But now surely they must have known in advance that fifty years later some bespectacled know-it-all in a tiny country to the left of them would have been reviewing their albums and had an issue with covers? Surely they would have taken that into account when deciding if they should include them? I mean, stands to reason, no?

Yep, starting out by doing covers is pretty much standard practice for musicians; many get left behind in the rehearsal tapes I suppose, but if one or two make it to the debut album, it doesn't worry me. I quite like the way it acknowledges that the new is actually growing out of the old.
It's the circle of life... :bowdown:

That's a good point, Chula.
In England at least, Yes at that time would've been called an underground band. That was the label for any music that wasn't turning up on tv and could only be heard on the radio if you tuned into a pirate station. Reputations and recommendations often came by word of mouth or what was in the local record shop, so yeah, out of sight of mainstream media.

For a long time "art rock" and "progressive rock" were used interchangeably and they weren't considered seperate categories like they are now, same deal with "punk rock" and "new wave".

A lot of genres are just kinda made up after the fact, there's been a lot of recent examples of this, yacht rock, sophisti-pop, city pop, etc.

Not sure I ever mentioned anything about "prog rules" (other than PROG RULES, BABY!) so why it's being discussed here confuses me. I think I noted Yes were one of the bands to kickstart the whole prog revolution, so if anything they would have been making up the rules, not following them.

We're in total agreement, sort of. I'm just not sure why it was worth a mention.
You are reviewing an album from an era where almost all new bands signed to a record deal chose some covers - whether it was their decision or a demand from the label, the goal was the same. Give potential new fans an easy gateway to your music.

A couple of my fave debut covers

I was wondering when you were going to bring up Led Zeppelin :laughing:

It's become worth a mention because I noted in the review that I wasn't bothering reviewing or taking note of the two covers on the album, and now people are saying I don't understand why they were there. I do; I just don't feel talking about covers on any album helps very much in assessing the band. I mean, even a really poor band (say, Nickelback) can probably do a competent cover. It's more how creative a band are, how well they write, particularly when dealing with a prog band, that shows you the measure of the artist.

Would you have skipped "Hey Joe" off of Hendrix's debut for similar reasoning?

Or this????

Hard to say. It's not apples and oranges. A) I wouldn't be reviewing Hendrix's debut, but B) if I was it would be more about his guitar expertise than his songwriting to be honest, so in all likelihood even an album of all covers would be okay. Lemonheads I don't know, but I think if I knew the cover I might be more interested to see how they handled it. The point about Yes is I knew neither of those songs, so I couldn't even say oh they did a good/crap job with it. If I praised the song, I wasn't really praising them, just the way they covered the songs. And as you know, in prog it's all about dem lyrics.