Yes 90125
 

I had Pandora running on my desktop while I read email and stuff and the song "Hearts" from 90125 came on. I have this on vinyl but it's been a loooong time since I listened to that album, having filed it away as the 80s "sell out" Yes, but hearing it again after so long I am remembering what I liked about it. It's not so bad for a pop version of Yes I guess. I still don't want to hear Owner of a Lonely Heart, but the other stuff on the album brings back memories. It's wierd hearing Chris Squire play simple stuff, though. I wonder what he thought of it at the time.

I saw that tour. It was a hell of a lot of fun and sitting in the second row in front of all those subs was quite an experience when Squire hit the Taurus pedals. I did miss the older versions of the band. I was spoiled by what I saw in the 70s.

They needed something to get onto the MTV bandwagon.
Agree, Close To The Edge it ain't...

There are two different ways to think about Yes' Rabin era. If you look at it from the perspective of their 70s albums, it's a whole other band. In fact, it was supposed to BE a whole other band; Jon Anderson had left to do solo projects, Rick Wakeman likewise, Steve Howe was off to Asia. Trevor Horn put Chris Squire and Alan White together with Trevor Rabin to form a new band that was going to be called Cinema, and it so happened that they tapped Tony Kaye, an old Yes alumnus, to cover keys. But apparently they started to feel that Rabin wasn't ready to run the show as frontman, so they invited Jon Anderson in on it, at which point the band was 4/5 former Yes members so they released it as "Yes" rather than as "Cinema." But nobody writing the songs on the album thought they were writing a continuation of what Yes had done in the 70s. In fact, Trevor Horn overheard Rabin fiddling with the chords for "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and asked him about it, and Rabin said, "oh, that's not a Yes song," but Horn said it should go on the album, so they recorded it.

But from another angle, if you listen to what else was going on in the world in 1983, 90125 was still different. You couldn't mistake them for Blondie or Madonna or the Cars or the Police or Van Halen. There was a progressive edge to it still. I was 12 at the time, my sister went to see the tour and I was too young to go but I stole her copy of the album and listened to it in my room over and over again. There was something going on in that album that appealed to me, that was more complex and interesting than the other pop available.

I agree. I saw them on the 1987 tour for Big Generator, which was a continuation of the 80s Yes sound, and even as a pop act they were still a few cuts above the average 80s tripe.

At least it kept Yes on the radio. Prog rock had taken a beatdown in the 80s and Yes could've faded away, but they had a string of hits from those albums that kept interest in the band.

At least on 9012Live we got a live version of the Fish, called "Whitefish".

The only time I saw Yes live was on that tour, it was fantastic!

"90125" was a very good album, it must however be taken in context of the time.

I'll agree with that assessment. When it came out I was in the Music Production and Engineering program at Berklee, so it made a pretty big impression around there (along with some other music that has long since been forgotten). It was really interesting to see how that all went down with the intersection of the Buggles and Yes, which 10 years before had seemed like an impossibility, but strange things do happen and the world is better for it. Although Hanson and Bob Weir might be pushing it.

I love that album!