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Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young & The Band in ‘The Alternate Last Waltz’


Japanese cinema poster

I was looking for something else entirely when I stumbled across THIS buried treasure: The Band’s complete “Last Waltz” concert, as shot from what must have been the house cameras at Winterland. The audio and video sound quality is amazing and best of all, this is not only how it went down, in the order that it went down, and it’s actually how it sounded before Robbie Robertson went in and overdubbed everything. (It’s also not had that blob of cocaine hanging from Neil Young’s nose edited out through frame by frame rotoscoping….)

Aside from the opening acts, this is the entire main event. As much as you might love The Last Waltz, this is probably even better.

1. Introduction / Up on Cripple Creek 0:00
2. Shape I’m In 5:55
3. It Makes No Difference 10:15
4. Life Is A Carnival 17:28
5. This Wheel’s On Fire 22:51
6. The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show 27:26
7. Georgia On My Mind 31:20
8. Ophelia 35:05
9. King Harvest (Has Surely Come) 39:18
10. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down 43:26
11. Stage Fright 48:16
12. Rag Mama Rag 53:23
13. Introduction / Who Do You Love (with Ronnie Hawkins) 57:26
14. Such A Night (with Dr. John) 1:02:45
15. Down South in New Orleans (with Dr. John) 1:07:58
16. Mystery Train (with Paul Butterfield) 1:13:23
17. Caledonia (with Muddy Waters) 1:18:27
18. Mannish Boy (with Muddy Waters) 1:26:20
 

 
Part two begins with Eric Clapton coming onstage to join The Band, followed by Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Neil Diamond and Van Morrison and then poetry from Digger Emmett Grogan, Lenore Kandel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure and others.

1. All Our Past Times (with Eric Clapton) 0:00
2. Further On Up The Road (with Eric Clapton) 5:39
3. Helpless (with Neil Young) 11:52
4. Four Strong Winds (with Neil Young) 18:01
5. Coyote (with Joni Mitchell) 23:52
6. Shadows And Light (with Joni Mitchell)
7. Furry Sings The Blues (with Joni Mitchell)
8. Dry Your Eyes (with Neil Diamond)
9. Tura Lura Lural (with Van Morrison) 44:10
10. Caravan (with Van Morrison) 48:15
11. Acadian Driftwood (with Joni Mitchell and Neil Young) 54:07
12. Poem (Emmett Grogan) 1:01:18
13. Poem (Hell’s Angel Sweet William) 1:02:41
14. JOY! (Lenore Kandel) 1:06:14
15. Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (Michael McClure) 1:07:36
16. Get Yer Cut Throat Off My Knife / Revolutionary Letter #4
17. Transgressing The Real (Robert Duncan) 1:10:26
18. Poem (Freewheelin Frank Reynolds)
19. The Lord’s Prayer (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
20. Genetic Method 1:14:15
21. Chest Fever 1:20:25
22. The Last Waltz Suite: Evangeline 1:25:45
 

 
After the jump, part three has all of the Dylan material, Ringo Starr, and the big jam sessions.

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.02.2019
01:02 pm
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A guide to all the gorgeous old guitars Neil Young is selling
12.04.2017
11:27 am
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It’s a busy time to be Neil Young. He just released a new album, The Visitor on Friday, with a new single called “Already Great,” a mockery of MAGA. On that same day, he performed an intimate show in a small theater in his childhood home of Omemee, Ontario. That show was live-streamed to Facebook, where it still resides, or you can watch it right here on Dangerous Minds, at the end of this post. On top of that, he announced the full-resolution digital release of every song he ever recorded for 100% free-of-charge streaming on neilyoungarchives.com. Note—it’s every song he recorded, not just every song he ever released, so there is an incredible wealth of unreleased music to be enjoyed. Have fun getting nothing done today!

On December 9th, Julien’s Auctions—notorious for once auctioning one of William Shatner’s kidney stones—are brokering the auction of a huge amount of Neil Young’s property. Over half the lots, to the tune of about 250, are model trains; I imagine there are surely Neil Young super-fans out there who knew this was a pastime of his, but I was kind of astonished by the sheer number of toy trains he was making available! There are clothes and some personal effects on offer as well, but of course, Young is a guitarist, and there are a good three dozen brilliant guitars (and some dross, of course) to be had by the tenacious bidder. We’ve gone through the auction and rounded them up for you. We’ve excluded doubles, and we may have elided an acoustic or two—after combing through three dozen guitars, a lot of those can tend to run together. Should you choose to bid, best of luck to you, any of these would make a great score.
 

 
This is pretty amazing—it’s called “The Whizzer,” and it’s a set of footswitches that activated servos connected to the knobs on Young’s amp—effectively, a pedalboard that altered amp settings on the fly. The auction catalog states that this was used on the 1975-1976 tour, which means the amp in question was almost certainly a 1959 tweed Fender Deluxe.
 

1935 Martin F-7 acoustic guitar, serial number 60204.
 

A 1957 Gretsch Country Club 6182 guitar, in sunburst, serial number 27466.
 
Many, many more after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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12.04.2017
11:27 am
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‘More Barn!’ Neil Young confirms awesome story about playing ‘Harvest’ for Graham Nash
06.22.2016
11:23 am
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It’s a quote almost as delicious as Nigel Tufnel’s “This one goes to 11” from This Is Spinal Tap—and maybe it’s not a coincidence that it’s about the supreme importance of rock music being LOUD AS FUCK.

Todd Van Luling at The Huffington Post ran an article yesterday in which he says he got Young to confirm the sort-of apocryphal story.

The story must have happened in late 1971 or early 1972. Neil Young had just put his fourth album Harvest to bed, and he badly wanted his bandmate Graham Nash to hear it. Here’s Van Luling’s rendition of the story, as it has been told for years:
 

As the myth goes, Nash was at Young’s ranch just south of San Francisco when Young asked him if he wanted to hear something. (That something would become Young’s now famous 1972 “Harvest” album, which features the track “Heart of Gold.”) Nash, of course, said yes and suggested going into Young’s studio. That wasn’t Young’s plan.

“He said, ‘Get into the rowboat,’” Nash explained on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2013. “I said, ‘Get into the rowboat?’ He said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to go out into the middle of the lake.’”

The two row out on the lake, with Nash assuming Young brought a cassette player and headphones with him.

“Oh, no,” said Nash on NPR. “He has his entire house as the left speaker and his entire barn as the right speaker. And I heard ‘Harvest’ coming out of these two incredibly large loud speakers louder than hell. It was unbelievable. Elliot Mazer, who produced Neil, produced ‘Harvest,’ came down to the shore of the lake and he shouted out to Neil, ‘How was that, Neil?’”

The best part is Young’s apparent response to the situation. As Nash explained, “I swear to God, Neil Young shouted back, ‘More barn!’”

 
One of the odd things about this story is that 20 years passed before Nash told anyone about it, more or less. It purportedly appeared in the liner notes of a 1991 4-CD compilation called CSN—however, my efforts to verify that on Discogs came up short. In 1996 a Neil Young fan named Brad Brandeau created a T-shirt that depicted the story with this image:
 

 
As mentioned above, Nash told the story on Fresh Air three years ago.

Young has a new album to promote, an album called Earth that comes out on Friday. The acclaimed singer-songwriter has been in an expansive mood lately, joining Marc Maron on his podcast WTF as well.

Here’s Young’s account of the barn story, as told to Van Luling:

“Well it’s funny, it’s just a little thing that happened one day and it keeps growing and getting crazier,” Young said over the phone. “But I had the left speaker, big speakers set up in my house with the windows open. And I had the PA system — that we used to rehearse and record with in the barn where I recorded “Alabama” and “Words” and a couple other things — over there playing the right-hand channel. So, we were sitting in between them on a little lake and that’s what we were doing.”

When asked if the kicker of the legend was true — whether he truly did yell back, “More Barn!” — the singer laughed for a bit. Then he said, “Yeah, I think it was a little house heavy.”

“A little house heavy.” Can we get a T-shirt for that one too?

After the jump, Young set at the BBC a couple of weeks after ‘Harvest’ was released…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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06.22.2016
11:23 am
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Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young & TOM JONES?


CSNY painted by Guy Peellaert in ‘Rock Dreams’
 
Although Neil Young apparently hated doing TV shows—one of the main reasons he supposedly left the Buffalo Springfield in 1967 was not wanting to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson—by 1969 Young had given a bit on this front, as he agreed to appear along with David Crosby, Graham Nash and Stephen Stills on the This is Tom Jones TV show. CSNY did a short “You Don’t Have To Cry” and then the Welsh belter joined them, as was the custom on his program.

From Jimmy McDonough’s Young bio, Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography:

September 6 also brought a surreal appearance on the This Is Tom Jones variety show, featuring Jones himself bellowing lead vocal on Crosby’s “Long Time Gone.”

“It was highly rated, sold a lotta records, but in retrospect it was embarrassing, just a bad call’, said Elliot Roberts. ‘Neil went, ‘The Tom Jones show! What possessed you? It’s that shit.’ He always used to say ‘that shit’. Crosby had this weed of doom… Neil never forgave me for that. He ripped me about it for a very, very long time. Years.’”

 

 
Given that nearly five decades have passed since this was taped, it’s actually pretty amazing. Nothing to be ashamed of, certainly. Tom Jones and his show might’ve been seen as somewhat “square” by the rockstar standards of CSNY—Nash would’ve been acquainted with the Welsh singer from his days in the Hollies, no doubt—but the man’s mighty lungs inspire the rest of them to keep up, it must be said. I love how (an obviously manic) Stephen Stills rises to the occasion with his, er, intense vocal contribution near the end. Bassist Greg Reeves might’ve only been fifteen years old when this was shot—look at how skinny he was—and that’s Dallas Taylor on drums. You’ll note how the expression on Young’s face goes from one of disdain/‘What am I doing here?” to “This fucking rocks” about halfway through. The goofy expression on Croz’s mug needs no further explanation.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.14.2016
12:38 pm
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The ‘Doom Tour’: Incredible archival footage of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young live in 1974
05.13.2016
03:44 pm
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The coked-out megalomanical circus that saw David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Neil Young storm across America in the first and most decadent superstar open air stadium tour of the rock era was nicknamed the “Doom Tour” by Crosby because of the feuding, the drugs and the fact that a small army of promoters and hangeroners were sucking at their hyper-megastar corporate rock teets like there was no tomorrow. There had been big rock tours in the past, but CSNY’s extra ginormous 1974 outing—dreamed up by manager Elliot Roberts and put into action by rock promoter Bill Graham—was like plotting a military invasion of each new town that the show moved to. The beachheads were 50-70,000 seat football arenas, which saw stages erected and massive PA systems hooked up by a legion of roadies. Other acts on the tour included The Band, Joni Mitchell, Santana and the Beach Boys. The tour was so decadent that they supposedly had pillowcases with “CSNY” embroidered on them! Don’t even ask what the “coke budget” was.

The “Doom Tour” grossed $11 million back when $11 million was still a hell of a lot of money, but the principals only pocketed half a mill each after expenses (and the promoters, natch) were paid first. There’s an amusing “oral history” of the trek at Rolling Stone.com. Only Young kept both feet (literally) on the ground, traveling in a bus with his son Zeke and avoiding the insanity.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.13.2016
03:44 pm
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Historic footage of the time Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reformed for one night only, 1973


Photo by Joel Bernstein
 
After the success of their monstrously popular Déjà Vu album, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “the American Beatles” as they were often called (never mind that one was a Brit and another Canadian) broke up in the summer of 1970, with all four members of CSNY recording solo albums. Soon afterwards Stills released his eponymous solo album which featured guests like Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, “Mama” Cass Elliot, Booker T Jones, Ringo Starr, as well as Crosby and Nash, Rita Coolidge and CSNY drummers Dallas Taylor and Johnny Barbata. Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name and Nash’s Songs for Beginners appeared the following year. In late 1971, Stills teamed up with ex-Byrd Chris Hillman to form Manassas and Neil Young was up to all sorts of things at the time, being the prolific chap he’s always been known to be and producing some of his very best work.

In 1973, a black and white video recording was made of an impromptu CSNY set taped live at Bill Graham’s Winterland in San Francisco. It was originally a Stephen Stills and Manassas concert, but then some “very special guests” decided to show up. At the time Neil Young was on what could be called his Tonight’s the Night tour with the Santa Monica Flyers and Crosby & Nash were touring as a duo.

It’s sloppy, sure—and clearly none of them could be bothered to actually tune their fucking guitars—but the four hadn’t played together in well over two years at this point, although Young had jammed with Crosby and Nash at Winterland on March 26th, 1972 at an event called The Sheriff’s Benefit Concert, an attempt to raise funds for the problems faced by prisoners.

Neil Young, perhaps emphasizing his independence from the other three, doesn’t come onstage until the fifth number:

Setlist:
0:00:00 - Helplessly Hoping
0:04:31 - Wooden Ships
0:10:16 - Blackbird
0:13:36 - As I Come Of Age
0:16:42 - Neil joins in…
0:19:03 - Roll Another Number (For the Road)
0:23:39 - Human Highway
0:27:32 - New Mama
0:33:13 - And So It Goes
0:38:01 - Prison Song
0:42:48 - Long Time Gone
0:51:02 - Change Partners

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.19.2016
10:27 am
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Psychic TV’s unexpectedly lovely cover of Neil Young’s ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’
12.29.2015
01:17 pm
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Songs don’t come a lot more direct in their emotionality than “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” the third track off of Neil Young’s 1970 album After the Gold Rush. This is a song that rapidly lays down a strong melody and a strong chorus and more or less bludgeons the listener to death with them. (In case it’s not clear, I don’t mean this as a criticism.)

The best-known cover of the song arrived in 1990 when Saint Etienne’s version popped up in discos everywhere in advance of their first album, 1991’s Foxbase Alpha. Interestingly, according to Robert Webb’s 100 Greatest Cover Versions: The Ultimate Playlist, Saint Etienne had shown an interest in covering Young’s “Ambulance Blues” but changed their minds after hearing Psychic TV’s cover of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” which appeared on the 1989 benefit compilation The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young, right between Sonic Youth’s cover of “Computer Age” and Dinosaur Jr.‘s cover of “Lotta Love.”
 

 
Those expecting a bilious or arch dismantling of this ultimate Boomer ballad from the U.K.‘s premier experimental art punks might be abashed to learn that Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and the gang must have found something in the song that resonated with them, for they appear honor the song’s insidiously catchy chorus as well as, it seems, the message of the song.

In his collection Interrupting My Train of Thought, Canadian critic Phil Dellio (who once isolated “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” as the greatest song of all time) commented, after addressing the Saint Etienne and Juliana Hatfield takes on the song:
 

And that leaves the bug-eyed, transgendered Satanist with the lengthiest and best version of all, the strangest thing about which is how very unstrange it is. There’s a lifetime of disappointment and missed opportunities in the counsel kept by “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” and while the lifetime that Psychic TV’s Genesis P-Orridge brings to the song is undoubtedly a lot more unusual than where Neil was coming from, all that matters in the end is the way he invests every last bit of it into the delicate fall of “Yes, only love can break your heart” each time he hits the chorus. Perfection.

 
Indeed. Enjoy.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Somewhere in this world is a Psychic TV Zippo lighter and I totally want it
‘Pirate Tape’: Derek Jarman, William Burroughs and Psychic TV

Posted by Martin Schneider
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12.29.2015
01:17 pm
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Dance troupe interprets Neil Young’s ultra-depressing 1974 album ‘On the Beach’
12.14.2015
04:11 pm
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Released in 1974, On the Beach is one of Neil Young’s more intriguing efforts. It’s also one of Young’s albums that could fairly be called “elusive”—it took an online petition to secure a CD release of On the Beach, which finally occurred in 2003. The LP went out of print in the early 1980s, making it an especially rare find for vinyl enthusiasts.

In the liner notes to Young’s compilation album Decade, the songwriter wrote, “‘Heart of Gold’ put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch.” From this turn of phrase sprang forth the notion of Young’s “Ditch Trilogy,” which includes On the Beach, 1973’s Time Fades Away and culminated with Tonight’s the Night.
 

 
Moody and unsparing, jammed with images of loneliness and apocalypse, On the Beach miraculously avoids succumbing to bleakness; instead Young manages to transcend and transmute the innate pessimism of his vision. Ironically, considering that the album incorporates visions of assassinating noted cinema personalities from Laurel Canyon in their cars, the recording sessions for On the Beach were “Hollywood Babylon at its fullest,” as bassist Tim Drummond observed. As Jimmy McDonough wrote in Shakey, a biography of Neil Young, “It was a nonstop sleazefest,” with porn star Linda Lovelace and various Playboy bunnies making regular appearances. The edgy languor of the album surely a product of the “honey slides” everyone involved consumed during recording. “Honey slides” were a combination of pan-fried marijuana and honey dreamt up by musician Rusty Kershaw’s wife “until a black gooey substance was left in the pan,” as Young wrote in his memoir Waging Heavy Peace. “A couple spoonfuls of that and you would be laid-back into the middle of next week. The record was slow and dreamy, kind of underwater without bubbles.”

Young, of course, is Canadian—perhaps the most famous Canadian musician of them all. Earlier this year a dance troupe in Winnipeg known as Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers decided to honor their countryman with a dance performance inspired by On the Beach. The project, called For the Turnstiles after the fourth track of the album, was the brainchild of Brent Lott, who enlisted John K. Samson, formerly of Propagandhi and the Weakerthans, to compose an original live score with the assistance of Christine Fellows, Ashley Au, and fellow Weakerthans member Jason Tait. The performances were held at Gas Station Arts Centre in Winnipeg from May 7 to 9, 2015.
 
In an interview with CBC, Samson discussed the evolution of the For the Turnstiles project and the special qualities of the album On the Beach:
 

 
The following photographs from the production are by Winnipeg photographer Leif Norman:
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Hey Hey My My: Neil Young and Devo together in 1978
Neil Young has a shitfit when he finds bootlegs of his music in a record store in 1971

Posted by Martin Schneider
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12.14.2015
04:11 pm
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70 years… Young: Happy Birthday Neil Young!
11.12.2015
12:27 pm
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When he was just 24—and newly very rich and very famous—Neil Young bought Broken Arrow Ranch, the sprawling Northern California property purchased in 1970 for $350,000 “from two lawyers.” As he explained during his 1971 Massey Hall performance, his classic humber “Old Man” is about the foreman who lived there with his wife – “he came with the place when I bought it.”

In Jonathan Demme’s 2006 documentary Heart of Gold, Young said this about the inspiration for the song’s famous lyrics:

“About that time when I wrote (“Heart of Gold”), and I was touring, I had also – just, you know, being a rich hippie for the first time – I had purchased a ranch, and I still live there today. And there was a couple living on it that were the caretakers, an old gentleman named Louis Avila and his wife Clara. And there was this old blue Jeep there, and Louis took me for a ride in this blue Jeep. He gets me up there on the top side of the place, and there’s this lake up there that fed all the pastures, and he says, “Well, tell me, how does a young man like yourself have enough money to buy a place like this?” And I said, “Well, just lucky, Louie, just real lucky.” And he said, “Well, that’s the darndest thing I ever heard.”

Young performing “Old Man” at Toronto’s Massey Hall. You catch a glimpse of Mr. Avila at the beginning of the clip.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.12.2015
12:27 pm
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Watch X-Files’ Scully and Mulder sing Neil Young’s ‘Helpless’


 
Here’s something I thought I’d never see: Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny singing a duet of Neil Young’s “Helpless” at The Cutting Room in New York. This all went down last night. Apparently Duchovny just released his first solo album titled Hell Or Highwater. You learn something new every day, I guess. I haven’t researched the reviews, or heard it, so I can’t tell you if it’s any good or not. BUT that’s beside the point, IT’S DANA SCULLY AND FOX MULDER SINGING A NEIL YOUNG SONG!

And as every X-Files fan knows by now, the show is going to return to FOX as a six-episode event series which is set to premiere on Sunday, January 24, 2016. All is good in the world.

 
via AV Club

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.13.2015
03:01 pm
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Neil Young & family discuss model trains & his son’s cerebral palsy on Nickelodeon, 1994
02.05.2015
12:12 pm
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Dangerous Minds has written before about Neil Young’s enthusiasm for model trains, his investment in the Lionel model train company and his development of (and design and engineering for) the Liontech corporation, who really changed the game for model train hobbyists (don’t laugh! It’s true!). Despite Young’s relative openness on the subject (and his full candor in the fantastic memoir, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream), many of his fans aren’t aware that he has two sons with cerebral palsy, a permanent physical disorder, often with an intellectual component. His techy train obsession actually evolved from a series of hacks he designed to make the set-up usable for his son Ben Young, whose limited mobility was aided by large buttons and controls he could operate by pivoting his head.

While all this information is out there, Young still hasn’t really advertised his innovations’ home-grown roots, which is why I was so pleased to find this 1994 interview with him and his family from Nick News W/5. Now known as Nick News, the Nickelodeon news show is actually a pretty fantastic program (or at least it was, when I remember watching it). Covering controversial subjects like presidential elections, same-sex couples and their families and gun control, host Linda Ellerbee never condescended to her young audience.

You’ll notice Neil does not dominate the piece, with daughter Amber and wife Pegi given a voice as well. It’s actually an incredibly sweet and intimate look at their family life, and the Youngs are clearly supportive and conscientious advocates for Ben. The fact that Neil and Pegi chose a children’s show (and not some earnest display of daytime TV pathos) to open up to really underscores their commitment to their kids.
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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02.05.2015
12:12 pm
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‘CSNY 1974’: Listen to exclusive live tracks from Crosby, Still, Nash and Young
07.18.2014
10:51 pm
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Photo: Joel Bernstein

Not only am I one of those people who gets all squirmy if a concert goes on for much longer than an hour, I tend to really hate live albums. So why did I spend six straight hours yesterday listening intently to CSNY 1974, the new 40 song live box set from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young all the way through twice in back to back playings? Because it’s the best archival rock release of the year…

The coked-out megalomanical circus that saw David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Neil Young storm across America in the first and most decadent superstar open air stadium tour of the rock era was nicknamed the “Doom Tour” by Crosby because of the feuding, the drugs and the fact that a small army of promoters and hangeroners were sucking at their hyper-megastar corporate rock teets like there was no tomorrow. There had been big rock tours in the past, but CSNY’s extra ginormous 1974 outing—dreamed up by manager Elliot Roberts and put into action by rock promoter Bill Graham—was like plotting an invasion of each new town that the show moved to. The beachheads were 50-70,000 seat football arenas, which saw stages erected and massive PA systems hooked up by a legion of roadies. Other acts on the tour included The Band, Joni Mitchell, Santana and the Beach Boys.

The “Doom Tour” grossed $11 million back when $11 million was still a hell of a lot of money, but the principals only pocketed half a mill each after expenses (and the promoters) were paid. There’s an amusing “oral history” of the trek at Rolling Stone.com. Only Young kept both feet (literally) on the ground, traveling in a bus with his son Zeke and avoiding the insanity, but suffice to say that the debauchery and rockstar egos—at least from the evidence on display here—didn’t interfere with the music, which is insanely good.
 

“Carry Me”

The musicianship on CSNY 1974  is first rate, better even than their earlier live album 4 Way Street as each member had creatively matured since the 1970 tour. In Stephen Stills we have one of the single most remarkable guitarists of the rock era. Don’t get me wrong, Neil Young is no slouch on the six-string himself, but with Stills—as opposed to with Crazy Horse—his ragged, idiosyncratic playing is obliged to conform to, fight against and to parry with Stills’ more structured and almost architectural guitar style. Musically at least, they bring out the best in each other, but it’s Stills who provides the foundation in CSNY that Young reacts to and then he in turn reacts to what Young does, and lemme tell ya, it’s breathtaking. If, like some people, you approach CSNY solely from the POV of Young’s perhaps more “aloof” contributions, these are some canonical performances by him here that I think any Neil Young freak would go absolutely nuts over. (Five of the songs in the set composed by Young—“Traces,” “Goodbye Dick,” “Love Art Blues,” “Hawaiian Sunrise” and “Pushed It Over the End” –appear on CSNY 1974 for the first time on any official release.)

For all the talk of the backstage feuds, there is simply no sign of this in the onstage camaraderie documented here, which is supportive, fraternal and joyously ecstatic. A good example of this comes with Stills’ delicate piano backing of Young on “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” Other highlights of the set include several “solo” numbers: a simply smouldering take on Young’s “On The Beach,” a gorgeous rendition of Crosby’s confessional “Carry Me” (at that point still un-issued on record), Nash’s “Grave Concern” from his dark, nearly unknown Wild Tales solo LP and Stills’ motherfucker of a rip, spitting his way through a frantic “Word Game.”

There are various configurations of CSNY 1974 on vinyl, CDs, DVD and Blu-ray Pure Audio discs. Unless you have to have vinyl (and are a masochist who loves flipping six records over) I’d highly suggest going with the version that Rhino sent me, the Blu-ray, which has all 40 songs—there were three sets, two rock sets with an acoustic set in between—on one disc so you can just relax and take it all in for three hours. Another reason to opt for the Blu-ray set is that it sounds really, really good. Produced by Graham Nash and the group’s longtime archivist, Joel Bernstein, the set was culled from the tapes of nine shows that were recorded by Elliot Mazer, the tour’s audio engineer and others. The audio quality here is astonishingly good for 40-year-old live recordings to begin with, but it would be remarkable sounding if it was recorded yesterday. The acoustic guitars chime, the electric leads cut through you like a knife, Stills and Young’s duelling guitars complement and argue with each other. You’ve got the heavenly harmonies of Crosby and Nash mic’d so closely that you can hear their breath. The piano has presence and clarity as if it had been recorded in a studio and not at an open air sports arena in front of 50,000 screaming fans. You get the idea. At least when all of that money was flying out the door unaccounted for, they got these great recordings out of it. The mastering was done by Bernie Grundman (an audiophile mark of distinction) after it was mixed down by Nash, Bernstein and Stanley Tajima Johnston in 192-kHz/24-bit resolution. [To anyone who says that stuff doesn’t make a difference, I defy you to listen to the acoustic set on Blu-ray and tell me you’ve heard a more “intimate” sounding live recording, ever. I suspect that Nash and Bernstein presented their work to Stills and the notoriously picky audiophile Young with confidence. What else would there be for Neil Young to say other than “Hey, great job, guys!”?]
 


“Grave Concern”

To my mind CSNY 1974 is the “classic rock” release of the year so far. It’s so damned good that I can’t imagine anything coming along and topping it, either, but if that did occur, then 2014 will be a good year for rock snobs, overflowing with an embarrassment of riches like this and the Led Zeppelin remasters.

Like the majority of Amazon reviewers, Ima gonna give CSNY 1974 five stars. One woman writes that she bought it for her husband and gave it to him before they were going to go out and eat. They opted instead to stay home and listen to it all the way through. That was my reaction to it, too. I expected to like it, but I liked it so much that I spent six hours straight with it. Not listening while surfing on my iPad, but listening to it. Listening intently and digging the shit out of it. In summation: CSNY 1974 is fucking good. You want a box set to feel like a good value and Christmas day simultaneously and this one truly does.

(Did I mention that there’s a separate DVD of video performances shot at Wembley Stadium and at Landover, MD’s Capital Centre? That’s awesome, too.)

Here’s something fascinating, a black and white video recording of an impromptu CSNY set taped at Winterland in 1973. It was originally a Stephen Stills and Manassas concert, then some “very special guests” showed up. At the time Neil Young was on his Tonight’s the Night tour with the Santa Monica Flyers and Crosby & Nash were touring as a duo. It’s sloppy, sure, the four hadn’t played together in over two years at this point, but it’s history, baby! Neil Young, perhaps emphasizing his independence from the other three, doesn’t come onstage until the fifth number:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.18.2014
10:51 pm
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Neil Young’s hard to see ‘Muddy Track’ movie: ‘I don’t know what the f*ck it is’
04.17.2014
02:05 pm
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In 1987, Neil Young told an interviewer that Time Fades Away was “the worst record I ever made—but as a documentary of what was happening to me, it was a great record.”

Young has never shied away from documenting, warts and all, the high points of his career and some pretty low points as well.  When he toured Europe in 1987 with Crazy Horse, disaster was looming. “It was fuckin’ terrible,” to hear Shakey himself describe it. Ticket sales were shitty, band members were often in an alcoholic stupor and played poorly, there were riots and Young even had to deal with the ignominy of a radio interviewer who expressed surprise that Young wasn’t dead yet. Good times! At the end of the tour, Young publicly vowed never to work with Crazy Horse again.

Young, being Young, saw the cinematic possibilities of the chaos of the tour and the result is Muddy Track, a patchwork, out-of-focus Shakey-cam walk in the band’s shoes as they stumbled across Europe. No distributor would touch something like this with a ten ft. pole and so the film remained fairly mysterious until parts of it were seen in the Jim Jarmusch directed Year of the Horse in 1997.

Speaking about his films, Young told MOJO in 1995:

Muddy Track is really my favourite of all of them, though. It’s dark as hell God, it’s a heavy one! (laughs) But it’s funky.

Funky it is! Muddy Track is incoherent, sure, but it’s quite real and immediate in the best sense of Young’s work. Some of the footage is probably a bit too personal (a band meeting that devolves into a tense swearing match is uncomfortable to watch three decades after the fact) but it’s never boring.

Muddy Track is not a documentary,” Young has said “I don’t know what the fuck it is.” 
 

 
Thank you Vinícius!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.17.2014
02:05 pm
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‘Southern California Brings Me Down’: Pitch perfect Neil Young parody
03.12.2014
02:32 pm
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This genius, totally spot-on Neil Young parody, “Old Maid (Southern California Brings Me Down”) hails from the 1970s The National Lampoon Radio Hour (and was subsequently released on the Grammy-nominated Good-bye Pop album in 1975). You could probably play this for Neil Young himself and he’d have a hazy recollection of recording it!

Young is played here by Tony Scheuren a singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist who was once in a band called Chamaeleon Church with a young Chevy Chase and a cast member of National Lampoon’s off-Broadway musical “Lemmings.”
 

 
Here’s Scheuren’s wickedly, er, accurate James Taylor parody, “Methadone Maintenance Man”:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.12.2014
02:32 pm
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When Neil Young met The Monkees and completely tore the roof off the sucker…
12.02.2013
02:46 pm
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Although the story about Stephen Stills auditioning for the Monkees is apparently at least somewhat apocryphal—Stills says that he only wanted to sell the group’s management some of his songs—he did play guitar on one Monkee’s song, the Head soundtrack’s “Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?

Stills longtime musical partner Neil Young, however, was a Monkee himself—well, so to speak—for four numbers.

Young plays guitar on Head‘s gorgeous “As We Go Along” and he also played on a few tracks recorded by Davy Jones in a session produced just days after he left The Buffalo Springfield: The lovely, but slight “Smile”; a backing track for the never completed “That’s What It’s Like Loving You” and the simply incredible “You And I,” which appeared on the underrated Instant Replay album in 1969.

This features some of the best, most blistering Neil Young guitar work like… ever. Such a great pop song. Why was this not a massive, massive hit?
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.02.2013
02:46 pm
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