neil young

that's one revision i'm a fan of.

i was in a position to have access to a lender of a copy with the original mixes in advance of committing to buy it and was very appreciative of the opportunity to save myself fifty bucks. glad i held onto my $5 70s reissue with the replacement mixes, which i will definitely agree sounded clearer and just overall better.

(granted this was all over a decade ago, so take that however)

xxxpost that is an extraordinarily bad ranked list of Neil Young albums, I don't know how you could do much worse

xxp you can tell by the matrix numbers, I definitely had the early mix and I agree w/Austin and not the "Neil Young fans who believe that the remix diminished the songs"

anytime i visit ILX and see this thread and the yearly rolling obituaries thread in close proximity i get brief panic attack.

this is one thread where i don’t have that reaction, i must think of neil as immortal. i guess it will be pretty shocking when (if?) i’m proven wrong

Allmusic today:

Somewhere Under the Rainbow 1973 Review by Fred Thomas [-]
Recorded at London's Rainbow Theater in November of 1973, Somewhere Under the Rainbow captures Neil Young at the height of the Tonight's the Night era, having finished that tumultuous album just months earlier and already taking the material to the stage. The Santa Monica Flyers, Neil's backing band on this tour, consisted of pedal steel player Ben Keith, bassist Billy Talbot, drummer Ralph Molina, and Nils Lofgren jumping between piano, guitar, and even occasional accordion. As with so many of the entries in Neil Young's Official Bootleg Series, Somewhere Under the Rainbow circulated as a rough audience recorded bootleg for decades before this official release, and professional mastering can only polish the raw sound quality to a certain point. For this kind of live document, the imperfections are part of the charm. Though boomy renditions of "Albuquerque" and "Mellow My Mind" sound like they're transmitting from the other side of a football field, there's a warm gelling of the vocals and instruments that doesn't happen with more defined multi-track recordings. Anyone deep enough into the Neil bootleg rabbit hole is probably already aware of Roxy Tonight's the Night Live, a far clearer recording of a club date that happened a few months after the Rainbow gig. Roxy has the same backing band and a similar set list, but the two nights carry significantly different energies. While Neil seems to be in loose, jokey form on both, Somewhere Under the Rainbow tones things down for a string of acoustic numbers that weren't a part of the more rocking Roxy date. This begins with a long, ghostly take on "Tonight's the Night" (the second time in the set the band plays the tune), the Buffalo Springfield-era song "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong," the always moving "Helpless," and several others. The night ends with a burning rendition of "Cowgirl in the Sand." Neil's voice cracks a little, and there's an especially wobbly quality to the way the band moves through the 12-plus-minute jam on the song, but it works with the rest of the set. Somewhere Under the Rainbow manages to feel intimate and hushed even when it's rocking hard and spilling out messily. All of the Official Bootleg Series releases are valuable documents of various phases of Neil's career, but this one has a personality that sets it apart.

Hoping to get my copy of both the new boot series releases today. I've heard absolutely glowing things about the Ducks one too.

What's the other one?

https://neilyoung.warnerrecords.com/en/the-ducks-high-flyin-2cd/093624855736.html

This is the first official release by The Ducks - a short lived group that Neil played with in 1977. The Ducks featured Neil (guitar, harmonica and vocals), Bob Mosley (bass and vocals), Jeff Blackburn (guitar and vocals) and Johnny Craviotto (drums). Mosley was an original member of Bay Area band Moby Grape; Blackburn had previously fronted his own band and co-wrote with Neil the classic track “My My Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)”.

The band played several shows in Santa Cruz, CA and other California venues during two months in 1977, and this 3-LP, 2 CD, 25-track live album features highlights from those shows. The set lists were very democratic, with each member of the band taking the lead in turn. 5 Neil Young songs are showcased, including a rocking version of “Mr. Soul”, plus beautiful renditions of “Are You Ready For The Country”, “Little Wing”, “Sail Away” and “Human Highway”.

this Ducks thing is ok so far but definitely not crucial.

it's so funny, the opinions are kind of all over the place.. some hate the Rainbow one and love the Ducks, others hate the Ducks and love the Rainbow one. Guess it depends on which Neil you like most. I'm just glad to have an official Ducks release.

Haven't been following non-jazz reissue/archival stuff but saw that Neil had a few things out today:

- Head-scratching he issued the 73 show, the sound is so dog shit (has to be the same boot that's gone around for years).

- The Ducks release might be the best one he ever did

— Jeff Conklin (@avantghettonyc) April 14, 2023

I can see warming to this Ducks but that second opinion is absurd.

haha not endorsing that at all, just sharing one i saw.

i mean, as long as, say, Citizen Kane Jr. Blues exists i don't know how that second opinion can even be real

Ducks is low-stakes but very enjoyable. the neil tracks are obviously head and shoulders above the other songwriters, but I think it's a good listen. Actually kinda preages the Bluenotes in some ways.

"sound is dogshit" on the rainbow release — yeah, duh, it's an audience tape bootleg. (and it's not that bad, conklin clearly has gone audiophile, haha).

it's not that bad

ha, you would know <3

(and it's not that bad, conklin clearly has gone audiophile, haha).

haha yeah, he's been tweeting more and more about audio equipment so that might be it. you'd think a guy with a love for jambands would be able to deal with AUD better that he is

i need my neil young bootlegs to be tone poet levels of audiophilia bliss!

Man I love citizen Kane jr, I never knew I'd need a whole Neil album with the audio quality and ambience of "baby what you want me to do" from Broken Arrow but there you have it.

Listening to the Somewhere Under the Rainbow release, I like it. It's a killer performance and yeah, a boomy audience tape, but I don't think it sounds all that terrible. Sure I wish this show was the same quality level as the Roxy show, but I'll take what we can get. Kind of hilarious to read the negative Amazon reviews throwing a fit about the sound quality, it's literally called a "bootleg" ffs.

Finally getting to The Ducks one as well, this is great. Killer sound quality and great performances. It's so weird to see people complain about the non-Neil songs on this, they still sound good to me. And even when he isn't singing, Neil's guitar playing cuts through so well (like on "Hold On Boys").

Neil Young goes to a record store in 1972, finds his own bootlegs, complains to the clerk, calls his manager...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-3rFhXVrvI

WOW! This is amazing. Neil Young has just dropped this on NYA! There’s not even been an announcement or mention, a fan has located it… enter ‘outtake’ in the keyhole search button.https://t.co/mbjQwOnqHe or the NYA app. pic.twitter.com/GG7jTVS6bI

— Kev (@kev__1987) May 23, 2023

cool stuff, but those have been on the NYA for over a year

OFFICIAL RELEASE SERIES VOLUME 5

Set for release on July 14, and available for pre-order beginning today, Neil Young's OFFICIAL RELEASE SERIES VOLUME 5 is a stunning collection of four albums that begins with the exciting renaissance that came with the release of FREEDOM in 1989, and continues on the unequaled exploration of collections RAGGED GLORY (1990), WELD (1991) and ARC (1991). In many ways, it is a musical travelogue of how Young saw the future and opened up creative worlds for the use of sound and originality which had not been used before.

The OFFICIAL RELEASE SERIES VOLUME 5 is available as a vinyl box set of the original four albums on 9 vinyl LPs and the 4 CD releases now issued on 6 CDs. The vinyl and CD box sets are numbered, and the LPs are pressed on 180-gram vinyl. The vinyl box for the four albums is in a telescoping box, and the CDs are in a slipcase.
All Greedy Hand Store purchases come with free hi-res audio downloads from the Xstream Store © at NYA.

In Neil Young's extensive career, this period of music came at a definite turning point. The 1990s were almost ready to start, and Young had recently returned to his long-time home at Reprise Records. It definitely appeared to be a joyous and jubilant moment for the man who had recently celebrated the 21-year anniversary of a solo career that had never stopped progressing. The first album in VOLUME 5 is aptly named FREEDOM, and includes the song "Rockin' in the Free World."

RAGGED GLORY (1990) was a non-stop celebration for the music Neil Young & Crazy Horse are still creating at full force, and was recorded at Young's Broken Arrow Ranch in Northern California. The 10-song original album is expanded for this re-issue with 4 rare tracks. “Interstate” and “Don’t Spook The Horse” were both B-sides to singles. “Box Car” and the 12 minute “Born To Run” are both previously unreleased versions. The 4 additional songs have resulted with the album expanded to 3 LPs and 2 CDs.

WELD (1991) is one of the most groundbreaking albums of Neil Young's history. It's a live album recorded with Crazy Horse after the release of RAGGED GLORY. It was from a wildly creative period of the band's history, and as Neil Young has often done, gave notice that he was a rock & roll originator who could never be second-guessed.

ARC (1991) is the live companion collection to WELD, and at the time generated the kind of musical notoriety that has often marked Young's creations. ARC is a 35-minute outburst of feedback, improvisation, guitar solos and vocal fragments. This marks the album's first release on vinyl.

FREEDOM Tracklisting:

1. “Rockin’ In The Free World” (Live Acoustic)
2. “Crime In The City (Sixty to Zero Part 1)”
3. “Don’t Cry”
4. “Hangin’ On A Limb”
5. “Eldorado”
6. “The Ways of Love”
7. “Someday”
8. “On Broadway”
9. “Wrecking Ball”
10. “No More”
11. “Too Far Gone”
12. “Rockin’ In The Free World” (Electric)

RAGGED GLORY – Smell The Horse Tracklisting:

1. “Country Home”
2. “White Line”
3. “Fuckin’ Up”
4. “Over and Over”
5. “Love to Burn”
6. “Farmer John”
7. “Mansion on the Hill”
8. “Days That Used To Be”
9. “Love and Only Love”
10. “Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)”
11. “Interstate”
12. “Don’t Spook The Horse”
13. “Box Car”
14. “Born To Run”

WELD Tracklisting:

1. “Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)”
2. “Crime in the City”
3. “Blowin’ in the Wind”
4. “Welfare Mothers”
5. “Love to Burn”
6. “Cinnamon Girl”
7. “Mansion on the Hill”
8. “Fuckin’ Up”
9. “Cortez the Killer”
10. “Powderfinger”
11. “Love and Only Love”
12. “Rockin’ In The Free World”
13. “Like A Hurricane”
14. “Farmer John”
15. “Tonight’s the Night”
16. “Roll Another Number (For The Road)”

ARC Tracklisting:

1. "Arc (A Compilation Composition)"
Neil Young's OFFICIAL RELEASE SERIES VOLUME 5 takes its proper place now in the career-exploration march of a true adventurer, both in the music he makes and the care and consideration in how it is presented to the public. Even with all the achievements and advancement in sound, it still feels like things are just getting started.

https://neilyoung.lnk.to/DSTH?eml=2023June2

is the depersonalised link to "preorder/listen here"

Any chance that Ragged Glory/Smell the Horse is getting a separate release? Already have the rest and not sure I want to spend $60 just for the one extra disc...

If you buy it now, you will guarantee that those 4 tracks are included in the next Archives box.

For which I will thank you.

"Down the Ragged Glory hole" would have been a much better title for an expanded edition imho

xpost - haha they absolutely will be in that next Archives box for sure, when it hits in 2026

I don't own physical copies of any of that stuff anymore and Young's remasters have genuinely sounded great, so I'm on board for this one.

The original Ragged Glory disc came out near the end of the 'too quiet' era of CD mastering, so that is a welcome upgrade.

ha the LP is pretty quiet as well, it's a long one

I understand why vinyl mastered at a low volume is not ideal due to signal/noise ratio inherent in the medium but I don’t think I understand why it’s an issue for CDs

I think it's just that they didn't really know what they were doing back then w/r/t CD mastering

Freedom and Ragged Glory (and Lou Reed’s New York, and probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting) came out during the uncanny valley period where CDs hadn’t quite taken over, and labels still felt a kind of default need to release vinyl. But releasing a double LP was expensive, and also constituted A Statement: even in 1989, if New York was released on two LPs (despite being 56 minutes) it would’ve changed the conversation around and perception of that record. It would’ve seemed more ambitious than it was.

So far I'm really refreshed by World Record and most of Toast---meanwhile, the solo acoustic tour is upcoming:

Young has prepared a setlist of roughly 15 rarities comprised of songs that he says “apply to my life right now,” including the 1982 “Trans” outtake “If You Got Love,” “Prime of Life” from 1994’s “Sleeps With Angels,” and “Song X” from his 1995 Pearl Jam collaboration “Mirror Ball.”

Fans can still expect to hear Young play his most beloved, well-known hits though he estimates that 80% of the performance will be dedicated to his die-hard fans. “They’re not new songs,” he said. “They’re old songs. But I wake up with them in my head every morning. They are songs that apply to my life right now and apply to everyone’s lives in this era that we’re in. Some of them were written 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, but never really played live.”

The tour is said to kickstart with a four or five-night residency at a “tiny, little unknown theater that’s close to one of the most well-known theaters in the world” on the West Coast, with the official locations to be confirmed tomorrow.

Variety coverage I hadn't seen when first posted in April:

Neil Young and Stephen Stills Bring Buffalo Springfield Classics Back to Life in Greek Theatre Autism Benefit

The original Ragged Glory disc came out near the end of the 'too quiet' era of CD mastering, so that is a welcome upgrade.

I understand why vinyl mastered at a low volume is not ideal due to signal/noise ratio inherent in the medium but I don’t think I understand why it’s an issue for CDs

The late '80s and early '90s were arguably the best years for CD mastering because they happened right before the "loudness wars" where everyone had to have their CD's mastered with more and more compression, for the asinine reason that they didn't want their music to come off as "quiet" if it followed much louder (i.e. compressed) music in the CD changer or on the radio. You even saw this happen on TV where the stupid commercials would blare out at obnoxiously loud volumes because they were compressed to be far louder than the actual TV programs they were interrupting.

One of the selling points of digital was that mastering the music at low volumes had no issues with surface noise from vinyl, and the reason you needed to master at low volumes was dynamics. This was especially true for classical music, particularly orchestral works, which is partly why digital recording acquired a reputation for being this fancy, expensive process in the beginning - classical music embraced it early on because of digital's advantage in recording highly dynamic music.

Regardless of what you record in digital, there's a ceiling where if you try overload the signal, it results in horrid distortion, and not the pleasing kind you'd get in the analog world. The common thing with digital is that it doesn't fail "gracefully" the way analog does. You see this in film too - when things blow out or have too little exposure, film still captures some kind of detail and information, and every kind of film stock will have some inherent characteristic that makes it succeed or fail at that level in a unique way. With digital, a hard limit means it just clips everything off into complete and unnatural looking black or white. In the case of music, it's just a square wave that sounds like shit.

So if you had this dynamic signal that's already close to the limit but want it "louder," you'd have to compress the signal. If you were really inept, you'd just jack up the output level and clip off the signal, which sadly happens quite a bit too. All of this incredibly stupid because all anyone has to do as a listener is raise the volume on playback - in other words, there's no good reason to needlessly compromise the music just because a listener wants it to be louder, it's literally why you have a volume dial, but such is the world we're living in.

Apologies if the last paragraph came off as an insult, it wasn't intended that way. I used to complain about CD's being quieter than others until I wised up and really started to notice how bad "louder" remasters sounded compared to older CD's. If you rip them on a computer, match the volume levels (by dropping the louder one), you can hear on a good pair of headphones how bad the compression is and how the "quiter" mastering is actually fuller and more dynamic when played back with the volume cranked up.

by dropping the louder one

By this, I mean opening the file in a sound editing program and decreasing the overall volume or output signal there. If you open the quieter mastering and try raising the volume or output level there, you end up clipping the signal as mentioned above. Only raise the volume using the speaker or playback application or equipment's volume output, don't do it by manipulating the digital file.

Hell yeah---see also: Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression

Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression part 2

And several others, if you search Dynamic Compression, or even just Compression.

I mainly wanted a slightly louder Ragged Glory because I still remember this one time had been listening to it and then later putting on some later & more loudly mastered album on while forgetting to adjust the volume and nearly blowing my head off through the headphones.

Maybe this is in the other thread, but when did the 'loudness wars' really get rolling? There seem to be plenty of nice sounding major label new releases and reissues in the mid-90s.

It was a steady and gradual build. You can find some examples as early as 1992 but they were likely to use a modest bit of limiting or compression just to make it louder - the majority of releases weren't like that. More releases did in 1993, and I'd say by 1994 it was probably a majority of them. Once that happened, people started adding even more compression, and it kept creeping up and up. I remember going through the Smashing Pumpkins catalog, which IIRC had something close to an annual release from 1991 to 2000 (maybe more like one every 18 months), and you could hear and see how the problem got worse and worse with each release. IIRC 1995's Mellon Collie was the first time where it became kind of egregious, and by the time they got to Machina II it was pretty horrid. Just as well - I think their records grew substantially worse and worse after Mellon Collie.

Can Weld be improved upon with a remastering? As in, was it not mixed to death by Neil and is unsalvageable? I'm clueless when it comes to this stuff.

Jimmy McDonough wrote about this in Shakey, but David Briggs made a better mix that was released on the now out-of-print LaserDisc edition. Neil himself admits the album mix (used for all audio formats) wasn't good and that Briggs was right, but Neil has never bothered to correct things. Now would be a good time though!

ty for new DN

I don't reckon Neil would want to delay a reissue project to tinker pointlessly with the audio though

lol

i've got the "briggs mix" of weld (on mp3 lol) ... can't remember it being some kind of insane revelation, but I'll check it out again. Weld rules in any mix!

Weld rules in any mix!

This. My first Neil.

My current World Record fave, along with "Love Earth," is the here-atypically thudsome "Chevrolet"---figures a car song would be the one to ignite all these natural resources he's been saving, and deservedly so! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcpdFfJqmYc