YESTERDAYS

I don't like record-company money-grabs any more than the average record buyer, but I never perceived Yesterdays that way. Of course the decisionmakers at Atlantic Records released Yesterdays to maximize profits, but it seems like Atlantic was likely to make more money with this one record in print than rereleasing both Yes and Time and a Word, the albums from which most of Yesterdays is drawn.

By 1975, Yes had been selling albums like proverbial hotcakes for four years, but was entering a period in which there would be no new Yes product for a while. Their first two albums had not been big sellers, so, it would seem that many newer fans didn't own them. But the Yes of 1969 and 1970 didn't sound like the Yes of 1975, so Atlantic created a compilation of four songs from Time and a Word, two from Yes, a single b-side from 1970, and a recording of Paul Simon's "America" which the band had recorded in 1972 for a label sampler. The ten-minute "America" was the draw here; Atlantic had released an abbreviated version in 1972 which became the group's third charting single in the US (it peaked at #46 on the Billboard Hot 100), but this was the first time it had appeared on a Yes album, and here it was in its entirety.

The selections from Yes and Time and a Word make sense, although of course my choices would've differed. At a minimum, the best two songs from Time and a Word are here - - "Sweet Dreams" and "Astral Traveller." In what might be considered a self-fulfilling prophecy, three of the songs included on this compilation, "Time and a Word," "Survival," and "Then," have become the staples of Yes "best-of" collections - - not because they were the best from their early years, but, I suspect, because they had been included on Yesterdays.

And then there's "Dear Father," a b-side recorded during the Time and a Word sessions. It seems unlikely most Yes fans were familiar with this one before 1975; it had been on the flip side of the "Sweet Dreams" single, which apparently was only released in a few countries. "Dear Father" is a groovy song, though not exactly progressive, which was as good as the material on the album from which it was excluded.

It's entirely fair to say that Yesterdays is redundant. The remastered 2003 Rhino series of Yes albums contains all of these songs, including alternate versions of "Sweet Dreams" and "Dear Father," and the single edit of "America," and they all sound better than the last widely-available CD of Yesterdays. Annoyingly, Yesterdays is available to download from itunes for ten bucks! That definitely sounds like a money grab.

In short, this compilation is made up of pretty good material that's available elsewhere.