Rhea's 2004 Jon Anderson weekend Pt 2

Jon Anderson
Keswick Theater
Glenside (Philadelphia), PA
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Section Pit, Row CCC, Seat 6
$35

On Saturday, Roy and I drove to Philly. I grew up there and I still consider it home. I try to get back there for shows when I can. We had dinner plans with a couple friends before the show. I used to work in Jenkintown, about a mile from the Keswick Theater, and I chose a place that I thought would be easy to find.

Linda was there waiting for us. She was one of my hotel-roommates at SLO and she's known Roy for longer than I have. Even though she bought her ticket weeks after we did, she ended up with a seat in the orchestra pit. Our seats were 18 rows back. At one point when we were making plans, I asked her as a joke "Any chance you'd want to catch up with Roy during the show and switch tickets with me?" with a winky face. Before the show, Linda asked me if I still wanted to trade seats with her. Wow.

My friend Scott was also supposed to be at dinner, but he didn't make it. He got lost on the way and went straight to the theater. We saw him there, along with a lot of other Philly Yes friends. The biggest surprise was bumping into my friend Bill. He had dropped out of fandom ages ago, so I wasn't expecting to see him at the concert. I hadn't talked to him since moving to St. Louis, so I yelled from my seat that I got married and was still living out there. Ironically, he only noticed me because I was sitting a few rows in front of him in Linda's seat.

The show started, the same as usual. Jon played Boundaries this time, and dropped Soon. There was an intermission, and Your Move closed the first set. Revealing was a little longer this time, with the "what happened to this song" section added in. Jon did a little joke all three nights when he sat at the keyboard. He told us how he broke his back over a year ago, and spent a lot of time sitting at the piano with his brace on. He started to play around a little bit, and then went into a fast show-offy piece. Everyone applauded. He spoke some more, and then played that bit again. This time, he very obviously took his hands off of the keyboard and adjusted his microphone, so everyone could see that he wasn't really playing it. This got a big laugh and an even bigger applause. A fan yelled out "Heart of the Sunrise", and Jon sang the beginning instrumental part and said "Yeah, I can play that" with a little sarcasm. We laughed with him on that one.

At the intermission, I ran back to talk to Bill. He was the first fellow Yes fan I met, back when I was 14 and most of my friends still listened to New Kids on the Block. He's a dozen years older than me, and became a big brother and a role model. For those of you who know the Yes jacket I have with the back cover of Fragile airbrushed on the back, Bill painted it for me. (If you have a recording of Yes when they played on Fox After Breakfast, you can get a good look at the jacket.) We did some quick catching up, and he told me that I was all grown up and that he was proud of me.

Jon came back on stage and played I'll Find My Way Home. I don't know if it was the song itself, or all the feelings of homesickness, or just seeing all these people from my past, but it really got to me. This was the most emotional I got during the shows.

Jon answered some more fan questions, including mine. These questions were completely unscreened - no one read them in advance to filter out certain ones. I wrote down a two parter - "do you ever look at fan Internet sites or discussion groups?" and "What do you think of releasing live archived recordings?" Jon didn't answer the first one. The second one, he said that when Rick rejoined the band, he wondered why there were so many bootlegs and why Yes wasn't releasing this stuff. This turned into a rant on bad management.

There were some funny questions the next night. Someone asked Jon if he believed Jesus was god or just a prophet. Jon kind of walked around the question. The next question was about influences, and Jon proclaimed that the Beatles were gods. I think that answered the first question as well!

The show itself was somewhat of a letdown after opening night. Some of the things I chalked up to nervousness at the previous show were looking sloppy. Jon had trouble with Nous Sommes du Soleil and it fell apart in the end. I think it was the first time I didn't give a standing ovation to a Tales song. It didn't deserve it.

The true low point was the encore. Before the tour, I didn't know how much Jon was going to rely on backing tapes. I didn't want this to be Yes karaoke. And it wasn't, until this point. Jon sang Owner of a Lonely Heart as the encore. It was bad. He messed up the lyrics and lost his place in the song. It was a catastrophe. Later on, I discussed with another YesSwapper that this was the worst live Yes moment we had ever seen, even worse than No Way We Can Lose in Hartford opening night of the 1997 tour. (To be fair, I wasn't at Toronto in 1998 for Close to the Edge.) This brought the whole show down. It was a bummer to have this as the last song, and not have a
more successful song to send us off. I was hoping he'd do Soon as a real finale, but he didn't play it this night.

I met up with Roy, and we got in the autograph line with Scott. I had hoped to see Bill again, because he planned to wait to meet Jon, but he must have left already. Darn, I just realized I forgot to introduce Scott to Rene! They know each other through YesSwap. We were towards the end of the line, so we had lots more time to chat. Scott had never had the chance to meet Jon before, and he was really excited.

I brought the new remasters of Tales and Relayer. (Yet another good thing about the remasters is more CDs to get autographs. I already got my old Tales and Relayer autographed by all the respective band members.) I told Jon the story of how I didn't like Tales when I first got it, but my friend Scott raved about it so much that I gave it a second chance and listened to it over and over. It's now my favorite album of all time. Jon said that it's a hard album to get into, and that it's Jane's favorite too. She was sitting next to him and chimed in that she only listens to it when he's not home because he doesn't like listening to it anymore.