Rhea's 2004 Jon Anderson weekend Pt 1

Jon Anderson
Trump Marina - The Shell
Atlantic City, NJ
Friday, January 9, 2004
General Admission
$39.70

These are some stories from the archive. Roy and I flew out to Philly for the first three dates of Jon Anderson's Work in Progress Tour of the Universe. I e-mailed this one out to some Yes and prog mailing lists on 1/13/2004, just days after the concert weekend. I'm adding this series to the blog in honor of Jon Anderson's upcoming return to live performance. Welcome back Jon!

I'm still digesting this weekend. I went to the first three shows, had great seats, got to talk to Jon all three nights, and met up with friends I don't get to see too often. There are spoilers below.

My husband Roy and I flew out to Philly on Friday and drove to the Trump Marina hotel Atlantic City. It's where we stayed and where the concert was. I am anal about general admission shows. I like to get in line ridiculously early to make sure I get a good seat. This club had maitre d seating, and I didn't know whether we'd have to bribe some usher to sit us up front. I kept some money in my front pocket just in case.

We found out where the club was, and no one was in line yet. It was 3, and doors were supposed to open at 8. So I agreed to gamble a little and meet up with some friends for dinner. Right after dinner, I practically ran to the line. I was 5th. Roy joined me, and the rest of our dinner party wasn't too far behind in line.

The doors opened, and the first two groups got seated. Our usher asked how we were doing. I gushed "I'm so excited. We came all the way from St. Louis to see the show!" He said we could sit anywhere we wanted. :-) We took the seats in the front row next to the chair with the reserved sign on it. Our friends weren't quite as lucky. Their usher was going to seat them further back, and they had to bribe him to sit by us.

The show starts out with a new song, then Long Distance Runaround, then another new one. After that, it changed a little from night to night. I noticed that most of the Yes songs had no backing tapes, but most of his new songs did. Jon is a competent instrumentalist - he plays guitar, keyboards, and harp during the show. He looked nervous that night, but held everything together well. A friend of mine planned to tape the show with his cassette recorder. He got the first 45 minutes of it. Being in the front row, he couldn't pull out his tape deck to flip the tape!

Jane sat next to me. I like to dance around in my chair and sing along quietly, but I wasn't sure quite how to act with her right there. I noticed that she was singing along to the Yes songs, so I did too. During State of Independence, I yelled out "Third World" at the same time she did. She turned to me, put her hand on my arm, and said "good job!" That song was one of the highlights for me. The next song was really impressive. Yours Is No Disgrace. Jon didn't play a difficult part on guitar, but it worked well and went beyond a few chords to accompany his voice.

This was supposed to be a multi-media presentation. There was a screen behind Jon that had different graphics on it. At one point, it showed a smiley face person playing guitar. I don't know if Jon meant it to be funny or just cute, but lots of us started giggling at it. At one point Jon turned around to look at the screen. He said after the song that at first he thought we were laughing at him for some reason.

Jon didn't give the names of many of the new songs. The songs I did recognize were Long Distance Runaround, State of Independence, Yours Is No Disgrace, Soon, Revealing Science of God opening chant, Nous Sommes du Soleil, Your Move, a song from Earth Mother Earth, and the biggest surprise - Richard! Jon said that Jane had requested that one, so I turned to her and thanked her.

There were a couple flubs, but they were more charming than anything else. At one of the new songs on the piano, Jon forgot a line and paused before looking at the lyric screen. YesSwapper Rene yelled out "You're so cute you can get away with it" in her Southern accent to Jon. He looked more relaxed after hearing that, and Jane turned around to say "bless you" to Rene. He went into Revealing after that, my favorite song. It seemed impromptu, and he had some trouble with the lyrics there. I wanted to yell them out for him, but he made it through.

There was an open guitar case at the end of the stage. Jon invited us to write down questions (along with $5 for charity) and put them into the case. He did two sessions of questions and answers.

Your Move was the encore. Jon started singing "Give Peace a Chance" during the first "dit dit dit" section and most of the audience joined him. It lost a bit of its direction. The next two nights, it worked much better. Jon shortened the song and instructed us to sing "dit dit dit" while he did Give Peace a Chance over us. I spoke to Jane for a little bit after the show, asking her to tell Jon how much we enjoyed the show. She thanked me, saying they were both so nervous about it.

Jon signed autographs after each show. The catch was, you had to buy a tshirt to get an autograph. We bought one the first night, and then figured we'd just drag it to all the shows. Ah, but the second night you got your hand stamped when you bought a shirt and the third night you got a ticket. We got away with getting in the meet and greet line each night with only buying that one tshirt.

I brought some of the new remasters and a limited edition copy of Magnification to get signed. The Magnification came with a purple jewel case with a silver Yes logo on it. I don't usually get jewel cases signed, but this one looked cool. I told Jon it was a import copy of Mag. He and Jane had never seen it, and spent some time looking at it. Jane recognized me, and told Jon that I had been singing along at the show. My big comment this night was to tell Jon that I became a fan of Yes during ABWH, and that Mag was my favorite CD of theirs since then. Jon said that it was the band's favorite too. Then he said, "well, the four of us". I asked whether they were going to do any more songs from Mag in concert. He said he wanted to do Give Love Each Day, but I'm not sure if he meant solo or with Yes. We were about to leave, but Jane asked if she could look at the Magnification package again. I don't know why I didn't just tell them they could have it.

That gave us an extra moment, so I thanked Jon for doing Revealing and told him that we'd be at the next two shows.