Don't remember much about the show but I do remember meeting Rick Wakeman. I had seats on the floor and on my way to the men's room I saw him standing in one of the tunnels taking in Lindisfarne. Went over, said hello and shook his had. He was very gracious.

I didn't want to go and my friend got tix and made me come with her!
I don't remember much except that I was thinking I knew Yes mainly from the "hit" Roundabout, and as soon as they started playing other songs like SSOS and all of the CTTE masterpieces, I recalled that I'd heard this all on WLIR (local great radio station) and was a lifelong fan from then on!!

well on the anniversary of 32 years, my memory is somewhat vague. i do remember seeing rick's keyboard setup and being totally in awe. as far as the music, i remember hots, yind, ctte, ym/agp. the highlight was rick's keyboard solo. this was my first of 20 yesshows. i also recall it was rather cold out with a full moon. also plenty of weed and hashish. lindisfarne was a disappointment. while this was not yes's best show, it was still exciting since it was my first time and i got to hear all their classic songs from the early phase of yes with rick and alan.

Actually, Yessongs (the album) is compiled from several concerts from the 'Fragile' and 'Close to the Edge' tours, as indicated in the liner notes...and made obvious by the fact that both Bruford and White appear as drummers. At least two of the tracks -- Close to the Edge and Starship Trooper -- are from the 12/72 shows at London's Rainbow Theater, and are presented in the Yessongs movie.

This was the most experimentally improvised as well as my first and favorite of all the Yes shows attended. Each member used extremely different kinds of musical structures within their solos, so much so that at times it was even shocking. "Oh My God!" (said slowly and evenly) was pretty big back then for the few who had it in them to be able to appreciate Yes at a live venue. Yes also sometimes experimented with structural parts of their songs, occaionally leaving out entire sections and at other times adding whole new sections. When Alan White joined Yes, the band gradually changed their style. When I saw this concert, Yes didn't sound like they did on Yessongs, an album compiled from recordings made on 12/15/72. Instead Yes still played a little more like they had on the "Close To The Edge" album in spirit and in content. That is, Yes at the time they recorded Close To The Edge" and before that as well, had a more introspective and dynamic style but after Alan "White joined the band their performances became more oriented toward a more mainstream rock sound, along with its greater emphasis on rythmic > drive and heavier volume. I recall hearing 'Yessongs' when it first came out and thinking how much worse they sounded compared to this concert from the same tour which had the same high energy level as 'Yessongs', but without the distorted mainstream rock sound, and sloppiness when compared to the studio album versions of the songs. Then I came across a bootleg of this show I attended. I will trust the bootleg I received is from the concert I attended. From hearing it I now think Yes were more polished on the Yessongs performances then on this concert in which I saw them. Hearing this bootleg also taught me that a bootleg recording is a misleading thing because musicians sound much different and much better when you attended the actual live event than they do on a recording, even one which is professionally produced such as Yessongs. Anyhoe, I remember while I was at the concert that it was like stepping into some kind of> >abstract, fragmented, hyper futuristic art although often showing a traditional> > human soul. I mean, those weird solo organ breaks in the beginning of 'Heart of the Sunrise', for example were different then either 'Yessongs' or the studio album versions. And until I heard the bootleg, I remembered the guitar break with the wah wah pedal in 'Yours is no Disgrace' to have sounded at one point like he was breaking glass and then scraping the broken shards. Perhaps my bootleg recording couldn't pick up these subtlties that I remember and only hearing them live can do that. (Great tough guy routine!) The light show complimented all the music changes so powerfully. The whole band gave off the impression of being like a super beings. Each bandmember different from the other. A lot to try to look at simultaneously. I kept thinking " men from the beginning of time inside of young bodies". Chris Squire seemed to bounce and float in slow motion as did the music from his bass guitar. Jon Anderson looked like some broadway singer/entertainer from the early days of film, and had an aura to the vocals of a time gone by of the simple innocence of song. He gave the band a very comfortable human element in that way. I don't want to say Shirly Temple. His lyrics, his melodies, so provocative, so sweeping in their implications, subtle suggestions and he weaved in and out of different spiritual entities more commonly thought of in the classification of musical style, situation, historic event, time or place. This was way before anyone incorporated world music into their own music. This man is a musical and artistic visionary. He just stood there pretty much. Sometimes he swayed. Alan White, (I just watch the guy move while he's playing and I'm into the music) was great to watch. Looking at him you could see the "time" of the music which wasn't always so clear to my ears given my seats were halfway back and halfway up in a big basketball arena- an acousical nightmare. But since he moved in time with the underlying beat I couldn't help being into the music. What an inspired and joyful player he was and still is - a superb guy too! Rick Wakeman looked like a switchboard operator standing sideways to the audience plugging wires into his wall of keyboard input jacks jerkily in time to the music every few beats. Schizophrenic in residence. A homeless man dressed like a king. Of course he was great. I think I cried during his solo spot. Steve Howe was the picture of perfect physical form and control, so joined with his guitar and the group it seemed at times any deliberate or extraneous movement - if he twitched or went to swat a dust barnacle off of himself, or even sneezed, beauty would take shape from his guitar playing as a result. He is very much and does very much musically like Jon Anderson. He was jumping and dancing around like a marionette's puppet, a controlled acrobat or a cat at other times. He had a most amazing perfectly formed almost statuesquely waxed figure type look to him - angular hair, piercing eyes that seemed to look right through you like the window that Yes music provides. His fingers, equally as long, sinewy, and nimble as the rest of his body, played seemingly impossibly beautiful things on the guitar. He was in a sense, scary, as if he could do anything, like an evil magician. His playing was, and has remained, the most inpirationally impactful musical force on me. The agony and the ecstacy. It was an amazing experience. At one point during a solo, I'm not sure now after hearing the bootleg if it was the end of the "Close to the Edge" solo but I remember he was bouncing his ES175 (guitar) on his knee while tapping the frets of the guitar with both hands simultaneously in opposite directions. And, it sounded very musical. He did an acoustic guitar medley in my recollection of the concert which was not in evidence of the bootleg tape, a medely which started with "Mood for a Day", then moved into some Renaissance classical lute stuff that sounded like "Greensleeves" then if memory serves, what sounded to be some excerpts from "Classical Gas" and then picked up from the middle of "Clap", (the part where he strums a secondary dominant chord before each whole step ascending chord on each beat of the rhythmic pulse, each chord having one melody note, making for an ascending chromatic melody line) and then played "Clap" to its conclusion. I was so mesmerized that it didn't hit me that I was listening to "Clap" until he was playing "Clap" for an entire minute or so!!! On the bootleg tape I have, he played Mood For A Day and then Clap. My tape is choppy in that a lot of the songs start abruply and some end abruptly and the talking between the songs is edited out, so maybe Steve Howe did play a medely. From what I heard on my tape I've heard other performances of Clap but this one is amoung his very best performances. Mood For A Day also approached a great introspective energy more characteristic of Yes' work closer to the time period that they recorded "Close To The Edge". The part of the show that best summed it up for me was that so transfixed was I (this is beginning to sound like Edgar Allen Poe's descriptions of his hallucinations in "The Pit and the Pendulum") so transformed was reality that my friend was tapping me on the shoulder and yelling "Rick!, they're doing ""Close to the Edge""!! "Rick! You're missing it"!! Well, it's not that I wasn't cognizant of that. It was perhaps just that I had a different type of awareness at the time. It was toward the end of the opening guitar solo of "Close to the Edge".