Yes 1974-02-18 Madison Square Garden New York City("YesSongs2")

Yes
Madison Square Garden
New York City
1974-02-18

"YesSongs2"

Recorded by: unknown
Remastered by: TheTooleMan January, 2005
Art by TheTooleMan (with involuntary contributions by Roger Dean)

There are two recordings of this show: one contains the entire concert except the encore, but it has several cuts in the music, lousy sound quality, and terrible speed problems. You become sea-sick from the constant pitch changes. This may seem appropriate for a live recording of Tales from Topographic Oceans, but it isn't desirable.

The other recording is this one. The bad news is that it only includes the four tracks from the new Yes album of early 1974, but the good news is that the quality is very good. The tape appears to have been made up close to the stage, a good thing since music recorded from across the arena at Madison Square Garden echoes like a sewer pipe.

There is a little distortion in the original recording. At some points the bass overrides the rest of the sound, and in a few cases the audio is overdriven, either from the sound system or the recorder. None of this is too severe, and I minimized it as much as possible through the remastering process. There is also some tape hiss apparent in quieter parts of the music. Noise reduction was used sparingly to reduce this noise, but not enough to significantly lower the high-frequency response of the original tape.

This same recording was used for the vinyl double album bootleg "The Affirmatives," though the quality of the tape copy used for that pressing ran too fast and sounded like an AM radio tuned off-center. On that album, The Remembering was faded out before it ended. On this copy of the tape, it runs to the end of the song.

The taper missed part of the introduction to The Ancient. I substituted the lower-quality tape here, as it contained the full introduction.

Usually, I undersell my remasters as I don't like hype and prefer people to listen and draw their own conclusions. I like to tell you all the little wrinkles and imperfections in the source so you know I didn't overlook them or cause the sound to be worse than the original. In this case, and modesty aside, I will say that this remastered recording will blow your hair off.

Yes stopped playing all four sides of Tales after their Detroit show on February 28, 1974. Considering that this is the best recording of a complete live performance of the double album, I took the liberty of naming it as if it was the intended follow-up to their live triple disk vinyl album, "YesSongs."

I give you "YesSongs 2"

TheTooleMan
January, 2005

Yes are:
Jon Anderson: vocals
Chris Squire: bass
Steve Howe: guitars
Rick Wakeman: keyboards
Alan White: drums

Tracks:
CD 1
Introduction
The Revealing Science of God
Comments about The Remembering
The Remembering

CD 2
Comments about The Ancient
The Ancient (Giants Under the Sun)
Comments about Ritual
Ritual


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