neil young

if only people had seen the video, Trans would have been a massive hit...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om2Lt94Ltw4

the whole show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqHcb7M5ZN8

man i love 'sample and hold' so much

Watching that has me hoping NY found a way to sneak Lofgren’s “Transformer Man” interprative dancing into the this Crazy Horse tour.

they should do Beggar's Day too, seeing as Nils did it with Crazy Horse and sang it with Neil on the Trans tour (unfortunately not included in the Berlin video)

fucking with the Roxy record now: don't think I've ever heard a celebratedly imperfect band play a live set that so closely approximates the sound of a studio record. the harmonies on "New mama" are tight as fukk re: TtN. makes me even more impressed that Talbot and Molina could sing as well as they did, Danny and the memories and shit tons of tequila, honey slides etc notwithstanding. or did Nils do most of the heavy lifting, singing-wise? no harmonies on "walk On", and no "lookout Joe" (yes yes, leftover from Harvest), "borrowed tune" and "Cmon baby" (also understandable).

and take a bow in the hereafter, Ben Keith.

that's a really good point about the singing. I've thought about that quite a bit over the years, specifically how Crazy Horse were able to sing well-to-great despite whatever debauchery went on, vs CSNY sounding ear-grating on most live stuff. I mean, I get that Neil isn't exactly the easiest guy to sing with, but c'mon. New Mama's a good comparison point - try to sit through the harmonies on this version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90LpT1OfOBY

ben keith was a total fuckin wizard

remember crazy horse had were doowop fiends before they became the world’s greatest knuckle-dragging neanderthal backing band

yeah nash and neil have never really sounded that great together to my ears (there are probably a few exceptions i'm not thinking of). santa monica flyers harmonies on the live "New Mama" form Tonight's the Night Live are pretty amazing.

oh and this may be relevant: https://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/173704794292/cowgirl-in-the-sand-the-losing-end-neil

New Mama's a good comparison point - try to sit through the harmonies on this version

i don't think it's the harmony singers who are the primary problem on that harvest tour version. ouch.

but yeah, neil and the horse's harmonies have been a thing of magic and beauty through the years and decades.

haha, yeah, Neil's a little, uh, ragged on that tour, that's true. There's some gems there too though, like the few acoustic versions of 'L.A.' (my favourite Neil song) and the early 'Last Dance' renditions with Buttrey on drums where they do this stop/start kinda woozy thing in the 'working on your own time' section that Barbata never did.

Something I've wanted to do for a long time: perform "Till the Morning Comes" with one of my classes. We've even got a teacher who plays French horn.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5kpLiiHV2g&feature=youtu.be

that's great!

Thanks. A few weeks ago, when I tried uploading a clip of me lip-synching "She Belongs to Me" in class, it was immediately blocked for copyright. This time, no problem. I don't know if that's because I was using Dylan's actual version in the former, and their software recognized that, or if it's just that Neil's not as copyright-mad as Dylan. It is a lot easier to find his stuff on YouTube.

wonderful

Love it! What a great experience for the kids. This has brought up memories I haven't touched in years- of being around 11 years old and our primary music school teacher Mrs Ghaznavi introduced us to Vangelis and his soundtrack for Blade Runner and encouraged us to make similar sounds. She also had one exercise where she got us to make our own musical instruments and can remember the excitement of fiddling around my tensioned elastic band monstrosity.

I haven't really considered it till now but it's pretty inspiring to think how important these things were in terms of my own creativity.

Awright clemenza! Yeah, it's too bad there haven't been (or I haven't seen) more albums like The Langley Schools Music Project (which just got a vinyl reissue in March), but who knows what's out there, much less publicized (although the Bar None dude who put out this comp on CD said that the original LPs were by far the best of their kind that he'd heard; wasn't too uncommon to have school albums like this, even my school did it). Must check YouTube.

there's a wonderful "on the way home" on this LP, unfortunately the mix I heard it on seems to have been taken off of soundcloud ...

https://img.discogs.com/TgWXq--wS9AkBBN47eAXWiZD7Dc=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-10560725-1499909883-1694.jpeg.jpg

Listened to "Sleeps With Angels" for the first time in a while last night. What an amazing record. It's a credit to the weird alchemy of Young and the Horse that even "Piece of Crap," the most aggressively outlier track on this relatively subdued and meditative album, is great.

I love that instead of doing that record as a more stand Neil record w/ a host of more sensitive & deft players, which is on the surface seems like the songs called for, he roped in his gang of cavemen to play way outside themselves and it works amazingly well.

Worst album cover.

Tell it to Springsteen.

"gang of cavemen" is so otm.

I would listen to Sleeps With Angels more if "Change Your Mind" were a b-side I think, it doesn't justify its length. so I skip it & "Western Hero" before it ("Western Hero" is the same song as like at least two other songs on the album) & go right into the fab "Blue Eden"

oh man I love Change Your Mind, it does go on though

I love the vibe of Change Your Mind. One of my favorites.

I never listen to Broken Arrow, but my recollection is that it fails at the same thing this album succeeds with.

Hard disagree — change your mind is great

dang, well at least we can agree that "Blue Eden" is fantastic, total grinder

"Sleep" def suffers a bit from mid-90s cd bloat, but when I am in the mood for it I wish it were twice as long.

"Broken Arrow" has some great tunes, "Big Time", but yeah overall isn't as great a record

Seeing him solo this Sunday...

setlist from st. louis last night looked nice — "Homefires"!

last time I saw him was a solo tour, the tour where he had all these instruments arrayed on stage and spent a lot of time walking back and forth between them, looking as if he was trying to decide what he was going to play, even though the setlist remained more or less static from night to night. I think it was because he was filming it?

haha yeah, i think that's at least partly schtick at this point

I saw him at Arroyo Seco last week and it just reinforced the fact that I am not into Promise of the Real. They opened with a 30-minute version of “Like the Inca” - cool jam I guess but yeesh, those lyrics. Did a great Cortez the Killer but then Neil turned it over to his band to do two of their own songs which kinda ruined everything for me.

Listening to Le Noise this morning, that one holds up really well, too!

yeah, that is probably my fave from this decade ... he seems to have rediscovered it in the past couple weeks! lotsa le noise in the setlists.

Well, it is a truly totally solo album - his only? - and he's on a solo tour, so ...

Storytone is totally solo, isn't it? Man, I literally have not heard a note of his last five records.

he was doing full band versions of le noise tunes w/ promise of the real, though — haven't heard 'em yet, but i'd be interested.

I remember being kind of bummed out by "Le Noise" when I first heard it but I revisited it a few yrs ago and loved it and I can't recall now what bothered me so much about it.

I stump for "Peace Trail" of his more recent records

le noise is also my favorite of his recent records, really going all the way back to harvest moon

psychedelic pill is pretty close, though

cosign both those posts

the bottom-end sound of that custom Lanois guitar thing is really something if you crank that record up

I remember reading about but not quite understanding Lanois's approach. Something quietly radical with a tricked out Gretsch Falcon?

"The other thing that was very important for the sound of the album,” added Lanois, "was the white Gretsch Falcon that Neil was playing, which had two pickups, one for the bass and the other for the treble strings, each of them going through one of the two Fender Deluxe amplifiers that we had put in the sweet spot in the room. The Falcon was our secret weapon. It was used on all the tracks, apart from 'Hitchhiker', on which Neil played his black Les Paul, and the two acoustic songs, 'Love And War' and 'Peaceful Valley Boulevard,' on which he played my Guild acoustic, which has an LR Baggs magnetic pickup, so we could mic the guitar and also have an isolated source of sound from the pickup.”

I guess there was also lots of mixing on the fly, tossing in effects here and there a la dub. I'd never watched this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU5B53b9ntQ

I never listen to Broken Arrow, but my recollection is that it fails at the same thing this album succeeds with.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, June 29, 2018 7:13 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think Broken Arrow is a bit more rambling and loose but yeah it's similarly understated. however i think the Broken Arrow songs themselves really called for a lot more energy, they're performed like the band just woke up from a nap. Sleeps With Angels has songs that really benefit from being delivered in the way they are, it's really got a fantastic late night noirish atmosphere throughout.

Safeway Cart is a great Neil deep cut, too

so dark