{"id":41873,"date":"2010-02-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-07T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/union-3\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T11:20:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T11:20:12","slug":"union-3","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/union-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Union"},"content":{"rendered":"

Awhile back I called Yes\u2019s 1994 disc Talk<\/i><\/a> the low point of the group\u2019s now 40-plus year career.\u00a0 I was wrong, and listening to this album for the first time in 15 years reminded me of why.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

How bad is Union<\/i>?\u00a0 Union<\/i> is so bad that its four not-entirely-embarrassing tracks only lift this 14-song turdbucket from an irredeemable F to an abysmal D-.<\/p>\n

But please, don\u2019t just take it from me, take it from longtime Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman, quoted in the book I\u2019ve just finished reading, Tim Morse\u2019s Yesstories<\/i><\/a>:\u00a0 \u201cI call it the Onion<\/i> album, because every time I hear it, it brings tears to my eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story of how this Frankenstein monster of a release came to pass is frankly a lot more interesting than the music itself, so bear with me a moment if you will.<\/p>\n

After the tremendously difficult recording experience that was 1987\u2019s Big Generator<\/i>, founding lead vocalist Jon Anderson exited the \u201cYesWest\u201d eighties version of the band dominated by guitarist-vocalist Trevor Rabin with the thought of starting over and building a new group more to his liking… which turned out to be an old group of his liking.\u00a0 His first call was to founding Yes drummer Bill Bruford (who\u2019s also done time in King Crimson and toured with Genesis), and the next two were to seventies-era Yes stalwarts Steve Howe (guitar) and Wakeman.<\/p>\n

The eponymous Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe — four-fifths of the group that recorded Fragile<\/i> and Close To The Edge<\/i> — became a virtual YesEast, issuing a moderately successful studio album and touring as \u201cAn Evening of Yes Music Plus,\u201d much to the consternation of the remaining official Yes lineup of Rabin, founding bassist-vocalist Chris Squire, founding keyboardist Tony Kaye, and longtime drummer Alan White.<\/p>\n

This inherently competitive dynamic might have led the two camps to some interesting places musically — might have, if the parties at the center of the ensuing mess had focused on the music rather than listening to the cries and whispers of managers and agents.\u00a0 Meanwhile, however, the second ABWH album arrived at Arista and was declared DOA by a business team that was looking for another \u201cOwner Of A Lonely Heart\u201d and didn\u2019t hear one.\u00a0 In a move that smacks of desperation, Anderson called \u201cOwner\u201d songwriter Rabin and asked if he could spare a song for ABWH.\u00a0 Rabin generously offered him his choice of three, all leftovers from his recent solo album.<\/p>\n

In the wake of this rapprochement, though, the two groups\u2019 business teams quickly spied the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.\u00a0 And so, suddenly, three tracks that Rabin would later describe as \u201cdemos that\u2026 Jon came in and sang on top of\u201d became both the lifeline for the stillborn second ABWH album and the catalyst for a new \u201cmega-Yes\u201d — the joining of the two camps into the eight-man lineup that toured to considerable acclaim behind the Union<\/i> album. <\/p>\n

The tour was obviously a climactic moment in the band\u2019s tangled history, and by most accounts the shows ranged from interesting right up to superb, depending on the night.\u00a0 (Personally, just the idea of \u201cAwaken\u201d being done with eight musicians on stage gives me goosebumps.)\u00a0 But the mostly fictitious Union<\/i> album, the original catalyst for this lucrative tour and the accompanying retrospective box set YesYears<\/i>?\u00a0 The ink hadn\u2019t dried on the contracts before Arista was pressing the newly-recast band to send it to duplication.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, Anderson and producer Jonathan Elias had been monkeying steadily with the ABWH tracks, erasing most of Wakeman\u2019s work and replacing it with no less than 11 other studio keyboardists\u2019 sterile, anonymous synth washes.\u00a0 Howe\u2019s playing was similarly tampered with, though they at least managed to hire an avowed Howe fan in Jimmy Haun (Circa:, the Chris Squire Experiment) to record over his parts.\u00a0 Bruford wasn\u2019t immune either — two other percussionists are credited in the liner notes.<\/p>\n

The end result was ten ABWH tracks that only occasionally sound like anything other than a third-rate Anderson solo album.\u00a0 Seven of the ten ABWH tracks \u2013 almost all co-compositions by Anderson and producer Jonathan Elias — rank among the most contrived, insipid and impact-free music the band has ever allowed to see the light of day.\u00a0 Two exceptions, \u201cI Would Have Waited Forever\u201d and \u201cSilent Talking,\u201d at least uncover a little drive in those moments when Howe steps up \u2013 and we can be pretty confident it\u2019s him, since the riffs in question are borrowed from his same-era solo album Turbulence<\/i>.\u00a0 The other not-completely-embarrassing track isn\u2019t even truly an ABWH track \u2013 \u201cMasquerade\u201d is a pretty Howe solo for which he won a typically 20-years-late-and-for-the-wrong-thing Grammy.<\/p>\n

Three of the four YesWest cuts are basically castoff Rabin solo tracks with Anderson vocals added \u2013 the pompous yet insubstantial \u201cLift Me Up,\u201d the limp reggae pastiche \u201cSaving My Heart,\u201d and the driving but over-programmed \u201cThe Miracle Of Life.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThe More We Live \u2013 Let Go\u201d is a swirling, atmospheric track Squire and future Yes member Billy Sherwood worked up together that\u2019s almost certainly both the best and the most proggy thing here.<\/p>\n

You would hope and expect that an album featuring the collective talents of Anderson, Brufurd, Howe, Kaye, Rabin, Squire, Wakeman and White would be tremendous, a cathedral of progressive rock greatness with a bit of \u201980s Yes sheen to buff it out.\u00a0 Instead, fans were lulled by the promise of that lineup into buying an album that rarely features more than three or four of the principals at a time, an album whose interminable song credits read like the legal contracts that \u201cinspired\u201d it, an album that Trevor Rabin himself has called \u201ca black mark on the band.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the final word, though, let\u2019s return to Yesstories<\/i> and the ever-quotable Mr. Wakeman for his advice on the proper reaction to finding a copy of Union<\/i> in one\u2019s hand:<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be honest, it took me a long time to play Union<\/i> all the way through.\u00a0 The first cassette I received from Arista went out the limo window after about fifteen minutes.\u00a0 The next one went out of a hotel window.\u201d<\/p>\n

Enough said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":26579,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5713],"rating":[11205],"class_list":["post-41873","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-yes","rating-rating-d-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41873"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41873"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}