Neil Young's "Ditch Trilogy" Poll

much appreciated tyler, thanx!

d&g rules btw, basically everything is some shit I love

yeah love the shit outta yer blog, man.

no doubt.

btw tyler, i KNOW i have that damn jayhawks CDR and i WILL find it but we are doing some work on the house and everything is in total disarray.

This is off topic but Tyler I just listened to your upload of Neil's SNL performance of 'Rockin In The Free World' and it gave me goose bumps all over my body. I remember watching this when it aired originally and it was easily the least genial performance of anything I've ever seen on TV. I remember NY broke at least half the strings on his instrument by the end. Thanks for including it in your In The 80s comp!

tonight's the night's my favorite album by him, so that. side 2 is some of the funniest shit ever on record. when his voice cracks in "tired eyes" i still crack up after all these years

wait which CDR? i've got some jayhawk live show (showbox in seattle) of unknown etiology

thanks for the kind words, ILM-ers. Plenty more Neil Young to come, fear not! After the Manchester show, I'll get around to doing an overview of my fave Neil bootlegs from 1976 ...

Neil's SNL performance of 'Rockin In The Free World'

his solo performance of "harvest moon" on SNL was really awesome too

yeah those SNL things are nice. to bring it back on topic, though, i wonder if there's any footage of the Tonight's the Night tour in Neil's archives? Would love to see that sleazy band in action. I think in Shakey, it says that there isn't much ...

Yeah, dying for some performance footage of the Tonight's the Night tour in the UK. Or maybe just audio, even. Will check in to the DoomGloomTomb blog.

gbx i have a really good boot of the hard to find vinyl only first jayhawks album on bunkhouse record that a friend of mine had done at a friend's recording studio through the board....lost highway was gonna reissue it on CD but never did

whoah that sounds cool

tonight's the night is some serious middle of the night, driving down country roads smoking cigarettes kinda music.

i dig the other two but it's not even close imo

middle of the night, driving down country roads smoking cigarettes kinda music.

― jØrdån (omar little), Wednesday, December 2, 2009 12:46 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is basically my favorite kind of music

would love to see various "the rough guide to the ditch trilogy" track listings here -- condense it down to the most hair-raising 65 minutes or whatever

someone do that plz and ysi thx

(i've only got On The Beach!)

this would be an inneresting poll

1. "On the Beach" – 6:59
2. "Motion Pictures" – 4:23
3. "Ambulance Blues" – 8:56

I'd be down for doing a ditch mix

yeah, do that

Since it's out of print and Neil refuses to release it on CD: http://musicartstyle.blogspot.com/2009/11/neil-young-time-fades-away-1973.html

While Time Fades Away is "lesser" than the others, it is totally worth hearing and it seems ridiculous that Neil keeps it out of print. I've always thought that maybe it's just a little too "personal" or something.

Like he just wants the memories connected to those songs to fade away.

if that were true he wouldn't have gone to the trouble of preparing an HDCD release

prolly more related to sound quality issues

like he wants that "time" to also fade away

tho the scrapped HDCD release sounded just fine

who knows

-\(O_o)/-

^ emoticon for head-being-crushed-by-neil's-weird-decisions

The official reason for no CD release of TFA is both sound quality and performance--Neil has said he doesn't like either.

Yeah, that's definitely what he said recently ... Still weird though -- I'm assuming that he is the one who put the album together and wanted it released in the first place. I'm sure that the record company would've loved a more conventional live album from him at that point, but Time Fades Away is not that! It's just weird that you can go on to Amazon and order 'Everybody's Rocking" but can't get "Time Fades Away."

I guess in a recent interview, he said he was going to "re-create" TFA on the Archives using different performances. Whatevs!

He won't, though.

well it'd be truly nuts if he just skipped that tour for the next archives ... it is wild, though -- he could have a 10-disc box just covering 73-74. So much activity -- TFA, TTN, OTB, Homegrown, CSNY ... The mind boggles. It'll probably be terribly disappointing .... :(

i've been listening to TFA cos of this thread and i realised that i always imagine these songs as being recorded at huge outdoor festivals, but they weren't, were they? not sure if it's the sound of the thing or the ~~vibe~~ that makes me think of wide open spaces.

yo - i just put up the three "ditch trilogy" bootlegs mentioned above over at http://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/ Enjoy!

you star - thank tyler

ditch mix coming soon

awesome!!!

i've been listening to TFA cos of this thread and i realised that i always imagine these songs as being recorded at huge outdoor festivals, but they weren't, were they? not sure if it's the sound of the thing or the ~~vibe~~ that makes me think of wide open spaces.

― jabba hands, Thursday, December 3, 2009 4:13 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

not big outdoor shows but they were recorded at live shows, digitally i think which neil said was one of the reasons it hasn't been reissues which is a lie probably

digital wouldn't even exist then, would it? a lot of the album was recorded in the winter of 1973, Jan.-Feb ... I have a theory that the reason the tour was such a bummer is that they were traveling through the midwest/Canada in the middle of winter!

you haven't heard of the compufuck?

per wiki, this is probably accurate:

Along with the soundtrack to Journey Through the Past, Time Fades Away remains the only officially released Neil Young album unavailable on CD, which may be due to technical issues: Time Fades Away was recorded directly from the soundboard to final 2-track masters using the Quad-8 CompuMix, the unreliable first digital mixing soundboard—against the wishes of producer David Briggs, who referred to it as the "Compufuck" but was forced to yield to the desires of Young. This resulted in a murky-sounding release; because the final mixes were those rough cuts, the album cannot be remixed for improved clarity:

actually the tour was a bummer cuz danny whitten died shortly after being dismissed from the touring band

but yeah, the difficulty in getting time fades away up to neil's audio standards are bound up in the way it was recorded, there's nothing to "mix down" from because the only thing left is the mixed masters

same thing goes for journey through the past

ditch trilogy is fueled by

not only the actuality, but the timing of whitten's death
neil's difficulty dealing with post-harvest fame
general post-woodstock malaise

also tequila

and yeah, i know whitten's death is the main catalyst for the darkness of this era, just saying that playing sheds in toronto and milwaukee in january can't have helped the mood much!

was reading this excerpt from a melody maker interview w/ young from '85 about the ditch trilogy and came across this:

I was pretty down I guess at the time, but I just did what I wanted to do, at that time. I think if everybody looks back at their own lives they'll realise that they went through something like that. There's periods of depression, periods of elation, optimism and scepticism, the whole thing is.... it just keeps coming in waves.

You go down to the beach and watch the same thing, just imagine every wave is a different set of emotions coming in. Just keep coming. As long as you don't ignore it, it'll still be there. If you start shutting yourself off and not letting yourself live through the things that are coming through you, I think that's when people start getting old really fast, that's when they really age.

^ seems like he was very connected to this on the beach/waves breaking metaphor for things, if he was still talking about it 10 years later, which put me in mind of the wave passage from fear and loathing in las vegas, 1972:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I've been listening a lot to the bottom line '74 version of "roll another number (for the road)"

when he starts singing it, to a crowd that had likely never heard the song before, the audience picks up on its rollicking "everybody must get stoned" vibe and starts clapping along like it's a hootenanny

now, I might be forcing an imaginary narrative framework over events, but I find it interesting how the audience loses its steam and stops clapping shortly after he hits the lyrical bomb in the chorus - "my feet aren't on the ground, but I'm standing on the sound of some openhearted people going down"

the second verse is even more pointed in its denial of hippie freewheeling, by the time he says "I'm a million miles away from that helicopter day" about woodstock, you can hear a pin drop, no hooting and hollering here

with the right kind of ears you can almost hear the high-water mark, that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back

yeah that whole show is kinda like that -- the crowd yuks it up on "Long May You Run" and even chortles at the "you're all just pissin' in the wind" line in "Ambulance Blues (which IS funny) ...

I think they're yukking it up during "long may you run" cause neil mentions it's about his car

which is kind of funny, when compared to how it sounds, his typical heavy maudlin loved-and-lost stuff