YESTERDAYS

It's an experience sharing - not a review. You may skip it. I remember vividly when this album came out I was visiting Jakarta (at the time I was at my 9th grade in Madiun, far away from Jakarta) and my big bro, Jokky, had this album in the form of Perina Aquarius cassette - the black'n'white cover. When I heard "America" it blew me away at first listening experience. I was not aware that it was a Simon & Garfunkle's song was. During my stay in Jakarta I played my big bro's cassette over and over whenever he worked at his office. Well, he came home he always played this cassette as well - so you can imagine how many times in a day I listened to this album - it was about 4 to 5 time in its entirety! It was not the only cassette actually - because my bro also played great white blues album from the Dutch band called Cuby + Blizards (any of you know about this band? It's a fantastic blues band!) with a ground breaking hit "Simple Man" which then became one of the seventies icons in my country at that time. Life was so tough at that time and I could not afford to buy the cassette of Yes "Yesterday" for my own collection back home in Madiun, East Java. So, when I came back home, I only had the songs like "Looking Around", "America", " Sweet Dreams" and "Dear Father" were played virtually inside my head! Never mind, music is emotion. I still can enjoy the music without phisically playing the cassette / cd. As long as I can sense the nerves in the forms of melody for each song - let my mind sing along the melody - even with no lyrics. I did not really care. I only got this album into my collection sometime in mid nineties when I started my first stack of rock music collection (jazz was not my priority; sorry .) in the format of CD (with most of them under AAD recording technology - no remaster at the time).

Even though this album is a compilation one, I still think that I have to own the CD for two reasons: 1. It's YES man! 2. The cover looks great. So, for any of you who start collecting Yes albums, this one is a good one. Oh by the way, there is one truly memorable song in here that unfortunately the band has ignored this song because never been performed live, i.e. "Dear Father". At the time my dad just passed away - so you can imagine how I was so attached with this melancholic song. Sorry - this review is probably too personal. But it happened to me. One thing for sure: music makes great impact to people! Keep on proggin' ..!

Progressively yours, GW