More Jon Anderson already! This is the expanded and remastered CD version that came out on Rhino a couple of years ago.
I'll say more about the album itself when my original vinyl copy crops up. I don't think I've bought more than ten albums on both CD and vinyl, but this is one of them because I was intrigued to hear the seven extra tracks (the original album has five tracks in total), particularly the alternative versions of Awaken, and the Rhino 'package' seemed genuinely good value.
It turns out there was good reason why the alternative versions were left out in the first place. These extras usually fail to stand on their own. They come across more as archaeological evidence that gives you a glimpse of how the original album was put together. It's like a 'making of' documentary without the documentary bit.
I've got to mention the sleeve notes by Tim Jones, because he seems to have a twenty-five-year-old chip on shoulder from the old punk/prog wars. He uses charts and headlines from 1977 to back up his case that Yes was what really counted to music fans then, and all that punk stuff was a lot of fuss about nothing:
Between Yes' return to the studio in September 1976...and the release of Going for the One, embryonic sparks of revolutionary musical change in the shape of punk underlined the malaise affecting Yes' progressive rock contemporaries like King Crimson, Genesis, ELP, and The Moody Blues. Even so, it was the return of Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman… that grabbed the headlines in the autumn of '76… Not one punk band topped the UK Album charts during its Year Zero of 1977, but Going for the One did just that (while making the US Top 10 to boot). It did so because, as its title track suggests, Going for the One is a "thoroughbred racing chaser".
MusicBrainz entry for this album |
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