neil young

"Cocaine Eyes" always makes my Neil Young top tens.

"Prisoners of Rock 'n' Roll" has become the go-to track, but I dig "Around the World" for its wtf chorus.

“too lonely” on life rocks, iirc

Yeah Eldorado is supposedly getting packaged with some sessions he cut with his SNL band from his Sep. 1989 appearance.

I bought it for like $20-30, then used it and Freedom to re-create Times Square on CD-R, and then sold Eldorado for a slight profit. (I couldn't afford to keep it as a kid, and I preferred to hear the tracks in that context anyway.)

FWIW, the Times Square recording of "Boxcar" is the only cut from that lost album that hasn't been officially released. (A different, later recording was used on Chrome Dreams II.) Had to use a copy of the bootlegged acetate with some pitch/speed correction.

it wasn’t easy to find a copy in the US (and really expensive if you did find it)

i lucked out. my best friend's sister was in japan right after eldorado came out and brought me back a copy. music distribution was weird back then. or maybe it was normal then and it's weird now? either way, i miss it sometimes.

"Cocaine Eyes" always makes my Neil Young top tens.

soooooo good

I do remember seeing it in indie shops back in the mid 90s but it was always $30 but I definitely saw it around

In the picture from the Stereogum piece, is Poncho ... wearing his own Poncho shirt?

https://static.stereogum.com/uploads/2021/03/GettyImages-452070038-1615994314-scaled.jpg

I kind of want one of those!

that's a boss move right there

I do remember seeing it in indie shops back in the mid 90s but it was always $30 but I definitely saw it around

Yeah, I remember seeing it in record shops in Champaign for like $30 back then, but I wasn't yet enough of a Neil completist to shell out that much dough. Of course I saw no problem back then spending the same $30 for those Nirvana bootlegs like Outcesticide, but that's a different discussion lol.

i lucked out. my best friend's sister was in japan right after _eldorado_ came out and brought me back a copy. music distribution was weird back then. or maybe it was normal then and it's weird now? either way, i miss it sometimes.

Stereogum has a great interview with Poncho.

Thanks! It was indeed a great read. And this:

SAMPEDRO: They had a good thing going, but when Danny passed away… it wasn’t like the wheels fell off, but there was a wheel missing. When I came along, I was so excited to be in a band. I brought a lot of energy. At that point in my life, I’d given up on music, even though I had played since I was 11 and moved to Hollywood in 1966 to get in bands and make records. I was 16. I tried hard, but it never happened. I had applied for a job at the post office. I had sold my guitars. I was tired of not having rent money and not having food and living in my truck and all the other crazy things you have to do when you’re broke. Along comes Billy and the next thing I know we’re jamming at his house and I’m meeting Neil Young. Right when I’d given up, I made it.

Years ago, when I found out he had been working full-time on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, I was like WTF, you play with Neil Young, and you want to work for Leno??? That was before I knew what it was really like to be a musician, and to drive the point home, I saw an interview with Branford Marsalis where he talked about quitting the same show as Leno's bandleader. Marsalis's dad told him, "all right, that's fine, but you can't complain anymore!" Like, no matter how much press or respect you get, it doesn't always translate to a steady income, and working for Leno may be awful, but you don't have to worry about the bills ever again if you stick with it long enough. Can't blame a guy for taking it - I've never had to live in a car before, who the fuck am I to judge?

lol at “whoa! that water had tequila in it!”

I'll give Living with War another go, but once through I found most of it to be a B- shrug-of-the-shoulders. "Let's Impeach the President" was a little better than I remembered. Almost every song is very specifically anchored in that W./no-end-in-sight moment (coming out in early 2006, I was surprised to hear specific mention of Obama--well before he announces, almost two years removed from his big speech in 2004); it felt dated to me, which I wouldn't care about if I liked the songs more.

The good news, though, is that I had completely forgotten about "Roger and Out," which I had #8 on my year-end that year and still sounds great. That's the Neil I often connect with immediately: meandering ruminations on the hippie moment. It's not anchored to that moment--he's remembering a friend who died in Vietnam (if I'm hearing it correctly), but it sounds different than every other song on the album. I called it a "miniature 'Cortez the Killer'" in my comment that year; an early draft of "Driftin' Back" works just as well.

"It's not anchored to that moment"--meaning W./no-end-in-sight. I've got a couple of moments circling around each other there.

Picture day for the bus drivers at my elementary school was always a blast pic.twitter.com/1sZVgcdKfS

— Stu (@RandBallsStu) March 19, 2021

What's in your bag, Neil?

his indian rug and a pipe to share, iirc

Mellencamp is all, pff, why are they making me pose with these losers?

iirc, he just got done suckin' on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freez.

Looks kind of like the photographer (who I casually know!) is actually *keeping* him from doing that, and he's growing impatient and hungry. Though it also looks kind of like the other two are just humoring Neil, too. Neil is all "OK, now just one more, maybe with the poncho and leather satchel ..." and John and Willie are all, "lol, this is so Neil of him."

Paul Natkin! Yeah he's been a big part of Chicago's music scene for a loooooong time. I've met him once, good guy.

FWIW, it looks like they’re making new DVDs of Rust Bucket due to the complaints they’ve been getting regarding the audio.

indeed:

https://neilyoungarchives.com/news/2/article?id=Letters-Rust-Bucket-DVD-Audio-first

did anyone else that doesn't pay for NYA get an email from Neil today ("a note from Neil Young") saying

NYA’s Classic tier will continue to provide all of your benefits plus a few extras. The cost remains the same. ($19.99/yr). If that’s what you want, you need to do nothing. Alright!

i'm trying to figure out if i woke up one morning in a gutter with a year-subscription to NYA and completely forgot about it

Yeah, I got that email and I don't subscribe. I'm just on the mailing list.

this is one of those situations where we both end up paying $19.99 and we're not sure why

because what Neil Young cannot know is that yes, I do need to do nothing. Alright!

so.... where exactly do we mail our address + photo of our Rust Bucket DVD ? It doesn't say in that Letter To The Editor reply

Just toss it in an envelope and write "NEIL YOUNG" on the front. It'll get there, like a letter to Santa.

you have to click the stuff that looks like Rust on the side of the NYA file cabinet. click once to raise the corner up, then click that corner to peel the rust off. that opens up the Post Office Neil Oops chamber. I'd give you a direct link, but every single page on the Neil Young website has the same link.

Thanks!

https://i.imgur.com/kLcZVuZ.jpg

What do you call a guy that hangs out with musicians ... (I kid, I kid)

Apparently Neil got vaccinated. I'm trying to work in a joke about the needle and the damage done but it's beyond me.

I'm sure some anti-vaxxer nut has already done that.

Vaxxin' In The Free World

xxpost lol I used that joke on a different thread about the Oxford/AZ vaccine getting approved, put on pause, and then approved again a mere week later after making millions of people more distrustful of it.

Shots
I got shots

lol

Coog looks the most unhealthy of the three in that photo.

Well, he had a heart attack at, what, 40? 42?

He's pondering his eligibility for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

feel horrible saying this but maybe the photo was taken pre-heart attack

lol xp

missed Josh’s post

For those who have HDCD playback, Archives II is apparently encoded in HDCD but the standalone versions of Live at the Roxy and Homegrown are not, and there is peak extension on the Archives II mastering which would otherwise sound a bit louder (i.e. you need to decode it for the full dynamic range).

copying this from the superwolf thread:

Sweeney tells me about another Superwolf enthusiast. One day, Rubin texted to say that he'd just played the album for Neil Young and that Young had “freaked out.” Soon after, Young's manager, Elliot Roberts, who had managed Zwan, took Sweeney to lunch in New York, and also gifted him “a joint of extremely powerful brain-busting weed.”
Believing himself free for the rest of the day, Sweeney went for a stroll and smoked the joint. That evening Roberts called to say that Sweeney should come right now to join him at an Italian restaurant uptown for dinner with Neil Young. “I was so fucking high,” Sweeney remembers. “I figured, ‘This is a funny situation, and I guess I just gotta go with it.’ Neil Young's been in my head since I heard ‘Cinnamon Girl’ at age five. I can't articulate how much his music means to me.”

So he went. “Got in a cab uptown and walked through the door of the restaurant. High as shit. As soon as I sat down at the table, Neil Young's in my face about the Superwolf album. Turns out Neil Young is a large dude with a booming speaking voice and very passionate opinions. Neil almost angrily blasted me with compliments about the album, with deep observations about how the music worked, and lots of questions.… It felt beyond great to hear my work appreciated by the person whose work taught me how to play and how to listen. Mind was utterly blown. Still is, really.”

Nevertheless, Young was not just full of praise. He was also wound up about why so few people knew about this great Superwolf record. How could it possibly be that he had seen no press about it? What kind of fecklessness was at work here? When Sweeney protested that they had made a video, Young said that he certainly hadn't seen it and that maybe he should make one for them.

Eventually, as this haranguing continued, it struck Sweeney, through his haze, just how absurd it was to be on the receiving end of this particular message from this particular messenger: “He gave me such a hard time about us not promoting the album properly, finally my high ass said, ‘You're telling me we're being difficult and willfully obscure? You should fuckin' talk!’

https://www.gq.com/story/matt-sweeney-will-oldham-superwolf

That whole profile is incredible, especially the story told in the last few paragraphs, which I will now post in a Will Oldham thread.