neil young

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

Someone was nice enough to make me a CD-R copy of their LaserDisc audio years ago after I told him everything Jimmy McDonough wrote about that particular mix - from what I can recall, it was just a better, clearer mix, like a better "life-like" representation of a presumably well-engineered live show. I don't have the CD-R's where I am now because I put a copy on my iPod, and unfortunately I forgot it and left it behind in the same family home where I have those CD-R's in storage.

you sound like the man himself, if you swapped out "iPod" for "Pono"

can't decide if i want to see him on this west coast tour in July or not.

solo, and supposedly he's rehearsing songs he rarely plays?

by "want" i mean "can i make this happen among all my other commitments, money-wise, etc." of course.

got a ticket for one of the LA shows ... it's been way too long and my brothers and I have been promising we'd go see him together at least one more time ... tickets were actually a little less pricey than I expected.

how much, TW? if you don't mind me asking.

my local Live Nation shed has just stopped publishing ticket prices altogether.

$95 + fees — those were the "cheap" seats, but the Ford is pretty small, I don't think there's a bad seat in the house.

yeah, it is ridiculous that you don't really know what tickets are going to cost until the last minute and you're sort of "committed"

yup. sucks.

and yet i get it ... they put "$59 general, $99 reserved" or whatever on the website and, esp for popular shows, pretty soon they're on TicketMaster for $200, $300 via Verified Resale so they look legit, and the venue gets 100 calls. i wouldn't want those 100 calls either!

just a crappy deal all around, except for Live Nation's Board of Directors, I guess.

can't decide if i want to see him on this west coast tour in July or not.

solo, and supposedly he's rehearsing songs he rarely plays?

― alpine static, Wednesday, June 14, 2023 11:09 AM (thirty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i went to the 2018 show at the orpheum in minneapolis and i joked to the two people i was with "watch him open with last trip to tulsa" (just referencing an obscure one) and he actually opened with it haha

I listened to Life for the first time since 1989, or I guess when I lost my cassette copy, and I really liked "around the world" : it seemed like with this recording, he was trying to incorporate fairlight/synclavier shit into the Crazy horse format, instead of trying to turn into Y.M.O./Kraftwerk re: trans, and this song kinda succeeds as such! I think at this point he hadn't turned into Mr. "digital is the dark ages of sound"? I had never heard Landing on Water until a few weeks ago, which it seems is him saying to Geffen that he'll do it their way and make it with Danny "Building the Perfect Beast" Kootch, and I rather like it because it is a not-so-obvious obvious mismatch.

Played the new Ducks OBS release again this morning on a long drive for work, surprised by how much I love this whole thing.

just need to post a lament that i'll probably never see him live.

I think at this point he hadn't turned into Mr. "digital is the dark ages of sound

but he's not talking about synths, he's talking about recording. kraftwerk, pretty much all of the original synth pop stuff would have been recorded analog.

you sound like the man himself, if you swapped out "iPod" for "Pono"

Hah, I'll never get rid of my iPod, more for practical reasons than anything else. It's got too much music on it, i.e. there's no way I'm going to load all of that into my phone, plus I recharge my phone a lot less when I don't use it for music. And I hate AirPods - headphone/ear monitor cables never bothered me.

I wish I splurged and flown to one of the Crazy Horse shows in 2019 with Nils Lofgren. Ah well...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIrlAwZaHK0

Part 2 of 2 of that 2019 show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnU0wXYUcDU

but he's not talking about synths, he's talking about recording.

Everything from Freedom through Harvest Moon was recorded digitally. Took him four albums (or five if you count Arc separately) to realize he didn’t like digital recording.

consistency is not the man's strong suit

yeah the middle 8 of “around the world” is spectacular, life is underrated

it was a bit startling to hear the solo “long walk home demo” that opens disc 1 of archives 2

that one goes even further back — to the buffalo springfield days!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAN9WjegRcU

More dates than I'd seen:
http://view.e.warnerrecords.com/?qs=d1572806c6d918abf895d4c03a09dff4127b32999b3bfb57cecbc7e6b28ba78ead002973ee97d97efb6952d4f3397701ce90e2f597e0efe21629f3f705d522133dce7f02d2448e72

I said I liked most of Toast, but spoke too soon, although remain sold, as I was immediately, on the opener, which he opens with a chirp, "Don't say you love me (don't say you love me)," then he throws up a fence of attractive sounds, going this way and that: one of those things only he is likely to do, although I guess it's kinda like something more enigmatic on Oar---Neil's oblique strokes can make their own sense, though, and this is a promising start to an album about or alluding to marital problems, mixed emotions and all.
But "Standing in The Light of Love," though ok, tends toward/points to several that are either personally or generically (FM Important Rock) predictable, rhetorical (although I do kinda like the well-intended or good-intentions gesture of "How Ya Doin'?")
---then there's "I don't wanna let/The good times roll," with a riff that seems to leave a note out, nudging, or just plain bending, slacking, like, "Uh-uh," yet letting the bad times roll into a recognizable boogie, "Boom Boom Boom," not John Lee Hooker's boogie of that title, or anybody else's, not too much: it's his, customized and blended, singing like himself, while also suggesting Canned Heat's Al "Blind Owl" Wilson, who based his vocal sound on Skip James, one of those bluesmen long disappeared, who was retrieved in the 60s, played some more, prob outlived young outidery Blind Owl, eerie historical associations adding to the overlapping eerie canals ov keening---also Neil's playing like himself, while sometimes taking turns that suggest young Carlos Santana and Peter "Black Magic Woman" Green, making his own way through all that---anyway I have to give it up for

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1RHI9XfOec

So this has quickly turned out to be a song that, when it plays itself in my head, I feel more like doing what I'm doing. Good thing it's so long.

Perhaps "boogie" is not quite the right term, category-wise, but in effect it boogies, it surely grooves, anyway, in thee Neilian.

I didn't know or forgot about this, but there's always been this story that Neil almost co-produced Love's Forever Changes or arranged one of the songs (something Neil himself denies even though Rhino claimed it in one of their reissue's liner notes).

Johnny Echols clears it up here:
https://www.caropop.com/caropopcast/episode/ed00736f/johnny-echols-love

Basically, Neil was on the verge of getting evicted and needed to make some money, and Bruce Botnick was a friend, so he invited Neil to come in and co-produce as a way of making some quick cash. Neil was also friends with the band, but as Echols put it, there's no way they'd ever listen to him as a producer. They didn't know Neil was the one coming in, and when he showed up, they just laughed. They hung out for a bit, but Neil left after like 30 minutes, i.e. had NO input whatsoever, but that was good enough because Elektra paid him like a couple thousand dollars for his "services."

Apparently some folks on the H0ffman F0rums (lol, I know) have seen signs that Chrome Dreams is soon to get an official release. Apparently "Sedan Delivery" popped up briefly on Apple Music before being taken down again.

Good news. The best circulating bootleg is excellent by bootleg standards, but it sounds to me like an acetate with something like NoNoise or CEDAR applied. (Some of the artifacts as a result of that processing become obvious when you put the previously released tracks side-by-side with official release masterings.)

It's one of Neil's masterpieces, IMHO, but it also has a few songs that were used on later albums that I think are great (in the case of Rust Never Sleeps, greater), so I'm reluctant to say he should've put it out back in the day.

Re: Neil and Love, the 500 Songs podcast says:

https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-161-alone-again-or-by-love/

Neil Young was brought in as the producer for the album, although he soon dropped out. Reports differ on quite what happened — according to Botnick, Young worked with Lee on the songs until shortly before the first session, and then said “Man, I can’t do it. I’m hearing too much in my own head for me to immerse myself in someone else’s music.”

According to Echols meanwhile “We were contemporaries and very good friends with the guys in Buffalo Springfield. If we were playing a club and Neil came in, he’d jump up on stage and play with us. Bruce said he had a friend who needed some money and would come in and maybe produce a few of the songs on Forever Changes. He didn’t tell us it was Neil. I guess Neil told Bruce not to tell us it was him. When he showed up, we all started laughing and said, ‘Come on, this won’t work. We’re not going to listen to Neil.’ We did maybe one song together and that was it. He got some money for that day because he desperately needed it.”

One more extended groove, from Promise Of The Neil's about-half-good Noise + Flowers---my fave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXBWD0c2Xh8

definitely the highlight of that album — one of the few moments when the conga player from POTR makes sense. and that electric piano sounds great.

xxxpost Chrome Dreamsrelease being reported by Stereogum and several others, apparently Aug. 11.

Rolling Stone:

All 12 songs found on Chrome Dreams are likely familiar to Young fans, as the majority were later released on different albums. However, six of the 12 tracks are presented here in its original way: Opener “Pocahontas,” which later featured on Rust Never Sleeps, strips off that album’s overdubs, while tracks like “Sedan Delivery” and “Hold Back the Tears” feature different lyrics than the versions that would pop up on later Young albums.
Ahead of Chrome Dreams’ release, Young has shared that original take on “Sedan Delivery”:

Fairly sure that stripped take on "Pocahontas" they mention is the same one from Hitchhiker.

So is this album pretty much superfluous now, maybe a couple keepers? I haven't heard it.

https://www.stereogum.com/2228990/watch-neil-young-play-deep-cuts-at-west-coast-rarities-tour-kickoff/news/

xpost the "Too Far Gone" is way better than on Freedom (if the bootleg I had the mp3s for is correct)

Thanks. Worshipful yet appealingly detailed report:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebaltin/2023/07/01/neil-young-reminds-us-of-our-humanity-in-dazzling-tour-opener-in-los-angeles/?sh=4fc42fd76a34

I especially like:

After "Ohio" he offered, "That's so strange? Four people. Look how many we do away with now. I wish I had something to say to change it."

Then he joked about AI and how his piano he got in 1968 had an AI soul. But there was a point. "I am so happy I was here before AI," he said.

Also from that show: setlist (17 songs) & two videos:
https://ultimateclassicrock.com/neil-young-2023-set-list/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xN1WYW29X4