1976 (Solo Album) Tour
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your_host:

Not sure how this could have been on Sunday Aug 15th since another show is listed on that date, in St. Paul, Minnesota. And two people on FY report having been at it!

This was my first Yes concert, and though I was disappointed that there was no light show, the music was incredible. The whole day was quite an experience. We arrived towards the end of Gary Wright's set and settled in about halfway back among the 75,000 people. I don't think it mattered where you were - the sound system was HUGE! Skynryd rocked through their set. Frampton preened through his (although over the years I have come to appreciate his music more. Well, expept "I'm in You"). Then as a lot of the crowd left, we worked our way closer to the stage to await Yes. I remember the judge who cleared the way for this concert to take place being up on stage, and after being introduced to the crowd, turned his suit jacket inside out to reveal a crazy pattern and saying he wanted to be "hip so he could boogie with the Yesses." It was hilarious. Off to the side of the stage throughout the day there was a diving pit where high divers would jump in. I guess this was supposed to be entertaining. Finally, Yes took the stage, and to this 17 year old, they appeared as gods! I still get goosebumps whenever I hear the start of the Firebird Suite introduction. There was no solo album material performed at this concert, but i don remember Jon doing an extended harp solo and Patrick's piano solo with it's boogie-woogie part. Chris and Jon had to don sunglasses as the sun was setting directly into their eyes. I was so impressed by Chris and his flowing robes (for lack of a better term) that he would open up as he turned his back to the crowd. From that concert on, I was hooked and have seen every tour since.

"Show us your boobs!"---classy.

But Gibby -- Patrick Moraz did some amazing music with Yes!! (He joined Moody Blues mid-1978).

We arrived late to this show, missing Gary Wright (and I guess Natural Gas?!?) probably because it was in unfamiliar territory. I remember a lot of this show for some reason -- considering how little I remember of the rest of the 70s. I remember that besides the people standing in front of the stage, people had about half-filled the grandstand of Hawthorne Race Track as well. The photo of the woman on her boyfriend's shoulder here reminds me that Peter Frampton and his band had developed quite a reputation for holding up signs saying, "Show us your [boobs]!" and women would happily comply. It was so prevalent during the show that we worked our way up front so we could get a better view BACK towards the crowd.

I remember Frampton rocking the crowd, I remember Lynyrd Skynyrd doing the same, but I remember Yes as more or less going through the motions. With Patrick Moraz on keyboards, maybe that was the reason why. One more thing, I think I saw Moraz on keyboards with the Moody Blues around this time, too, did I?

I was the 'lost sister' and actually, it was my brother who was lost. I was with his friends the whole time! He left us to get closer to take pictures (he was VERY into photography at the time)and that was the last we saw of him. His friends and I eventually left and took the shuttle buses to the parking lot and waited by the car. My brother in the meantime had called our Mom & Dad and told them he lost me. My Dad still says that was the angriest he ever got at my brother! This is the kind of thing that happened in the 'pre-cellphone' days.

boy do i remember that concert. i was 15 and brought my little sister kathleen who was, i think, 14. well, we each went to the bathroom and that was the last i saw of her. the girls bathroom was total pandemoneum as the venue was NOT designed for that many people. it was a horse racing track with the entire infield filled with stoned teenagers! i spent the rest of the day looking for her. at eight that night i finally called home. she wasn't there!

i dont recall how she finally got home but the issue was resolved and now she teases me relentlessly about the concert where i lost her!

Thanks for posting the pictures. They really bring me good memories. At the age of 14, this was my 1st concert experience. I went with my brother and 2 friends and I remember sitting in the middle of the infield. I agree with most of what everyone has posted here. The reason this show was moved from Comisky Park to Hawthorne Race Track was be cause of the Aerosmith show. During that show, a fire broke out on the roof of the old Comisky Park, where smoke engulfed the stage, forcing the show to come to a stop. Many fans thought the fire was a special effect that had gotten out of had, when in fact, due to the extreme heat on that day, the old stadium's roof caught fire. In addition to Aerosmith playing at this show was Jeff Beck with Jan Hammer (remember the album Jeff Beck Live with the Jan Hammer Group?) Anyway, this fire is what sparked the controversy and the movement of this show to Hawthorne.

Nick: Thanks for your beautifully written piece on YES and spirituality. 1976 was a truly amazing time to be a YES fan. They were much more passionate -- and serious -- about their music back then. Going for the One was pretty much the last YES album to send shivers down my spine.

I was a subscriber to your excellent 'zine "7C's" in the late 70s and early 80s and I've often wondered what you've been up to since then. Good to see you're still out there spreading the word about peace, love, and understanding -- and music.

Surprise, surprise. I got an email from my ex-wife who had been checking out her diary, and she reminded me that it was 29 years ago that we had gone to see YES (at an all-day music festival in Illinois) and also the day we had begun our experiments in vegetarianism.
The concert was at Hawthorne Park Race Track-- I'm not even sure where that is. The lineup was Natural Gas, Gary Wright, Lynryd Skynrd, Peter Frampton, and Yes. It was actually a pretty impressive lineup. Natural Gas was a band I don't remember at all, and never heard from again. Gary Wright had an early all-synth band playing funky pop with spiritual messages. He had just had a huge hit, "Dreamweaver," which I should only have to mention and the chorus should pour through your mind. His inspiration was Paramahansa Yogananda, the same yogi whose book Autobiography of a Yogi was mandatory reading in the counterculture and which had also inspired, in the form of a footnote, Yes' double album Tales From Topographic Oceans. Lyrnrd Skynrd wins the award for the all-time-most-difficult group name to spell. They played ass-kicking southern rock which seemed kind of moronic to me, despite the occasionally melodic song and the anthemic hymn to decadence, "Free Bird." (It's become an ongoing joke in Chicago to call out "Free Bird" at literally ANY classic rock concert, much to the bewilderment of the band on stage and amusement of the audience.) Peter Frampton was one of the few "typical" pop rock acts I liked during the 1970s. I stumbled on him by accident when I went to see another band and Frampton was the headliner-- I remember being impressed by the clear mix that emphasized the vocals so strongly. Predicting the success of his live album Frampton Comes Alive was one of my rare moments of attunement to commercial tastes. Looking back at it, he had a good voice and adequate guitar playing but the songs don't interest me much anymore. Like most people, I promptly forgot about him after that album.
Yes, on the other hand, were unforgettable. Most people have a band (or two or three, or in my case countless) that runs parallel to pivotal periods in their life and exerts tremendous influence. To put is succinctly, Yes were my gospel music and the gospel music of countless hippie spiritualists. The counterculture spilled out of the cities in the late 1960s into the suburbs in the 1970s. There were two wings to it, the spiritual and the political, and I caught on to the spiritual wing in 1976, just 6 months before this Yes concert at Hawthorne Race Track in August. Of course there was a great deal of overlap between the political and spiritual counterculture, but our emphasis was different. I would say the main inspiration behind the spiritual counterculture was Allen Ginsberg-- Beat poet, early gay rights and progressive political activist, drug experimenter, and inspiration to all who delved into Eastern religions and chant as a spiritual path. Ginsberg basically mapped out the path by touring around the country doing poetry readings that served as part entertainment, part how-to-be-a-human-being be-in.
For those who wanted a better education in world religions and spirituality, there was another touring hippie guru, Ram Dass, the bisexual Harvard psychedelic researcher (and colleague of Timothy Leary) turned yoga student after discovering his guru after being led around India by another Western convert (Bhagavan Das) who patiently taught him to "be here now," the phrase that would become the title to the most popular book of the spiritual counterculture (and would crop up in YES 1977 lyrics for "AWAKEN".
I was pretty much oblivious to all of this until 1976 when a long-time passion for atheism would give way to a long-time passion for spirituality after viewing one simple TV show (Tom Snyder's Tomorrow, sometime mid February 1976) which featured a gaggle of spiritualists which were probably a brand of neo-Theosophists. That pretty much changed my whole life. Running parallel to this was the progressive rock movement with YES as one of its brightest stars. I had been listening to their double album, four song Tales From Topographic Oceans for about a year at that time, but after this revolution in my mind it would become a near obsession. Spearheaded by two of the most melodic singer-musicians ever to pass as rock and roll, Steve Howe (guitar) and Jon Anderson (vocals, percussion) brainstormed their way into rock legend by creating one long, intricate rock symphony with just four twenty minute "songs": "The Revealing Science of God", "The Remembering", "The Ancient," and "Ritual." Too complex and non-rock to be appreciated in a sitting or two, it baffled most rock critics accustomed to easier-to-digest fare. Coupling this problem, Yes performed the entire album in concert before most fans had had a chance to digest the album. I was completely out of this loop altogether, as I hadn't bought the album or seen the band until the next year, 1975, when they were touring in support of a more jazz-rock inspired album, RELAYER. They did perform one side of TALES at the show, "Ritual," but I wasn't familiar enough with it to follow what was going on except to note that they were all going berserk during a percussion movement, banging on drums, timpani, large metal triangles, and other percussive instruments.
Looking back at it now, TALES wasn't that terribly complex or that different from it's much-lauded predecessor, Close To The Edge. TALES had simply taken the elements of their style and stretched them to their maximum potential. Yes' style was a mixture of rock, folk, classical, space electronics, country, and a touch of whatever else they could throw in. Steve Howe wrote some of the most beautiful guitar passages of his career (lead guitar, slide guitar, Spanish classical, folk) and Jon Anderson responded with his stream-of-consciousness lyrics (aided by further lyrical ideas by Howe) that owed more to painting-by-words than poetry. While Steve kept the melodies constantly inventive, the lyrics wove a web of ideas that encompassed all that life is-- the beauty and cruelty of it all. Nature and evolution, the quest for enlightenment (spiritual evolution), the degradation of the earth through civilization/plundering/war, nonviolence and war, romantic love-- everything apparently lived within the "topographic oceans," and sorting through the contradictions of life was the task of wise philosophers and mystics-- or stoned hippies-- depending on how you looked at it. These were the concerns of the ethos. What was clear about the counterculture was that it broadened the range of people who took on these heady issues. It was nothing to spend endless hours discussing all these issues. Paul McCarntey would later write in a song that looked back on these times ("The Songs We Were Singing" 1997):

For a while, we could sit, smoke a pipe,
And discuss all the vast intricacies of life
We could jaw through the night
Talk about a range of subjects, anything you like

But we always came back to the song we were singing
At any particular time
Yeah, we always came back to the song we were singing
At any particular time.

Take a sip, see the world through a glass
And speculate about the cosmic solution
To the sound, blue guitars
caught up in a philosophical discussion...

Paul would know-- he was at ground zero of the counterculture explosion in London in the mid 1960s, supporting everything from the underground press to the legalization of marijuana movement to the avant garde arts scene with the megabucks pouring in from international Beatlemania. The Beatles internationalized psychedelia and counterculture spirituality with the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. With the cat out of the bag, every band in rockdom followed suit.
YES grew right out of the psychedelic rock movement of the late 1960s (Howe was in Tomorrow, Squire in The Syn), which was one of the first attempts of pop and rock to move out of its tightly controlled contrivances of verse/chorus/verse/chorus (and maybe a tad of a solo). The band members' backgrounds and early influences were church choral music, early rock, classical, jazz, and of course, The Beatles. Their first album bore a resemblance to psychedelia and British invasion styles (including a cover of the Beatles "Every Little Thing" with souped up instrumental passages) but they soon showed classical and jazz leanings on their second and third albums. They broke in America with their third album, The Yes Album, then established themselves as the head of the heap of what was being called "progressive rock" for its progress in battering down the walls between musical styles: folk, rock, classical, space electronic, country, and jazz all sat comfortably next to one another in a new meta-style. Their audience hardly cared which genre was being referenced at any given time as long as the epic story lyrics and extended musical ideas unfolded seamlessly. Only the most talented and flexible musicians could tread this path. After Rick Wakeman, a legitimately classically trained musician, joined them in 1971 for the Fragile album, there was almost no stopping their glee in fulfilling this musical task. Guitarist Steve Howe in particular could absorb musical styles as easily as drinking water, and this gave Yes a complete departure from the blues-rock or folk-rock style of most pop bands (including the later punk bands). Yes' musical arrangements amazed virtually everyone, especially other musicians, and they became dubbed "the musicians' musicians," "the thinking man's up with people," while simultaneously being greeting with skepticism by more traditional rock critics. Well, screw em. "Mainstream" was not what we wanted in the counterculture. We wanted no boundaries, or expanding boundaries, in religion, art, culture, peace, science, ecology, sex, and technology. And oh yes, love.
Yes reached it's pinnacle of artistic freedom with 1974's release of Tales From Topographic Oceans. Steve Howe was so obsessed with melody, including avant garde ones, that it pours from every guitar line on the album. Jon Anderson was so obsessed with the divinity in all things that he wanted to record the album in a forest! This convergence of talents produced a work that still to this day can test the patience of your average pop fan. Side one is too reverential, side two is too mellow, side three is too weird, side four is too bombastic, and so go the usual complaints against TALES. But actually, Yes was from the word go was reverential, mellow, experimental, and bombastic. TALES simply took all those styles and tested their limits. It's up to the listening to decide if they have the stamina for it.
1976 was the last time for two decades that YES would perform a complete side from TALES, and this was the tour I saw at the Hawthorne Race Track when they performed Ritual. Performing at an outdoor event meant that Yes did not have their usual elaborate stage show, and indeed performed its final song, Ritual, while facing a beautiful Midwestern sunset-- how perfect for Anderson's lyrical imagery as he sang "nous sommes du soleil," "we are of the sun."
Trying to remember or review this concert from 1976 would be impossible, but in the early 1990s an audience tape surfaced of the event which, though running out shortly after "Ritual" began, shows that the concert was as stormingly good as we remembered. In fact, the tape runs out just after Jon let out with his opening lyrics, "Nous sommes du soleil/ We love when we play." OK, let our minds fill in the last 20 minutes of the song.
"Ritual" is based on Tantra, an approach to enlightenment that is more associated with indulging the senses rather than the typical ascetic approach to mysticism. Jon Anderson's closing lyrics of "Ritual" give Tantra a Western romantic twist-- seeing the sexual aspects of tantric practices through the prism of the Western romantic tradition of love: "hold me my love, hold me today, call me 'round/ Travel we say, wander we choose, love tune/ Lay upon me, hold me around lasting hours/ We love when we play." If you want to look at this in Biblical terms, it's like a hippie version of The Song of Songs with an Eastern religious twist.
That's the last part of Ritual-- the mellow closing portion, the folkish ditty, typical of many Yes epics. The middle portion is also a favorite style of Yes, the manic instrumental. In this case, we have a percussion movement which the liner notes say "present and relay the struggle (between evil and love) out of which comes a positive source." If you watch the video of Yes performing Ritual in 1975 in Queen's Park, you can see just how ferocious that struggle can be. Drummer Alan White appears to be a man posessed-- or is it Patrick Moraz' crazed synthesizers-- or is the Anderson and Howe and Squire pounding on those damned iron triangles-- or is it Chris Squire on the timpani. It's probably the combination of all of it. It climaxes into a simple, stunning lead guitar line from Steve Howe-- the guitarist who won Best Overall Guitarist five years in a row from Guitar Player magazine, the guitarist sourced as inspirational by punk rocker Keith Levene. Yeah, that Steve Howe, whose talents and melodicism represent so much that punk supposedly rebelled against.
One last thing. On that audience tape of the Hawthorne Park concert, a rather stoned young woman plaintively calls out her requests to the band: "To Be Over," "The Revealing Science of God," two of Yes' most devotional pieces. And in so doing, sums up what the band stood for to a certain percentage of their fans. Probably most listeners just heard the exquisitely crafted music, but a significant minority tuned into the heart of Yes. "To Be Over" ends with the lines, "After all, your soul will still surrender/ After all, don't doubt your part-- be ready to be loved" which climaxes into a flourish of lead guitar that can send shivers down your spine. It speaks to the implications of what it means to be "loved" -- what does it mean to love our spouse, each other, the animals, and the earth. This is an ongoing dialogue between theology and the reality of the way we live our lives. Yes represents one such link in that dialogue, a free-form artistic exploration of the contradictions of living a life and having high ideals.
I think Yes' approach to spirituality and art at this time still holds up. They were spiritually eclectic, musically diverse and passionate, concerned with broad ethical issues regarding the environment, war and peace, and tenderly romantic. They offered no easy solutions, but an abstract prayer that was positive and hopeful. ==-=-=- om=-=--= Nick

I agree that the website should change the date of this show to Sunday, August 15, 1976. After reading the controversy about the date, I went and dug out an old newspaper review of the concert and it said "Hawthorne Park Race Track, Sunday, Noon."

Yep, You're right WURM.I checked it out.Unfotunately,maybe because of the multiple acts before YES, they just didn't have time to set the Monster up. They just had the gold streamers for the backdrop,as you can see in the Cicero pics.Thanks for pointing that out for me.YES!!!!

Jeff,
They used the 3 headed monster at many outdoor shows. Look at the picture of them on 6/19/76 at Colt Park in Hartfort, CT you can see it.

Woops!forget something... this concert was actually Sunday August 15th, not Saturday.Sorry FORGOTTEN YESTERDAYS,I just wanted to clear that up, That's all!I Really love this website!Really!Thanks.

YES!The first concert I'd ever been to.And a lucky break as well, because I lived in Cicero at the time,And the CTA train station down the block from my house had shuttle buses taking people to Hawthorne Race Track for the event.I still have the program from that, but it hasn't held up too well over time.
A neighborhood friend came with me, and it took only 15 minutes to get to the racetrack.Gary Wright was fist to play(about 45 minutes),Then Lynyrd Skynyrd got the place rocking(for about 90 minutes). Peter Frampton was next and basically played his "Comes Alive" album,which was Huge at the time.Then,After the longest set-up time between the bands that day,YES hit the stage!Being outdoors,we didn't get to see the metallic Ghidrah the 3-headed monster thingy that they used for the indoor shows that tour,but oh well,I still was happy to finally see my favorite band play live.GATES and RITUAL were AWESOME!!! I can still remember seeing Jon jumping up to hit various cymbols on the small platform he was on just behind Steve Howe, during the percussive middle section of RITUAL. Correct me if I'm wrong,But didn't Chris Squire play "Lucky Seven" from His FISH OUT OF WATER solo album at This concert? Can anyone verify this for me?
Well, anyway,They finished RITUAL and left the stage. My friend started to walk towards the gates to leave and I said,"Where the heck are you going,They're not done yet?" He insisted that they were, Then SUDDENLY, we heard the unmistakable sounds of Alan White's Drum rolls as he led the rest of the band into a Rippin'Hot version of ROUNDABOUT. I turned to my Friend and said "SCREW YOU!"and I ran back towards the stage.Needless to say my friend finally caught up with me to watch the encore.As night settled in,we caught the Shuttle bus home and on the bus,this(at the time)14 yr. old couldn't believe the experience he had just witnessed.Sorry if this was a bit long-winded.Not really a review, but more of a wonderful REMEMBERING!!!
A Final Wish/Plea to other die-hard YES FANS out there:If anyone has pictures/photos of this or any other CHICAGO yes concerts from 76-79,Please try to post them.Thanks!LONG LIVE YES!!!!ROCK ON!

On a Sunday in August, Yes played @ Hawthorne Park race track in Cicero, Illinois. It was an afternoon show. The concert was part of "The World Series of Rock." Named that because the series of concerts were scheduled at the old Comiskey Park in Chicago. The first in the series was Aerosmith. I don't remember who also shared the bill with that show (maybe Foghat was one act). The bill had usually 3 or 4 groups on it. For the first concert in the series (Aerosmith, et al) the crowd tour apart the Comiskey Park stands and after that canceled the remaining shows in the series. When it came time for the next concert, the YES show with Gary Wright as 1st act, Lynyrd Skynyrd as 2nd, Peter Frampton as third and Yes, the only place that would take them was Hawthorne Park, a horse racing track in suburban Chicago. The big stipulation was that it had to be in the daytime and done by sundown. There must have been 30,000+ fans that day on a hot August afternoon. Most of the crowd left after Peter Frampton. I don't know how much of their solo stuff they played buy the did Sound Chaser, Gates of Delirium, And You and I, Ritual, Roundabout, Heart of the Sunrise, All Good People. Since they played during the day, there was no laser show, no light show and no cool looking stage - just the guys on a bare stage playing great music. I believe the ticket was only $10.

At the time Frampton was really big and half of the people left after he finished his (endless) set which seemed to consist of 11 different versions of "Do You Feel Like I Do?" Gary Wright was fluff. Lynard Skynard really rocked. I love that shit-kicking southern rock. The band members chugged on bottles of Jack Daniels and threw the half-empty bottles into the crowd. Then Yes came out and kicked ass and the sun set and Yes was cranking away and it was awesome. I can still hear Steve's pedal steel guitar solo ringing in my ears. The authorities tried to stop the show but a local judge issued an injunction and on it went. The judge addressed the crowd during the show as "very nice young people." Ha ha! If only he knew! He must have smelled all that reefer....

I saw the YES concert on 8/14/76 at Hawthorne Racetrack. A reviewer, Cynthia Dagnal, made the following brief comment about Yes' performance: "Yes ended the show with its highly literate and inventive flights to the cosmos. Jon Anderson's clean, sparkling vocals never had such a fine showcase. And what Yes remembers that others of their genre don't is to keep it rocking, no matter how extraterrestrial it gets. It was excellent sunset music, mellow for the mind, soothing to the soul."

I have to agree with her entirely. In fact, I even wrote her a letter thanking her for her comments. For me, this show still stands out as one of the most exciting concerts I ever saw, and it was a marker during a pivotal time in my life as I got more immersed in the study of the mysticism. (My first Yes show was in Chicago in 1975, the Relayer tour.) "Sound Chaser" was such a devasting piece of music, watching the band perform it was astounding.

Moraz' work here destroyed any apprehension about him replacing Wakeman, although he seemed better at being intense and bizarre than at being melodic (which was Rick's strength). And Jon's vocal interlude was a brief eye in the hurricane of Steve and Patrick's solos. Because of time constraints, the set was shorter than we are used to from Yes. But I still remember the improvised harp and synthesizer solo by Moraz and Jon. And of course, who could forget that performance of "Ritual." There was a beautiful Midwestern sunset happening as Jon sang "Nous Sommes Du Soleil," "we are of the sun." For anyone who was a romantic or mystic, the concert was just one big affirmation of life.

The concert program was excellent as well. Jon's page contained some excellent photos, as well as a bit of poetry and a quote-- "Energy is Eternal Delight"-- by poet/visionary William Blake. The centerfold photograph showed all of Yes looking up to a scenic photo of sun-drenched clouds, with there heads fading into the sky, a sort of photographic depiction of the ascension/expansion of consiousness. This was also at the time of Yes' solo albums, and although nothing was played from them, the amazing works that each member had come up with on their own was still fresh in everyone's minds and featured in the program. It was definately a day of high vibrations!!!

The 08/14/76 Chicago date was at Hawthorne Race Track in Cicero, Illinois, which is a suburb bordering Chicago. The 11X11 program for the tour erroneously mentions the Chicago date as being at "Kaminsky Park, Chicago". I think they meant "Comisky Park", former home of the White Sox. Originally, the concert was to take place there, but a big court battle ensued right up to a few days before the concert about where the concert would take place. Hawthorne Park in Cicero was finally given the nod. Yes was the mainliner. Backing them up was Peter Frampton, at the height of his popularity, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Gary Wright. The show started at noon, and ended at about 7 pm, at dusk. Jon joked during the show, "Let's hear it for the lighting man!", as this was a rare outdoor daytime performance with no lights. Many people left after Frampton. Another sidebar of the day -- the judge who allowed the concert to happen in Cicero showed up, went up on stage after Skynyrd and talked about how proud he was of the 75,000 kids in the audience that this was a peaceful event. It was a real weird day!

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