Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Americana

neil young, always riding the boss's coattails

lol sorry neil stans, continue geeking out

tbh there's no point in being a neil young fan if you're not going to be a total stan/dork about it.

we've already established that neil conceptualized this album sometime in 1964 after eating several cheeseburgers at a Toronto diner.

Love this "Oh Susanna" as fuzzed out "Venus" or whatever, but I always wonder why Neil bothers calling them covers when all he needs to do is toss on a few new lyrics to make them his songs. I mean, they're in the public domain, anyway. I thought the same thing when Peter Gabriel did those radically rearranged covers a couple of years back. Just change the lyrics and call them new songs, dude.

think there's a publishing/legality rationale behind that iirc

i think it's mostly the artist doing what they want to do -- neil can write songs anytime he wants, but he wanted to do folk covers, he's not going to sweat how the label credits it or who gets royalties enough to change how he makes the record.

i keep forgetting to transcribe that section of Shakey but basically in that book it sounds like Neil's had these arrangement/reworkings since the early 60s and is just getting to them now

oh susanna sounds great. love neil's studio chatter at the end. it's funky!

What I mean is, Neil - or anyone - can skronk out songs like his "Oh Susannah" at will. So why not?

Like, it doesn't matter how it's credited. I'm just always surprised when artists cover a song that sound so unlike the song they're covering that they might as well call it a new song.

i think you're looking for logic and reason in the world of neil young, a long and lonely journey my man

At least he's not doing an album of Sinatra-ized standards.

don't say that too loud

recently it seems much more common for artists to claim songs as new compositions which "include elements" of other songs, which i always thought was lame.

Had a dream last night that neil put out a new album--cover photo was a grainy b&w silhouette of him now with his arm propped against a doorway. In a white marker block letter scrawl was the title, "THE YOUNG ONE"

Otm

tbh there's no point in being a neil young fan if you're not going to be a total stan/dork about it

Plenty of hardcore NY fans won't listen to anything after 1979. Plenty of hardcore NY fans only like the acoustic stuff, plenty of hardcore NY fans only like his Crazy Horse stuff

but that's so much less rewarding that trying to see the hidden genius in Re*Ac*Tor

I was talking to an acquaintance when "Le Noise" came out, and I asked him if he liked Neil Young. He immediately said, as he should, "I *love* Neil Young..." But then he added "...but not his loud stuff." Which honestly leaves ... not much!

I dunno, if you stick with Harvest, Comes A Time, half of Rust, Old Ways, Unplugged, Massey Hall, Harvest Moon, and whatever mostly-acoustic stuff he did after that, you'd have a not-necessarily-skewed portrait of Young.

You'd also be missing a more than healthy portion of his best stuff.

you'd also be getting pretty much noe of the really terrible stuff

none

not-necessarily-skewed

seems to be the very definition of "skewed", actually

I meant more that yes, it'd be a skewed picture of Young, but not wackily unrepresentative.

True, I bet there are people who do only know his quiet stuff. Seems a shame, though, really.

well, i mean, my mom *prefers* harvest/harvest moon to ragged glory, but she's perfectly aware of the loud stuff.

preview for the latest demme film
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/neil-young-journeys/trailers/neil-young-journeys-theatrical-trailer-29214537.html#jumbo
annoying that the *last* demme film is nowhere to be seen on DVD.

It'll be on Archives V, due in the year 2525:

i think you're looking for logic and reason in the world of neil young, a long and lonely journey my man

― l0u1s j0rdan (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 19:10 (6 days ago)

LOL, missed this before

i haven't read up on NY as closely as others but i always get the impression people are playing up and romanticizing how crazy and unpredictable he is or deliberately misreading a tendency to be indecisive or secretive.

i wouldn't say crazy at all.

but unpredictable to the core, and we're not exaggerating that at all, read shakey and he literally walks out on huge stadium tours with 50+ sold out dates booked...or, after a CB radio argument with stephen stills actually instructs his tour bus driver to take off in the opposite direction of the next date on the tour and never returns to the tour

but crazy in the actual sense is not neil, more cunning and weird and self-interested, he just does what he wants at the time and that's it...that's sort of the essence of his work, he feels things very strongly and believes that a certain way is right...until he doesn't and one day ppl wake up and find neil has left them or changed his mind about this album or that album and he's already moved on without them...

but i said logic and reason, i guess i meant to other ppl, everything makes sense to neil...in a neil way

he's certainly unpredictable compared to his big 60s rock peers, only Dylan really comes close i think, (dylan might even be more predictable). i mean, neil has scrapped numerous completed albums in order to follow weird tangents.

neil has scrapped numerous completed albums in order to follow weird tangents.

^^i was seriously getting kind of angry reading shakey again a few weeks ago

so between oceanside/countryside, homegrown, and chrome dreams we have 3 albums that are said to be among his best, plus the supposedly "better" david briggs version of tonight's the night

i have a bootleg of chrome dreams and if it's an accurate picture of what it was supposed to be, i'd put it in my top 10 neil albums

ha, yeah it is frustrating. this announcement came almost two years ago!
http://www.spinner.com/2010/07/28/neil-young-archives-lost-albums/
and don't forget about Toast!

oh god yeah toast haha...

the part when he was talking about homegrown was really irritating he basically said it was too good or too honest and he didn't want to put it out

yeah, in addition to being weird, neil is definitely good at mythmaking. "this album is so rad, i couldn't even put it out, dudes. think about that!"
it will be interesting to see what "chrome dreams" actually is/was -- i'm not sure if there's an actual tracklist out there. there's that "memo" with a tracklist but someone told me it was a fake.

just looking at the proposed lost albums series though -- 'Homegrown', 'Oceanside-Countryside' and 'Chrome Dreams', plus 'Odeon-Budokan Live'
those records in the span of about three years, any artist would kill to have made them.

the tracklist of the chrome dreams that i downloaded (it's on my ipod, but i lost a bunch of computer files so i dont know if i have it anywhere else) is:

pocahontas (different than the rust never sleeps vers)
will to love (the vers from american stars n bars)
star of bethlehem (ditto)
too far gone (differnt, far superior vers to the one on freedom)
hold back the tears (stars n bars)
homegrown (from stars n bars, though was this supposed to be the title track from the unreleased homegrown album?)
captain kennedy
stringman

stringman was only formally released in a live version from Unplugged right?

yeah i believe so.
this is the supposed memo, which certainly looks authentic
http://29.media.tumblr.com/BHtcu8LoLljo9ttnQV4NYizro1_400.jpg

captain kennedy sounds like the hawks & doves version to me, so maybe it was a leftover or this is just an assemblage made by a bootlegger?

yeah it's the same version on hawks n doves i believe.

oops i left some off here's the tracklist:

pocahontas (different than the rust never sleeps vers)
will to love (the vers from american stars n bars)
star of bethlehem (ditto)
too far gone (differnt, far superior vers to the one on freedom)
hold back the tears (stars n bars)
homegrown (from stars n bars, though was this supposed to be the title track from the unreleased homegrown album?)
captain kennedy
stringman
sedan delivery (different, slower versions, but similar to the rust never sleeps version)
powderfinger (totally different acoustic version)
look out for my love (sounds identical to the comes a time version to me)
like a hurricane (stars and bars version)

either way it's a hell of a lot better of an album than american stars and bars and lot of these songs i think flow together better in this form even the ones that were released otherwise

the version of Too Far Gone is a real gem, so much better than the freedom one

yeah who knows? when neil puts it out, it'll probably have none of those songs.

haha yeah no shit

reading shakey again made me so curious about the briggs version of tonights the night, it's hilarious briggs was so pissed and acted like neil was chickenshit and put out the "clean commercial" version as if the released version of tonight's the night was rumors by fleetwood mac in comparison to his version

of course, briggs comes off as genuinely crazy though so who knows

there are so many truly insane fucked up people in shakey

yeah judging from shakey, that's neil's MO -- find these nutty characters and feed off of them. neil might not actually be the weirdest guy in the world, but he gets a certain energy from weirdos.