----------------------------------------------------- SEPTEMBER 13, 1976 ----------------------------------------------------- Source: Circus Magazine Yestour '76 - Laser Show Intrigues Audiences by Peter Crescenti "This is fantastic fun this tour," assures Yes bassist Chris Squire, "it really is. This is the eleventh tour, and we seem to really know how to make touring work, as a personal pleasure as well as a business thing. That's very conducive to making music. Personally, I feel it's been really good vibes this tour all around. "If you've seen the last tour, and you see this one, even though two or three of the songs are the same, the whole thing is completely different in its presentation and projection," Squire continued. That, of course, is what Yes fans have come to expect from the band over the years. This year though, in this Bicentennial blitzkrieg of rock & roll bands on the American public, bands are all scrambling for some new, and if possible, unique, attraction in their show, something that will distinguish their concerts from the scores of others, and build a momentum that spells sell-outs down the line. The buzz is definitely on about the Yes tour though, and when it's all over for them at the end of August, the group will have played to over one million fans and fanatics (people who attend at least two or more shows) over a three-month period. The tour's biggest gig was held in Philadelphia's JFK Stadium, where over 100,000 Yes people turned out to see them. "JFK was the biggest gig the band has ever done," Squire confirms. "There was about 110,000 people in JFK. It was a fantastic place to play, it really was. It's so beautifully laid out, and it was really one of the best sounds that I've ever experienced in an open-air gig. "You just have to be adjusted to doing it, really. We had a PA that was equivalent to 14 ordinary systems, and it was on three levels on each side of the stage. It was really lovely." Yes also crashed RFK Stadium in the nation's capitol, Roosevelt Stadium in New Jersey, and will be playing in Anaheim Stadium, in California, near the end of the tour as it grinds to a halt on the west coast. The Yes stage presentation is spectacular. The band has employed a new concept of lighting, says Squire, "where the whole thing is hung above the stage. It's a grid, and all the lighting is actually in this grid. "This grid also includes in it pod-like things that go up and down on chains and kind of vertebrae-type arms. They're a bit like the machines out of H.G. Wells' 'The War Of The Worlds', and they have lights inside them. They're basically the lighting for me, Steve, and Jon at the front of the stage, and they look quite amazing in themselves. "I think we've got the best laser show ever seen. It was something that was especially developed for us by this guy in Paris, who's been working on lasers for the last few years. He's developed some techniques that have certainly never been seen before, in a rock concert anyway." In the last few months though, laser beams have suddenly become almost commonplace at concerts. Zeppelin, the Stones, The Who, Blue Oyster Cult, and Nektar, to name a few, have introduced lasers into their show within the last year, and now that the technology is available, all the bands have to do is find ways to make the lasers work uniquely within the context of their performance. "If you're gonna play to a vast audience," Squire explains, "you've got to be able to turn the people on in that kind of size hall. Lasers are just so terrifically powerful, in the way that they don't die. They're as impressive in a large place as they are in a small place. The laser beam is no different from a light bulb really. It's what you do with it. "We also have two backdrops, one is this 3-D, and then another one behind that, and things go on in between the two backdrops, like special lighting effects. I've never seen the show myself. This is only what people tell me! " This year, the Yes set has experienced an almost total reshuffling of their music material, as the band decided to revive some of their older works, drop out other things, and also include a variety of material from the five musicians' respective solo albums. Since the beginning of the tour though, the set has again been somewhat rearranged, because with the lengthy encores the band has been forced to do, their sets have been running much too long to suit them. "We've modified the show, and we're modifying it all the time," explains Squire. "We're still doing a bit of picking and choosing, rather than having one show that we know we're gonna play every night for the next two months. We're varying it a bit to keep us interested as well." It was finally decided that most of the solo tunes would be the ones dropped from the set, even though at the beginning of the tour, the set was arranged so that each member would perform one of their songs with the band. "We were, but actually we're not doing it at the moment because basically the set was running a very long time, and we weren't sure that it was making up the best kind of show doing it that way, because obviously, a lot of people don't know all the music from the solo albums anyway. So we spent the first couple of weeks really trying different things out, but in the end we kind of let the solo things slip, because in a way I think people were more into just hearing the Yes songs, and that's fair enough really, I can dig that." At a concert in Memphis' Mid-South Coliseum, when Yes was still performing various solo material, Chris Squire got his turn with "Hold Out Your Hand," the opening track from his own "Fish Out Of Water" album, and some ten thousand people responded to the Squire tune with a standing ovation. "We were still experimenting with the show at that stage, and we were playing different songs every night, and I think that one night we just happened to play my song," says the too-modest bassist. Another surprise happened at the Omni, in Atlanta, where the band encored the Jimmy Carter constituency with a rousing version of the Beatles' rock classic, "I'm Down." Even the bands are being struck by the new wave of Beatlemania. "That was pretty crazy. We may even do it again at some point, but it was spontaneous. We always try to surprise people. It was an idea we had back in England. I don't know why, it's just one of those things. We just did it one day in rehearsals as a laugh, you know, and we enjoyed it so much that we said 'Hey, we may even play that on the tour as an encore number.' But we really didn't think we would, seriously, then just one night we did it. It's a good song, that." Still included in the show are tracks from both "Tales From Topographic Oceans" and "Relayer" and the group has reintroduced old songs from their earlier "The Yes Album" and "Fragile" albums. "What we've done on this tour is to recycle some old songs that we haven't done for a long time, which were favorite songs that we'd dropped. We've cut other songs out, like 'Close To The Edge,' and everything is presented in a totally different way. "We've brought back 'Heart Of The Sunrise,' which is a song we haven't played for two or three years, and Patrick Moraz never knew, and we play 'I've Seen All Good People,' that kind of early rocking-type thing." "The day touring stopped adding a new feeling is the day I wouldn't continue, personally, but it seems to every time we come out on the road. There seems to be something even more exciting about it than the last time. I think we're still on our slow, upward curve," Squire conjectured. Close Window YesInThePress.com For site comments, problems, corrections, or additions, contact YesinthePress@aol.com