How to split Union?

[BillUK]

It's been said that Union is really two albums glued together. If you were to split Union into its Yes West and Yes East parts how would you do it and in which order would you run the tracks?

Bill

[Faceintheplace]

That's a cool idea. If you had a cd of ABWH out-takes, Trevor's cd of demos and Conspiracy, you could easily make Union into two seperate albums.

ABWH disc (You could call it whatever, I like the title "We Make Believe, myself)

1. I Would Have Waited Forever
2. Shock to the System
3. Masqurade
4. Without Hope You Cannot Start The Day
5. Make Believe (ABWH II outtake)
6. Angkor Watt
7. To The Stars (ABWH II outtake)
8. Tall Buildings (ABWH II outtake)
9. Sourthen Accent (ABWH II outtake)
10. Holding On
11. Axis Of Love (ABWH II outtake)
12. Dangerous
13. Give And Take
14. Even Song
15. Take The Water To The Mountain

Yes West Disc

1. Miracle of Life
2. Saving My Heart
3. Lift Me Up
4. Beethoven 5th (I think this is on Trevor's demo disc, he mentioned it in his interview)
5. The More We Give, Let Go
6. Love Conquers All

and you could flesh it out with the early Conspiracy material.

ABWH II material (with vocal overdubs by Chris Squire, and a lot of ABWH's original parts overdubbed by session guys,) makes up the majority of Union. The Yeswest material was the three songs Jon wanted for ABWH II, Trevor says most of the songs are just his demos with Jon's vocals overtop and again lots of session men pasted on by (shudder) John Elias.

I can't help but thinking whenever I hear ABWH II outtakes. Some songs never got past the demo stage or were reserected later. There's some songs that with a little work would have been a vast improvement over what wound up on Union. "Without Hope..." was one of the biggest disasters of Union. The original was about twice as long. (Elias cut out the middle and faded out the ending. He also deleted most of Rick's keyboards and replaced them with other people's work. Ditto Steve Howe's guitar work.)

[YESYOUANDI]

The best way to split this record/cd----is right down the centre with a pair of industrial tin snips.
It worked well on my copy!!
Cheers fans.