From the website: All packaged in a fantastic flight case [...]. Each heavy-duty flight case has been sprayed individually, and the stickers placed by hand. No two flight cases are the same, making each one unique and a highly collectable piece of rock and roll memorabilia! This is one of the reasons I’m not buying the set. It gives me the feeling that the high cost is due, in part, to the packaging. If this had a simpler packaging, like the Progeny style for example, and a price reflective of a simpler packaging, I would have been more likely to pull out the credit card. But I hope those who buy it enjoy the heck out of it.
And to cut back on expenses and max profits they are using their kids to place the stickers. "Hey, Johnny, here are some stickers, have fun and stick them wherever you want!"
I saw them in Dayton, Ohio in May 1991. My recollection was that the album was only released a week or two before... The show was pretty good but the sports arena sound was horrible. It was my first of 3 Yes shows. I'd pay maybe $30 dollars for two CD's and a blue ray... Not interested in 30 discs for $300.
Yes, for the money, I want to know what each concert's source is and see the track listing to make sure they're complete. - I hope we can all dig in and figure that out before this is released. Also, I'm sick of these big boxes. I don't want to store a big box. It's going to raise the price extremely just to ship it. Apparently however, I'm a much bigger fan of this tour than most people after reading this thread. I've seen Yes live a lot and it was really cool to see the mixture of the two bands. It's not the amount of shows/discs that is the problem for me. It's the source of the material. Or the lack of sources. I'm trying to figure out if there is anything mutli-track/soundboard/radio broadcast on this set that I don't already have. And if there is, if it's available for trade, why would I buy this? - I want it, but this is a little too big and too pricey to justify. And I know I COULD afford it.
Man, as a major Yes collector, unless the audio are all newly mixed professional recordings, this is a hard pass for me. I'm assuming the videos are the circulating audience bootleg recordings and, as stated in the product description, that the extra audio material is the same bootleg stuff we've had for years. And I am THE guy that would totally buy this - I adore this period of the band and the tour is among my favorites.
There are 2 versions of Denver - the full uncut thing, and then a second one edited down a bit by Rabin with more "proper" visual editing (not as raw, more watchable). Both circulate easily and both are actually worth having
if it's a gonzo production i pass on : they never been able to correctly record the live sound of YES.
Really hard to imagine who would buy this other than a wealthy Yes completist. Even harder to imagine anyone listening to it all.
At best i would buy a highlight compilation. But i honestly can’t stand the trevor horn guitar’s sound and the sh!tt# era of most studio albums from 90125 and after... the only exception is key to ascension’s studio.
The Union Tour box is admirable in a "turn it up to 11" way. The Progeny box, with 7 great shows, 14 discs, and which I found for $70, is the perfect size tour overview for me.
(Full disclosure: I'm not a Yes fan, I only have about 6 of their albums, and I've only seen them once - when the Russian guy was on keyboards...) But... that actually seems excellent value for 30 shows. I mean, think of the effort and time that has gone into making all that, considering that (they probably know) it will only sell a 1,000 copies to a niche hardcore... There's a lot of (free) love that has gone into making that set!
Seems to me that, the only reasons a box this size can exist at this point, are a) the source material was recorded at 90's concerts where the tech allowed pretty decent bootlegs to be made, which might have now been given some form of minimal (cheap) retouching, and b) all band members get to benefit financially. The Progeny set, even though it was professionally recorded, i guess needed quite a bit of professional work before release. This stuff - from what Im reading above - might even be released in raw form. One thing we casn guarantee - there will not be any overdubbing!!
10 shows, 30 discs. Some of them audience recordings, and lavish packaging to justify the price. I would've considered buying this box if it was packaged like Dylan's 1966 live box or Progeny.
“It was nuts! We went nuts,” keyboardist Wakeman told ROLLING STONE in a recent interview. “I called it the Onion album because it made me cry. When I heard it, I thought, ‘This isn’t Yes. We didn’t play that. We didn’t do that.’”
This is a very expensive cash grab. All the content is available online for free, you just need to know where to look. The Shoreline CD/DVD content was previously released by Gonzo as 'Union Live', a 2CD/2DVD set in 2010, which also featured what I gather will be the same Tour reproduction program and a couple of other bits of tat... That set also contained the Pensacola video, along with Denver (missing from this set). The audio content will have cost Gonzo nothing other than their initial investment in the 2010 set, it's all b**tleg material, wither audience or radio broadcast - the Stuttgart show for instance will be part FM, part audience, since that's all that exists. None of this stuff will be remastered or sourced from previously unknown archive sources. So you're paying for a flight case, some postcards, nice but generic cover designs for the 10 sets and a bit more ephemera... Huge fan here, and if I had the cash, I'd buy one to put on the shelf... but don't anyone kid themselves this is a quality archive product... Progeny was a valid archive release... this one, less so.
Peter Banks interview, from Yesstories, 1994: "Tony asked me if I'd like to play a couple of tunes with them . . . . I was just going to come out and play two encore pieces, 'Roundabout' and [Starship Trooper]. . . . So on the day of the gig I'm in the backstage bar and I'm looking forward to it . . . . But about ten minutes before show time I was told I couldn't play, so I asked why and someone said, 'Because Steve Howe doesn't want you to.' I was very upset about the whole thing and just stayed in the bar and got very drunk."
other than the grateful dead (with dav and dick's picks) yes has to be the only other band (after this release) with more OFFICIAL live releases than studio albums.
Yep. they could have done with a bit more quality control in my opinion. The recent ones have been dreadful.
