neil young

nearly a year later, i'm finally getting to homegrown and yep: it rules.

also flipping through the neil cds at barnes and noble yesterday, holy hell there's been a shitton of live archive releases lately. i knew the frequency of releases had picked up, but not like that. got some catchin' up to do i reckon.

yeah the floodgates are finally coming open! there's a lot of shit.

homegrown's more than alright with me

oh shit, i didn't realize that's robbie robertson playing along on "white line"!

makes sense, i suppose

never really got into the ditch stuff before for some dumb reason but I’ve been playing a disc from archives ii every day since I got in a couple of months ago and it’s like why even bother listening to other music

I was you some 8 years ago or so. And clemenza sent me Time Fades Away vinyl in the mail. This was before you could stream it! <3 to clemenza down in the rust bucket.

That is a good ilxor.

A quandary

1. I will buy anything the dude puts out.

2. I hate Greendale. It just goes tunelessly on and on forever. 8 minutes declaiming through a bullhorn is about 7:59 too much.

Do I have to get Return to Greendale?

I quite like the solo acoustic greendale live show (Dublin) but none of the other versions :-(

I think Return to Greendale is an improvement over the album but it's not like it's Live Rust or something, if you dislike the material it's probably not enough

greendale is rotten. first time i saw him aged about 17 i was so hyped, but it was the first run of greendale acoustic solo shows before the LP was even out. he played the whole thing with 5 minute chats between each song about what the lyrics mean (as if every single on that lp isn't extremely obvious). I had exams the next day and had to leave just as he started playing old stuff for the encore, and still missed my train, had to wait 2 hours in waterloo station until the next one. had a little cry.

thankfully he's made up for it every other time i've caught him. but yeah, it sucked.

so..... is this new/better audio version of the Rust Bucket DVD thing still happening? I haven't heard back in a while (re: https://neilyoungarchives.com/news/2/article?id=Letters-Rust-Bucket-DVD-Audio-first )

Not sure if this was covered somewhere or not, but that batch of Official Bootleg releases is delayed until late this year (due to the vinyl delays):

In other Neil Young release news, The Official Bootleg Series will now be released on October 29 beginning with "Carnegie Hall" disc. On November 5th, five more bootlegs will follow, including the long-awaited album with live recordings with "The Ducks" from the summer of 1977. The releases were previously planned for August and October.

He should just put out a boxed set called "Delayed."

Obviously there are many "culprits" behind the worldwide vinyl delays, but it annoys me to no end that releases the like this keep getting pushed back because the major labels are throwing their weight behind $45 "exclusive" RSD booger green colored represses of bargain bin commons than can otherwise be found for a couple bucks in every single record store ever.

Not in booger green!

fair, can't argue with that

Goddammit, I quit vinyl because it was a colossal, overpriced pain in the ass, and still the format finds a way to plague me.

Yeah, I don't even care about the vinyl. I'm planning to grab these on CD, but annoyed that everything seems to be delayed. Vinyl is an absolute shitshow right now though and, judging by the conversations I've seen between labels, artists and stores on Twitter in the past couple of weeks, the CD resurgence might be nearer than we think.

As far as I can tell from my day job there is a crazy shortage of EVERYTHING right now, from pet parakeets right down to, like, super common plastics such as nylon, not to mention the containers that have to sail the stuff to you.

Oh yeah, I'm seeing this in the construction industry right now, without a doubt. It's impossible to lock down pricing and schedules for material deliveries. But I'm reading that the vinyl problems were well under way before COVID, they've just gotten infinitely worse and quite a few people in the industry seem to think the current vinyl paradigm focusing on exclusives and 6 different vinyl colors for every album is not sustainable, COVID or no COVID.

Anyway, sorry to divert from Neil. I'm excited these bootlegs are coming out, no matter how much we have to wait.

Also, he claims to be working on finalizing the tracklist for Archives 3 and sold a fiction novel? Oh, Neil.

I found Prairie Wind in a clear-out bin last week; got through it twice, not without some effort. "It's a Dream" is pretty good, but I don't think there's a song worth saving. The background harmonies remind me of bad "American Dreamer" CSN, and--Christgau praises this--Neil is very much in moon/June plain-speak rhyming mode. Not a fan--I love oblique, "Cowgirl in the Sand" Neil.

Up to and including Psychedelic Pill, I'm now down to five I don't have:

This Note's for You
Greendale
Chrome Dreams II
Fork in the Road
Le Noise

I thought I was almost caught up, but I see he's made eight since then! I don't know that I ever will.

le noise is one of my favorites he's done, period. it's kind of an oddball in his catalog (not unlike the dead man soundtrack in some ways) though

I should have included Dead Man as something I don't have; I was going by Wikipedia's list of "regular" issues.

I was at Le Nuit Blanche in Toronto the night he debuted Le Noise...I mean, he wasn't there--there were giant speakers, and somebody debuted it.

Chrome Dreams II is worth getting just for "Ordinary People", which is an absolute classic.

I second Karl’s enthusiasm for Le Noise. It’s easily my favorite of Neil’s since Ragged Glory. And I say that as someone who is not a Daniel Lanois fan.

clemenza if you ever get to the bootleg stuff, Bluenote Cafe does a tremendous job of rehabilitating the This Note's For You era

Thanks for the tip, sounds like something worth pursuing. (I've also discovered that, after writing about Are You Passionate a few months ago like I was hearing it for the first time, I had accidentally bought it a second time.)

Got the rust bucket 4lp for $42 on fuckbezoszon. Genuinely surprised at the great packaging.

xpost there's a 25 minute bulldozing of Tonight's the Night that is like James Blood Ulmer and the Saturday Night Live band

Le Noise is his best record of the last 30 years imo, even with the obligatory clunkers

i am not SUPER-knowledgeable of his stuff from 90s to now, but it is also my favorite of that period.

The burnt out “Hitchhiker” take on Le Noise is great. The fact that song morphed into a track on Trans is nuts but on-track wrt Neil.

Le Noise is his best record of the last 30 years imo, even with the obligatory clunkers

― sleeve, Friday, June 18, 2021 7:37 PM

i was gonna be like, "HEY STOP RAGGED GLORY IS AWESOME" but then i remembered what year it is and. . . fuck, i'm old.

and yeah, le noise is solid. dream pop neil?

are those 2 the neil young for people who don’t like neil young? are there others in that vein?

nah, ragged glory is just classic neil + crazy horse noisey melodic buzz guitar jams. solid, but definitive *very* representative of "classic neil©"

le noise is produced by lanois and sounds like it, so yeah maybe. kind of folk troubadour neil goes space cadet ambient. like km said, it's an oddball in neil's catalogue for sure.

The biggest outlier in his catalogue might be... Landing on Water?

that album's sound hurts my ears

yeah, but that's. . . uhh, not a good album.

(now i've summoned the landing on water defenders, i just know it. oh dear.)

Just listened to it last weekend <3

are those 2 the neil young for people who don’t like neil young? are there others in that vein?

Although I don’t see what RG and LN have in common so maybe I’m misunderstanding the q

Landing on Water has some great songs

Old Ways is my personal least favorite

i don't think le noise would really convince anyone who wasn't already a fan but it's an interesting one, just neil & some nice spacy/noisy electric guitar.

I love his guitar playing, i like a lot of his tunes, sometimes like & sometimes hate his vocals (though they’re always interestingly unmacho & unrockstarlike even when they’re way offkey & the words are cliched/chauvinistic). his lyrics vary wildly between great and terrible from song to song or line to line & the politics are a fucking mess even by his generation’s standards

I heard landing on water the other day & thought it was mostly not very good so maybe i do prefer neil young being neil young. I’ve heard most of the famous albums at least once & found things to like on all of them but none of them are very consistent are they? closest is maybe after the gold rush… ?

ragged glory was one of the first i liked on first listen, i heard & enjoyed le noise for the first time last week. what they have in common: guitar noise, simple accessible tunes, the whine, the messy but intriguing lyrics

he seems like the kind of artist where the fuckups/messiness are part of the appeal if you’re a real fan. which i may become one day

Coming from the guy who’s honeyslider recipe sounds horrifying- I’d say you’d be 100% right that messiness is part of the appeal!

xp yeah I think every Neil album has at least one song I routinely skip over, except for On the Beach, which is ace all the way through

I wouldn't skip over anything on Time Fades Away either. Tonight's the Night has the missable "Roll Another Number".