I wonder if anyone will ever find what they filmed and release it??
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The ultimate Holy Yes Grail.
My recollection is that after filming a few shows the results were deemed too dark and unusable and the project was abandoned by the band and management.
As to the whereabouts of the source material it seems no one has come close to locating any of it. But wow, I can still wish and dream... -
Chris Squire answered a fan question about it saying he was looking for it too but it seems to have gone missing. The fan had been to a show at Cobo Arena in Detroit and had seen all kinds of cameras. WTF?? This is the sort of thing that drives me crazy.Comment
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There is a few short shots of the stage (crab structure) in an outdoor arena in California from some film of Gary Wright from 1976 but if you blink you may miss it. A nice treat for his fans showing people arriving etc.Comment
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I think the footage you are describing was a local San Diego news report from the old Jack Murphy Stadium. Could be wrong and I probably am LOL.
I've always been curious what dates the supposed "Yessongs 2" filming was attempted - IIRC from old reports it was fairly early in the tour.
Something about a pair of brothers who showed up at a gig with cameras offering to film the show, but there was no additional lighting that would have been necessary to properly capture any images. Sketchy details that I probably have wrong.Comment
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This is a legend which has been going round for decades to the point where myth and fact have become hard to separate.
The story which is most commonly told is that two Canadian brothers were hired to do the filming but at the end of the project there was a dispute with Brian Lane about payment and the brothers disappeared taking all the footage with them. It would be incredibly helpful to know what the brothers' names actually were but finding someone who was around and would remember is probably difficult by now.
Regarding dates that were filmed, the two dates that have been most commonly mentioned are Cobo Hall in Detroit and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. Cobo Hall would make sense because that's where the audio on YesShows and The Word Is Live comes from. Allegedly a lot of backstage filming also took place around this time.Comment
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Here are some quotes I have been able to find about it:
Chris Squire in 1976:
"YesSongs was one of those kind of films that was made very quickly and organized a day before a show we did in London at the Rainbow Theatre about getting on for four and a half years ago or something now. And anyone who's seen it will have noted that it's quite dark, you don't see very much. But on the other hand it's kind of a piece of history captured on film at the time when Rick Wakeman was playing with us. And as a piece of footage it's fairly interesting .[...] I mean after it was shot and we saw some of the footage we didn't think it was that impressive to actually work further on in any intense way. So that is why in a way it was just left as it was. What we're always hoping to do and we have in fact started doing is shoot a proper, more organized Yes film. And we did quite a lot of filming at Philadelphia when we were on the East Coast this time around. Gradually we're going to build up a film around experiences that may happen over the next year. And it will have everything that YesSongs failed on, possibly."
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7Tz9pKM85E (13:03)
Chris Squire (1985):
"[In] '76 we did a whole film of the Philadelphia concert we did with Peter Frampton, which was a fantastic concert. Filmed the whole thing, got 80% of the way through it, spent a fortune and then didn't finish it and so... And then we lost the tapes. And so, that never happened."
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOxRv0_bIZ0 (3:51)
Roger Dean (in "Close To The Edge: The Story Of Yes" by Chris Welch):
"The tragedy is that the guy who organized the filming of Yessongs also organized the filming of the Relayer tour but there was a falling out at some point and they never completed the film. They shot quite a few concerts but the film has never surfaced and I would love to see that because the staging was amazing. There are rumours of an 8 mm pirate copy. Even though they never completed filming the tour, they shot a lot of footage."Comment
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The only clue as to any of the footage ever being seen that I know of is that someone once posted that they had seen a TV advert to promote the release of "Going For The One" in 1977 on UK television which included time-lapse footage of JFK stadium filling up with people and some clips of the band playing live from 1976.
This leads to me to hope that some preliminary editing got done and hopefully the footgae was transferred to smaller film print or videotape at some point. But again who would have that?Comment
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Yes the two guys from Canada is the famous one. Brian Lane seems to be connected. Is too bad Peter Grant was not in charge. QPR was put out by Brian without the bands input. I blame the band for not really caring that much about it. Yessongs had been released and was a hit by then so there is no excuse. Jon was complaining they did not film the Union tour when they did. Not paying enough attention to what is going on and Brian thinking about himself. Around the time of 90125 Jon was asked about Brian and he said he didn't want to talk about him.
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