Marty & Connie B

Note: There’s a story here, a story of Yes fans with their two year-old daughter in the front row. If you care to avoid it, just page down to where "the Actual review" starts.

We had planned a three-day vacation of biking and an evening of Yes music at the local summertime rock fest, Moondance Jam in Walker, MN. This event had Yes headlining the Friday’s line-up, which also included Lamont Cranston, The John Entwistle band and Alan Parsons (touring with Yes). We expected to arrive late Friday evening, say around 8 or 9 p.m., and stroll or sit way-back with our two-year-old, Kendra, in her Burley bike trailer/stroller. Maybe catch AP, maybe not. But that ain’t what happened.

Friday morning, we visited the Moondance Ranch and Wildlife Park to let Kendra run around and pet some deer. While paying for admission (and a few souvenir tees) the clerk bemoaned how she had spent 3-1/2 hours in a traffic jam trying to get into Thursday night’s Jam, and missed half of heartthrob Johnny Lang. We thought, can you imagine sitting in a car for 3-1/2 hours with an unhappy child in a car seat ("pick-up please", "I NEED pick-up", etc.)? We couldn’t, so we changed our plans and arrived at the Jam site at 1:00 pm instead of 8:00 pm! Guess what? At 1:00 p.m. there’s nobody by the stage! So, to make the most of the situation, we parked the Burley and our two folding chairs right up to the fence, opposite Steve Howe’s position and proceeded to wait. 10 hours. 10 long, hot, dusty, sticky hours. Yes, that’s right. To avoid sitting in a traffic jam for 3-1/2 hours we decided to sit in front of a fence in a hot, dusty field for 9 hours. Go figure.

We took turns taking Kendra on walks, or back to the van, and managed to keep her in good spirits until the music started at 5:00 p.m. During the wait we met die-hard Yes fans from Brooklyn park (had gone to the Yestival, and went to the concert in Milwaukee the day after this one!) and St. Cloud (scoffed at us thinking we were big Yes fans when they had seen the CttE concert in ’73 and our first was the solo albums tour in ’76!). We talked about great shows (our favorite was the GftO show in Chicago in ’77). We bemoaned the fact that we (probably) wouldn’t hear anything from KtA 1 or 2. We all wanted to hear Mind Drive. We talked about our kids (the St. Cloud couple had their 10 year old there). We think that Kendra was the youngest fan there. We had gotten rifle range hearing protectors (headphones) for her to protect her ears, but they were hot, which proved to be our/her undoing in the end.

We heard Lamont Cranston-they were pretty good. We heard John Entwistle-he was pretty bad. We avoided major child melt-downs, fights amongst "sitters" and "standers," heat strokes, faints, etc., though both CJ and I had spells of feeling a little queasy, mostly form the heat. We had draped a sheet from the fence to the Burley as a shade for Kendra, and CJ and I ducked under it some, but we were pretty well baked.

Between JE and Alan Parsons, the staff came by and took all their chairs away. I guess that the previous night’s crowd had stood on ‘em, broke ‘em and used ‘em as projectiles. They didn’t tell us to fold ours, nor to remove the Burley (which takes up about 10 people worth of standing room) but we decided to anyway. Better to do it with time between sets than in a panic during the AP or Yes sets. We kept the chairs up to "hold" our spots while I returned the Burley to the van.

We then put Kendra in the backpack and watched a nice (but short) Alan Parsons set. Good sound and a nice selection of tunes (though I wanted to hear "The Raven"). Kendra fell asleep for most of the set, and the sun went down (with the temperature following suit about 10 degrees). Things were looking up! The set was ready for Yes and I had put the headphones back on Kendra at least 20 minutes before they finally came on. The moon, one day past full, had just come up, and maybe they were waitin