Howe’s solo acoustic performances of “Clap” and “Mood for a Day” are also a treat.) The dramatic use of dynamics in “Heart of the Sunrise” also packs a punch live—and overall, the music from this period of Yes was a master class in dynamics.
My favorite performance here is “Yours Is No Disgrace,” which is longer than the Yessongs version. For Yes, there are points during this performance when the players actually sound a bit loose, if you can imagine that, with Rick Wakeman sneaking in some honky-tonk riffs on acoustic piano while Steve Howe throws in a few twangs on electric guitar. Eventually, though, the noodling gives way to some big, bombastic guitar chords from Steve Howe while Alan White pounds the skins aggressively. Suddenly the band is rocking in an unconventional way, once making it clear that these progsters were fully prepared to take on the arenas.
By Jeff Wilson
This will take some explaining, but I can connect the dots between pawing through LPs at a headshop called Elysian Fields in Des Moines, Iowa, as a seventh grader, and becoming the Music Editor for The Absolute Sound. At that starting point—around 1970/71—Elysian Fields had more LPs than any other store in Des Moines. Staring at all the colorful covers was both tantalizing and frustrating. I had no idea who most of the artists were, because radio played only a fraction of what was current. To figure out what was going on, I realized that I needed to build a record collection—and as anyone who’s visited me since high school can testify, I succeeded. Record collecting was still in my blood when, starting in the late 1980s, the Cincinnati Public Library book sale suddenly had an Elysian Fields quantity of LPs from people who’d switched to CDs. That’s where I met fellow record hawk Mark Lehman, who preceded me as music editor of TAS. Mark introduced me to Jonathan Valin, whose 1993 detective novel The Music Lovers depicts the battles between record hawks at library sales. That the private eye in the book, Harry Stoner, would stumble upon a corpse or two while unraveling the mystery behind the disappearance of some rare Living Stereo platters made perfect sense to me. After all, record collecting is serious business. Mark knew my journalistic experience included concert reviews for The Cincinnati Enquirer and several long, sprawling feature articles in the online version of Crawdaddy. When he became TAS music editor in 2008, he contacted me about writing for the magazine. I came on board shortly after the latest set of obituaries had been written for vinyl—and, as fate had it, right when the LP started to make yet another unexpected comeback. Suddenly, I found myself scrambling to document all the record companies pressing vinyl. Small outfits were popping up world-wide, and many were audiophile-oriented, plus already existing record companies began embracing the format again. Trying to keep track of everything made me feel, again, like that overwhelmed seventh grader in Elysian Fields, and as Music Editor I’ve found that keeping my finger on the pulse of the music world also requires considerable detective work. I’ve never had a favorite genre, but when it comes time to sit down and do some quality listening, for me nothing beats a well-recorded small-group jazz recording on vinyl. If a stereo can give me warmth and intimacy, tonal accuracy, clear imaging, crisp-sounding cymbals, and deep, woody-sounding bass, then I’m a happy camper.
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