{"id":2230,"date":"2020-11-19T16:38:42","date_gmt":"2020-11-19T20:38:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/?p=2230"},"modified":"2020-11-19T16:38:44","modified_gmt":"2020-11-19T20:38:44","slug":"neil-young-archive-ii-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/?p=2230","title":{"rendered":"Neil Young Archive II (Preview)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Neil Young is a BIG part of why I love music. Listening to and collecting his work, and seeing his remarkable performances, became a template for how I would approach musical genius. Now, with the impending release of his second Archive set that will cover his most vibrant, creative and turbulent period, I give a preview of what will be on the ten-disc release, and also reflect what makes \u201cShaky\u201d Neil so vital and why this brief period of his massive catalog is so extraordinary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As always, thanks you so much for joining me in the MPOMY Escape Pod!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listen to the podcast on Apple<\/a> and Spotify<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reissues vs. New Music<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s hear it for the old guys who kicked our asses when we were younger! Sure, new music by Bruce Springsteen and Buddy Guy and Neil Young and Steve Hackett and David Gilmour and Mark Knopfler (all my heroes!) just doesn\u2019t hold a candle tho their prior work. It\u2019s fucking understandable. I mean that\u2019s a pretty high bar. And I give the new stuff a chance, but it just lacks the urgency and immediacy of what we got when these artists were young and hungry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are exceptions. Bob Dylan\u2019s latest material knocks me out just as much as his old stuff. No lie. Lindsey Buckingham too. The music is so simple, but it seems to never sound derivative. It\u2019s never a question of recapturing that old glory. It\u2019s always looking forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So you want to look back to your glory days? I\u2019m a huge fan of the archive, the official bootleg. The unalloyed \u201chot ticket,\u201d warts and all. This is how I became nuts about music. I learned from a cousin who would go to see Peter Gabriel on multiple nights, even if the show was largely the same both nights. That inspired me to start collecting bootleg recordings, so I could analyze the difference between Pink Floyd playing \u201cCareful with that Axe, Eugene\u201d on a Friday in August to them playing the same song on the following Saturday. I put up with a lot LOW fidelity enjoying those fan-made recordings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a fan of old Genesis, I did NOT want to hear them play watered down version of their old songs as they got into their dotage. And the new music, while much of it was quite good, was in no way anywhere near the calibre of what they created previously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, for me , the answer is the Archive release. And so many of my favorite rock artists have done it so well, including Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, King Crimson, (NOT Genesis BOO!) and even Neil Young.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take a look at what\u2019s on the box set
-four terrific years of music making
-lots of stuff we\u2019ve never heard before<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tuscaloosa, AL; Feb 1973
-four months after Danny Whitten died.
\u2014 concert sounds good \u2014 pretty together
\u2014 Time Fades Away seems to straddle both periods \u2014 The Tonight\u2019s the Night content, which is darker. It\u2019s almost like an unraveling is happening in real time, in front of an audience. The drummer had to be replace, Neil had trouble with his voice, Crosby and Nash had to come and kind of bail him out at the end of the tour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When that tour ends, Neil assembles the Santa Monica Fliers, which is basically a combination of the Stray Gators (Harvest band) and Crazy Horse, but with young Niles Lofgren replacing Danny Whitten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is such an amazing period of music, and the whole thing is problematized by the fact that we have to look BACK on it. No one but the people on the record and the people in the audience really got to see this play out in sequence. As ever, the music industry was fraught with peril and the result was an album of stunning importance (Bitches Brew level importance) was not released until almost two years later. Remember that his entire TEN DISC box set only covers four years. So, that two years is an eternity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reprise (record company) decision not to release the record looks pretty bad in retrospect. And when it was finally released in June of 1975, it didn\u2019t serve up the success of Harvest and was seen as a failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neil Young definitely didn\u2019t see it that way. He ha to fight to get the record released and once he succeeded in that, Young began one of the most productive and successful periods of his career. As a result of Tonight\u2019s the Night, Young crystalized the second incarnation of Crazy Horse \u2014 Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina and Frank Sampedro. That band changed music forever under Neil\u2019s guidance, starting in earnest with Rust Never Sleeps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in terms of transformational songwriting, in both music and lyric, Tonight\u2019s the Night cannot be touched. It is without question the finest Neil Young record. The rawness of the emotion, the sincerity and directness of the guitar and piano and everything else you hear on that record is mind-blowing. It can be a hard listen, depending on your mood, but there is an unmatched richness and texture to everything in there, and I swear you don\u2019t need to know about all the backstory to understand just how good the record is. You just have to listen to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 \u2014
But now we get this detailed insight into the music that came before and after that pivotal moment. That\u2019s really the moment that made Neil Young the legend. It was the dawn of a second act that had such a monstrous and profound impact on me. Made me want to play guitar, made me a music freak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So let\u2019s see what all is gonna be on this thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Neil Young is a BIG part of why I love music. Listening to and collecting his work, and seeing his remarkable performances, became a template for how I would approach musical genius. Now, with the impending release of his second … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1555],"tags":[125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2232,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions\/2232"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}