3LP Live! Yessongs vs. Welcome Back My Friends...

You should have thrown "Lotus" by Santana into the competition too; my vote would have gone there. Since it is missing Yes get my vote.


Edited by BaldFriede - July 05 2021 at 03:35

I'm more of a Yes fan than ELP but in this case I would probably vote for ELP. It has a better versions of Tocatta, Tarkus (particularly the wonderful Aquatarkus), Take a Pebble has a much better piano section and it has the piano improvisations, so ELP wins it for me for being more different to the studio versions.

I do like the extended version of Yours Is No Disgrace and Six Wives excerpts of Yessongs but nevertheless voted for ELP. KE9 , Hoedown , Toccata and Tarkus are better for me than than the studio versions. Take A Pebble does drag though. I would have removed the whole acoustic/medley section and included the Pictures encore instead.

Edited by JD - July 05 2021 at 05:35

Yessongs

Sacro_Porgo wrote: Dellinger wrote: Yessongs isn't my favourite Yes live album, but I do like it better than Welcome Back my Friends... both are great, of course. If only Genesis had released it's own classic 70's live album with the complete show (I don't know if it would have needed to be a double or a triple), it would have made a perfect match with these other two. Well, even though Genesis never did the triple live album, I think both Genesis Live and Seconds Out are fantastic releases and easily compete with these two triples, particularly Seconds Out.

But just to know that Genesis Live is an incomplete performance, missing several of the better songs from the set-list, diminishes my apreciation of it. On the Live Box-set, which is how I got their live albums, they also have a recording of a Live at the Rainbow show, which seems to be from the same tour. Unfortunatley, that show is only complete in DVD audio, and on CD it only has the songs that were missing from the Genesis Live one (unfortunatley, because I sort of liked better the performance on The Rainbow, and the pair of CDs don't flow as the show would have). About Seconds Out, as much as I want to like that one better (since I actually like Phil Collins better as a singer, and he does improve some of the songs for me), I think it suffers from the same problem of missing songs that were actually played during the tour, and unfortunatley they didn't choose many of my favourite songs, but I don't like how Hackett was mixed a bit too low on that one... and I really wish they had chosen recordings with Bill Bruford for all the album, and going just a bit further, I wish they had gotten a flute player to tour with them... perhaps even Steve's brother might have worked fine. Oh yeah, and in both albums, I wish they had played Firth of Fifth complete with the piano intro.

Awesoreno wrote: ^The decision to ditch the piano intro of Firth was a practical decision. I know Tony hated playing it on anything other than a piano, since many of the keyboards lacked weighted keys. As a keyboard player myself, I can understand this. But yeah, still, would love to have it.

Prefer the sound of WMFTTSTE. However the Yes album is still fine for all the sound problems.

richardh wrote: arturfd wrote: The set list of ELP is fantastic but needs a real very good remaster. there are at least a couple that I really like 2009 Deluxe Edition (Leadclass) 2016 Remaster (BMG) I don't think it will get any better to be honest. I know a lot of people consider it has a 'muddy sound' because it's so much weaker than the crystal clarity of Pictures but I think that's just how it is and no amount of remastering will fix it sadly.