Album Review

Bruce Eder [allmusic.com]

The 1984 lineup of Yes -- Jon Anderson, Chris Squire, Trevor Rabin, Alan White, and Tony Kaye -- left behind this filmed account of their tour, which was made by no less a figure than Steven Soderbergh, about four years before he released Sex, Lies and Videotape. It found a following among Yes fans of the period, cleverly intermixing excellent live footage of the band with conceptual material and graphics, which seemed state of the art at the time and today seems a quaint relic of its era. MTV was what was happening then, and Yes, with ''Owner of a Lonely Heart'' as a chart-topping hit in this incarnation, was suddenly competing in that medium. Of course, what then happened was that following the hit and the tour documented here, it was three years before another Yes album showed up, by which time their lineup and sound had shifted again -- 9012Live became the only full-length concert document by the ''comeback'' version of the band. And then, across the 1990s and beyond, as Yes endured and evolved further, the particular version of the group represented here came to be considered more of an aberration than anything else, a flukey incarnation, despite the fact that, at the time, its success probably saved the band. And to make matters even more complicated, the master materials for this movie -- in particular the underlying sound elements -- were lost. As a result, for quite a few years, 9012Live was only traded as a bootleg DVD on the underground market.