Neil Young's "Ditch Trilogy" Poll

beach

Tonight's the Night's dimmed because we've all bought the OTB reissue and ripped vinyl copies of TFA, but it's really the one that most sustains a mood while still remaining beatwise and concise. On the other hand, "See the Sky About to Rain" and OTB's entire second side compresses and expands everything Big Star ever did.

neil hates time fades away.

On The Beach's stock has risen a lot in the last decade, but of these three it's still Tonight's The Night.

i'm one of those people who thought that tonight's the night was godhead for a long time and now i never play it. but on the beach, man, i could play that every day.

I'M A VAMPIRE BABE

On The Beach. I used to love Tonight's the Night, but what scott said.

Time Fades Away has great performances, Tonight's The Night has great songs, On The Beach has both.

they all have both. it took me a while to get into Tonight's the Night and Time Fades Away, but On The Beach was love at first listen so..

To clarify - when I think of those albums I think of those aspects of each first. They all smoke - my favorite Neil period by far. Only thing close to these for me is Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

you people who're suddenly above tonight's the night I hope the time never comes when you need it again

imo there will never be a day when anything can touch it

fuckin' "new mama" one of those songs where I can remember the exact taste of the air in the room the night it cracked some brittle thing inside me which is an emo-ass thing to say but what can I tell you, the heights of emo to which I aspired during my time with that record were pretty fuckin airy

my favorite Neil period by far

absolutely

I'd rank em

1) on the beach
2) time fades away
3) tonight's the night

I've listened to on the beach so much, I prolly listen to tfa more nowadays

but still, beach

tonight's the night

would also like to rep for the ditch antilles

journey through the past
tonight's the night acetate
live @ the bottom line 1974

bottom line show is one of those things that first made me realize that i could worship neil young and not just be a casual fan. i thought it was really special.

That show is the Citizen Kane Junior Blues bootleg, right?

Tonight's the Night, no question

yup

xp

Thanks Edward. I don't have it in front of me so wanted to make sure my memory was straight. Great, great show, and he better put the whole damn thing on the next Archives box.

neil probably hates that one too

"Tonight", bored with ILM's OTB worship

I'm not anti-On the Beach, but other people are definitely hearing things in it that I never have. Tonight's the Night for me, thx.

"On the Beach" is fantastic but it's become a cliche

very hard to decide between beach and tnt... i almost think that the stuff in Shakey, about the David Briggs OG mix with all the banter between songs, slightly spoiled TNT for me, because i am so fascinated by this earlier incarnation that has, afaik, never been bootlegged? and OTB has some lovely upbeat songs alongside its darker stuff (and its darker stuff is positively MURDEROUS).

i think i need to think abt this.

aw fuckit only one of these has 'tired eyes'

On The Beach for the second half, but I'm already regretting my vote: the second half is beautiful and desperate and also self-absorbed, so I use it like a drug when I am wallowing. But Tonight's The Night is an empathetic album, about his friends' dissolution as much as his own. "He tried to do his best but he could not"---darkest hole of the album b/c it's true of all of us. "Please take my advice"---we won't, Neil knows it, he knows he won't take his own advice. But he joins with his brothers in the chorus to try anyway. This album breaks me up.

I agree, OTB is a bit too rock star whiny in places. Not that I care about Neil Young's lyrics all that much.

tonight's the night...sends a chill up & down my spine

aw fuckit only one of these has 'tired eyes' 'albuquerque'

oh it had been far too long since we had a Neil Young thread!

Thoughts:

Time Fades Away - So ragged and strange-sounding. For being a live album recorded in stadiums, it sounds really reverb-less and dry! Piano ballads aside, not the most *tuneful* thing Neil has done. Some of his most anguished vocals though. He definitely sounds edgy! Maybe one of his most Dylan-influenced albums? Always thought that the title track was his version of "tombstone blues"

Tonight's the Night - Incredible throughout. What comes to mind is Neil's guitar here -- so thick and bottom-heavy. Drop Drop D? The riffs on "World on a String," "Albuquerque," "Tired Eyes" ... Even though the purist in me wouldn't mind having the original Briggs mix/sequencing, the songs from earlier sessions/shows are great ("Borrowed Tune", "New Mama", "Lookout Joe" "Downtown"). They really add to the overall picture. For all its darkness, I think there's actually a great sense of humor on this record -- gallow's humor, for sure, but it's still funny in parts.

On The Beach -- The record that made me fall deeply in love with Neil's music. As noted, the second side might be his best three song stretch. So many great sounds -- the keyboard in "See the Sky," the howl in "Revolution Blues", the guitar solo in "On the Beach", the tambourine & harmonica in "Ambulance Blues" ...

I don't go to any of these albums for the guitar playing, unlike some Neil albums

"Time Fades Away", the song, is really great. He's right about time, too. I like "L.A." a lot too but I think it sounds better on some boots of that era.

The versions of "L.A." and "Journey Through the Past" on that 2007 live album blow the album ones away.

The Massey Hall show? Don't think "LA" is on that one.

It was "Love in Mind," my mistake.

The version of "L.A." I'm most thinking of is on the Lonely Weekend boot, January 15, 1973.

is that the solo acoustic version? I like that one, too.

love all three...or love two and like time fades away...but yeah there was a period of time when i listening to like nothing but tonight's the night for like a year it seemed

Tonight's the Night

yeah, tyler, that 1-15-73 show has the usual 1973 structure, and "L.A." is in the acoustic part of the show.

love how the music in "LA" is written like some majestic paean but the lyrics are just snarky putdowns

xpost I think that boot is probably the essential TFA tour bootleg. TTN essential boot = Manchester, UK. And as others have noted above, the incredible OTB show is the Bottom Line one.

yeah, I'm fascinated by those 1973 shows, and you're right, I think: the Manchester show you're talking about is the 11-3-73 show, right?

don't have it in front of me, but yeah, I think that's the one ... there's a part where one of the mancunians yells: "you must be JOKING!" and Neil says: "you might be onto something there ..." the songs aren't as loose/long as some other bootlegs, but they're pretty intense.

yeah that's the boot...it's on the last song, "Don't Be Denied"

I really love that song. Haven't heard the boot, though.

it will be exciting for this era to be mined for the next archives ...

david crosby - "if i could only remember my name"

See this thread.

Those are all good. No Other, and to my ears, Aja, embody it, as well.

What about contemporary artists? Jeff Tweedy tries too hard. Jason Molina comes a little closer, but his work can be a slog. Will Oldham?

Oakley Hall are worth a look. Kurt Vile, My Morning Jacket's early stuff always gets these comparisons. I kinda like the Tennessee Fire, I guess.
mmmm not a whole lot, really.

If you're broad enough in your sonic palette, you can follow Tim F and others' suggestions in the thread on exhaustion I linked to, and find contemporary suggestions from dance music broadly understood.

my morning jacket is so muppety and barfy

Yeah, I don't have any of their records, I don't know.

i think Wilco's Being There is a pretty transparent attempt to do a Tonight's The Night/Exile on Main St. kinda thing. And it's good! Not as great as those records obviously. I guess Being There is like 13 years old now, isn't it.

i love MMJ (esp At Dawn and It Still Moves) but i think they're more everybody knows-era than ditch.

Cool turn of direction for a cool thread...

And to briefly turn it back to a previous direction...

(no tunes? really?

I'm not saying TTN doesn't have "good tunes" -- just that none of them ranks up there with his best. But the point is, the record isn't about tunes, per se -- it's about the overall vibe and aesthetic. I mean, you can hear the guy who did Gold Rush on there pretty clearly, skills intact -- but on the whole, it literally sounds like he passed out or sank into a brutal depression in the middle of writing these songs.

All that said, song-for-song, I find On the Beach (to which Marsh, btw, gives two stars in the Rolling Stone Record Guide) a more rewarding listen.

Tuneless? Not with "Tonight's the Night," "Speakin' Out," "Borrowed Tune," "World on a String," and "Downtown" one after the other.

q, for this thread i guess: has anyone else written lyrics that so explicitly engage their contemporaries? NY seems to explicitly name-check so many other artists and his own life and times, in a way that seems totally unlike any other songwriter i can think of

am i wrong?

whaddaya mean, like, talking about Woodstock on Tonight's The Night?

no, like actual song lyrics!

i was talking about song lyrics -- "I'm not going back to Woodstock for a while" -- from "Roll Another Number."

oh ha.

i mean, he talks explicitly about CSNY, Bob Dylan, roadies that died, etc.

or "I'm singing this borrowed tune, I took from the Rolling Stones"

also, anyone who thinks TTN is "tuneless" needs to get this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51iX2JgAEyL._SS500_.jpg

and learn how to play "Mellow My Mind" and "Speakin' Out"

...although, holy fuck, I had no idea those things had finally gone out of print. seems like they've been around forever, and what prices!

yeah, i've always loved the melody of "Speakin' Out" -- how it sort of tricks you into thinking it's a straight-up blues progression, but then throws in some really lovely little accents.

Who called TTN "tuneless"?

re. other albums with this same "burned out vibe": one reason I think the contemporary rootsy albums listed (e.g. Wilco) fail to reach that same vibe is that none of their authors/performers are as good as Neil Young. But more interesting to me is that the other artists listed fail to understand TTN's vibe. To burn out you must have burned in the first place. Neil's burn out is in response to his fame (with CSN, with Harvest) and the 1973 tour. It's easy enough to be mopey and take a bunch of drugs and declare yourself burned out and ready to write a burned-out album. But that's not why Neil was burned out.

This comes together for me when I think of "Borrowed Tune". Neil sings that he's singing a borrowed tune because he's too wasted to write his own. Implicit is that if he weren't wasted, he could write a tune as good as the Rolling Stones (as they did in 1967, no less). That's a bold claim! But what sells the song as burnout is that you know he could write such a tune. Could Jeff Tweedy or Jason Molina sell such a boast? Listen to Tweedy on "Somebody Else's Song", on Being There, an album mentioned as a contender above: "I sound like what's-his-name". Tweedy sells what he can sell: at best a vague boast, at worst self-deprecation. Whereas Neil, even in his waste, is selling a star.

^think that this warrants an otm.

yeah booming post!

Hey Trip Maker,
Thanks for the tip on Oakley Hall. It's not exactly what I was looking for, but they crank out some damn fine artsy roots rock with nice long jams. Reminds of Eleventh Dream Day.

No sweat! Glad you dig it.

about tweedy -- uncle tupelo had a lot more to offer people into neil than wilco ever has. anodyne (especially its title track, the last song, and "chickamauga") are square in the crazy horse tradition

i think they are. they might be ridiculously expensive tho
― tylerw, Tuesday, December 1, 2009 1:43 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ha, that is why i am asking for them for xmas!

― crazy farting throwback jersey (gbx), Tuesday, December 1, 2009 1:48 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

Not sure if Time Fades Away has its own thread:

http://www.uncut.co.uk/neil-youngs-time-fades-away-rumoured-for-record-store-day-release-news

The two songs I gravitate towards now are "Love in Mind" and (especially) "Journey Through the Past"; in high school, it was the title track and "Don't Be Denied."

MSRP $500 (includes PONO download code)

I think I'll stick with my 35+-year-old copy--still plays fine.

pretty awesome record. thanks again. It was a blast to finally read Shakey and go through Archives vol 1 and the ditch trilogy. hope I'm still around for vol 2.

Found this on the Steve Hoffman forums. Kind of interesting:

I just ran across this thread today ... and joined so I could set the record straight, so-to-speak. I conceived and developed Compumix while I was chief engineer at Quad-Eight in the early seventies. It was the first successful console automation system in a time when floppy discs and other data storage media taken for granted today didn't exist. Compumix I (as it would be called later when newer technology was available) automated fader and two switch functions per channel for 16 channels. This digital data was turned into a bi-phase PCM data stream that was recorded on a spare track as the mix engineer worked. On a second pass, the engineer could select one or more channels to "update" (the use of -15 dB as a reference point was established by my design). This copied both original and updated fader moves to another spare track. Layers of updates could be bounced back and forth between these two tracks until the final mix was made. As in the case of Neil Young and "Time Fades Away", the mixdown would "run itself" and the board's output run directly to a disc cutter (as was done by Neil at the Lacquer Channel. I stayed at Neil's ranch for several days to help ... it was most enjoyable to hang with Neil. Anyway, the audio tracks themselves were never digitized ... all they "saw" was a VCA (dBx 202) between multi-track tape out and console line inputs. The audio path was all analog (the system could properly be called digitally-controlled analog). The drawbacks to Compumix were two: 1. obvious requirement for two "spare" tracks, and 2. a short time delay for every bounce of data between tracks. If it took 10 updates to "get it right", there would be small time lag in fader moves. But some other systems under development had serious issues with level stability and required pristine performance for the data channels on the recorder (ours could play error-free from a cassette!). The system sold very well, to clients like Advision London, A&M Records, Jack Clement Nashville, Mowest, Sound Labs (Armin Steiner), Ken Nordine, Neil Young, and others.

- Bill Whitlock, 25-year president & chief engineer for Jensen Transformers & AES Life Fellow

huh....that's interesting

i think david briggs called it the Compufuck.

I've owned Time Fades Away for a while but last week I saw a vinyl copy in almost perfect shape for $15 and I had to buy it. Very rare for me to do that, but i thought, if nothing else I want to give this record to somebody. And I'm listening now and it's in INCREDIBLE condition, I'm happy when new vinyl records out of the shrink wrap sounds this good. And though it'll always make sense why it's 3rd here, this is a brilliant record. Top, say, 7 Neil for me.

Has its very own Facebook group, just like Danny Whitten would've wanted:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/124529420890827/

ha! (I still joined)

I may too. I've joined Ball Four and general baseball-discussion groups, and also the Christgau-acolyte Expert Witness group (all-Wussy, all-the-time). The problem is I get bombarded via e-mail with notices. I've clicked "notices off" on the drop-down menus, and still I get them.

Where does the version of "Journey Through the Past" in Inherent Vice come from? I'm so used to the original, I thought at first it was a cover, then soon realized it was Neil.

Don't know but there's a previously unreleased version on The Archives Vol 1, maybe it's that one?

Yeah, it's the Archives version.

Then I have it...I should investigate my own records.

how does it differ from the Time Fades Away version? (ps I am not buying the Archives just to find out)

it's a full band version -- an outtake from the harvest sessions. it's great! i actually think that "journey" and the Harvest version of "bad fog of loneliness" in place of man needs a maid and there's a world would make for a stronger album overall. i like the orchestral numbers but they always seem out of place there.

word

Quite a bit different in execution--closer to country?

yeah, kinda breezy

have we done a big NY albums/songs poll, and if not why not, and when?

A World of Constant Strangers: The Neil Young Results Thread