Classic Bootleg Series Vol. 20: Neil Young - Chrome Dreams

If you need to come back, come back strong, I always say.

First off, my sincere thanks to all of you who expressed sympathy and offered music after my recent burglary experience. I never dreamed that TTT readers would respond the way they did to my misfortune, and it is no exaggeration to say that I was profoundly touched by the reaction and encouragement. So thanks, a million times -- as we say down south, y'all are the best. And once I get my musical bearings, I may take a few of you, especially you Atlanta locals, up on your generous offers. Special thanks, too, to my good buddy Rich, who carried the torch admirably during my 3-week hiatus. Rich, I'm prepared to shoulder some extra weight for a while to make it up to you. Thank you for being patient.

Second -- and as I was just about to say when I was so rudely interrupted -- it's about time for some classic Neil Young. Neil's been in the news in recent weeks after announcing that he will release a new album, Chrome Dreams II, on October 23. "Chrome Dreams Two?" many of you may have asked. "When was there ever a Chrome Dreams One?" And the answer is, there wasn't, because Neil's original Chrome Dreams is one of those great lost albums, from the further reaches of rock history, that never saw the light of day, except to boot collectors. The detailed liner notes from this particular version (the "Rust Edition", which draws from the very best sources) tell the tale better than I ever could:

Neil Young was on a creative high in 1975. By the end of the summer, Zuma was finished, though still not released. Yet Neil carried on recording his new songs. Sometimes he recorded solo and sometimes with Crazy Horse.

Lots of these songs would remain unheard by the public until quite a while later, but by late '75, Neil had already written and recorded versions of such future classics as "Like A Hurricane", "Powderfinger", "Sedan Delivery", "Pocahontas" and "Ride By Llama". He carried on recording in 1976. More great songs were put down on tape, such as "Will To Love", "Stringman" and "Campaigner".

Some of us may feel that the Long May You Run album with Stephen Stills robbed us of the natural successor to Zuma, but Stills always suspected that Neil was holding back his best stuff for his solo album. That solo album was a work in progress throughout this period. Titles were reported in the press: Ride My Llama, In My Neighborhood, American Stars 'N' Bars, Chrome Dreams.

When American Stars 'N' Bars was released in 1977, Neil had scrapped most of the material he'd been recording since late '75, replacing much of it with a series of rough hewn cowboy songs. Fun stuff to be sure, but had Neil committed the latest in a series of difficult to explain career suicides? Who else, except maybe Bob Dylan, would sit on a stash of such quality songs and not let the public hear them?

Tracks 1 to 12 of this compilation are thought to be the unreleased Chrome Dreams album, readied for release weeks before Neil recorded those country hoedowns and rethought his strategy. Some of these song titles will be more than familiar to you, but the actual performances may surprise you.

"Powderfinger" is performed as an unadorned solo acoustic song. "Sedan Delivery", a second song destined for Rust Never Sleeps, is presented in its pre-punked-up arrangement and, in many people's opinion, sounds all the better for that. You'll also find the definitive "Stringman", a song not given an official airing until Neil's Unplugged set, heard here in a 1976 live performance enhanced by subtle yet beautiful studio vocal and guitar overdubs. "Hold Back The Tears" is another solo performance, longer and more ghostly than its later remake for American Stars 'N' Bars. "Pocahontas" is the same performance as the one that made Rust Never Sleeps, but in its original "naked mix". "Too Far Gone" wouldn't be officially released until the Freedom album in 1989, yet here's a version from 14 years earlier, with Poncho Sampedro adding a tasty mandolin part.

The other six songs from the album were released unchanged on the albums American Stars 'N' Bars, Comes A Time and Hawks And Doves, yet you may still be able to pick out slight differences in the mixes. "Homegrown", for one, would seem to have a little more fire in the guitars. Have a listen and see what you think.

We've also chosen a select batch of bonus cuts to give you a further taste of just how creative Neil was during this fertile period. If the version of "White Line" (here retitled "River Of Pride", maybe because Neil forgot to sing the actual "white line" lyric) didn't make the Chrome Dreams shortlist, then its continued circulation among collectors is something of a mystery. Maybe it was pressed onto acetate as a possible contender for Decade, which Neil was also preparing at this time. Whatever the truth, it's a stupendous version of the song, recorded in 1975 with a loose and joyful Crazy Horse. Neil's remake for Ragged Glory in 1990 may have been fine, but it doesn't quite capture the spirit of this earlier version. "Campaigner" did make Decade, but not before losing one of its verses. You can hear the full-length version here.

Three live cuts follow. "No One Seems To Know" is an aching piano ballad that Neil once described as Part 2 of "A Man Needs A Maid". It's first class, but remains unreleased. "Give Me Strength" dates from an earlier, ill-fated album called Homegrown (an album that would have also featured "Star Of Bethlehem", the oldest cut in this collection) and is another lost classic. "Peace Of Mind" is heard as an electric rock song played with the Horse, and very different from the version Neil released on Comes A Time. And, as a nod to Zuma, we close with Crosby Stills Nash & Young. "Human Highway" was recording during the Stills-Young sessions in 1976. The song was always meant to be a CSNY track, but Neil had run out of patience by the Comes A Time LP.

Now you can have a glimpse of what might have been, which, come to think of it, is also true of the whole collection.

- Jules Gray (May 20, 2004)

NEIL YOUNG - CHROME DREAMS (RUST EDITION)

Artwork:
Front cover
Inside cover
Back insert

01 Pocahontas
02 Will To Love
03 Star Of Bethlehem
04 Like A Hurricane
05 Too Far Gone
06 Hold Back The Tears
07 Homegrown
08 Captain Kennedy
09 Stringman
10 Sedan Delivery
11 Powderfinger
12 Look Out For My Love

Bonus Tracks:

13 River Of Pride (a/k/a "White Line", Unreleased Studio Version, 27 NOV 75)
14 Campaigner (Unedited, Unreleased Studio Version, Summer 1976)
15 No One Seems To Know (Live, Tokyo, Japan, 10 Mar 76)
16 Give Me Strength (Live, Chicago, IL, 15 Nov 76)
17 Peace Of Mind (Live, Chicago, IL, 15 Nov 76)
18 Human Highway (CSNY, Unreleased Studio Version, April 76)

Odds and Sods

Arcade Fire ended their run of five sold-out shows in NYC on Saturday night, and by all accounts each night's performance was better than the one before, as Win Butler steadily recovered from an illness that had him really struggling early in the week. Recordings of the last two shows are online and ripe for the downloading. The show on Friday night was fantastic, and was recorded from the audience by a guy who's known in the taping community for getting consistently exceptional sound. His pull that night sounds almost as good as a soundboard tape, and Hearsay has mp3s posted today. As previously reported, too, NPR did a webcast of Saturday night's show that is now available to stream, with a downloadable mp3 version promised to be up by Tuesday. (If you can't wait one more day and want an mp3 rip of the NPR stream -- sticklers for sound quality beware -- you can grab that right here, right now.) I haven't listened to the Saturday show yet, but reports everywhere yesterday were that it was the finest of the bunch -- one of the best bands in the world right now, firing on all cylinders.

Following up on another old post, the trailer for the DVD portion of Neil Young's forthcoming Live at Massey Hall 1971 release can be seen here, and looks (and sounds) just too damned good to be true. (Via Chromewaves)


Whatevs.org finally re-launched last week, with a brand new look and feel, unleashing six weeks of Grambo's signature, slang-filled commentary on music, movies, TV, sports, advertising, journalism, bloggers and young starlets all at once. It's good to have him back, obvs.

Slate addresses the burning question, "How could a Geordie twat like Sting have fronted a band as great as the Police?"

The only two providers of satellite radio service in the U.S., XM and Sirius, are merging. Wonder what Dylan and Howard Stern will talk about at the water cooler.

And yet another sign that the apocalypse is near.

Journey Through The Past

Of the many hundreds of bootleg recordings that I've amassed over the years, Neil Young's solo acoustic shows from 1971 are up there with my very favorites. Neil was at the absolute peak of his powers in this period, 24 years old, fresh off the release of After The Gold Rush and, from the sound of things, well into one of the most prolific bursts of songwriting brilliance that any artist has ever enjoyed. You can't help but shake your head in amazement as Neil apologetically introduces one "new" song after another to his unfamiliar audiences, many of them -- "Old Man," "The Needle And The Damage Done," "Out On The Weekend," "Journey Through The Past" and "Heart of Gold" among them -- destined for classic status. The genius of Harvest, which set the bar for every singer-songwriter to follow, was at hand.

So I was thrilled to see the news this week that perhaps the most legendary of these shows -- two sold-out sets that Neil played at Massey Hall in Toronto on January 19, 1971 -- will be officially released by Reprise on March 13, the second release in the Archives Performance Series that kicked off with last year's Neil Young & Crazy Horse Live at the Fillmore East, March 6 & 7, 1970.

The extraordinary Massey Hall performance has circulated in the bootleg community for 36 years, most frequently as Going Back To Canada, in excellent (if a bit hissy) sound, but the thought of hearing an official release, sourced from the master tapes and no doubt gorgeously remastered under Neil's supervision (because that's the only way he rolls), is enough to set my heart aflutter. Listen to "Old Man" from the bootleg and see for yourself -- to all but a relatively few collectors, this is long-lost treasure. Look for it, as simply Neil Young Live at Massey Hall, in March.

The other gem of the '71 Neil Young solo recordings is his set at the BBC Television studios in London on February 23, which was recently rebroadcast in the UK in full digital quality, to the delight of bootleg traders everywhere. Here's a clip of "Don't Let It Bring You Down" from that performance:

YouTube Classic Clips

There's been a lot of hype recently (including an end-of-year Time cover story) about the extent to which YouTube has revolutionized the sharing of video clips, and that's true enough. Still, it seems like most folks use the site to post home videos, see a Saturday Night Live skit or Colbert Report segment they missed, or just watch a couple of guys dropping Mentos into bottles of Diet Coke. The thing that excites me the most, though, is that YouTube has become a vast and immediately accessible repository of some of the most fantastic musical performances ever caught on film. No, it's not DVD-quality footage -- okay, sometimes the quality is downright lousy -- but the breadth and diversity of clips that have been posted there is something else. A lot of people, with a lot of old VHS tapes lying around, have turned YouTube into a music lover's treasure trove. [Note to self: Make trolling YouTube for classic performances a semi-regular feature here?] Here's the tip of the proverbial iceberg:

Ever seen The Beatles deliver probably the best version of "Revolution" ever, on the David Frost Show on September 4, 1968?



(And some people say they couldn't hack it live towards the end. Yeah, right.)

Or the blistering "Down By The River" that CSNY performed on David Steinberg's The Music Scene show on September 22, 1969?



And of course, how can I not post a clip of The Clash, performing the song that gives this blog it's name, at Le Palace in Paris on February 27, 1980:



It just doesn't get much better than that.