This is one of those albums, like Van Morrison's Bang Masters (a.k.a. Blowin' Your Mind, T.B. Sheets etc) that gets released under alternative titles. Of the various aliases that this set of recordings trades under, Millenium Collection is the most egregiously misleading and the most poorly spelled.
Something's Coming: The BBC Recordings 1969–1970 and the US release, Beyond and Before: BBC Recordings 1969-1970, are much more honest, and feign no connection with the millennium (though Something's Coming was released on the New Millennium Communications, which could provide one explanation; a cynical cash-in for a 1999 release could provide another).
So this is Yes "before they were famous", before Steve Howe's angular guitar, Rick Wakeman's capes, and before Bill Bruford fled this, his first job, for the clutches of King Crimson. Jon Anderson is making tentative steps in Astral Traveller towards his "cosmic" persona, but Chris Squire's bass is in your face from the off (in an interview with Tommy Vance in 1982, he claimed this came about from working with a producer who was listening on cheap headphones, and kept saying, "more bass").
My friend Fred saw Yes in these early days, and claims they were mostly doing covers of West Side Story. I think "mostly" may be poetic licence, but there are two versions of Sondheim and Bernstein's Something's Coming on this album, and, around the same time, they're cover of Paul Simon's America featured a short snatch of the Sondheim/Bernstein song of the same name.
It's a couple of the original songs — particularly Dear Father and Then — that appealed to me from thirty years ago, and curiosity got the better of me. There are brief snatches of John Peel and (I think) Brian Matthew introducing a couple of the songs. I'd have liked more of them, for period detail.
Comments