Neil Young's "Ditch Trilogy" Poll

like he wants that "time" to also fade away

tho the scrapped HDCD release sounded just fine

who knows

-\(O_o)/-

^ emoticon for head-being-crushed-by-neil's-weird-decisions

The official reason for no CD release of TFA is both sound quality and performance--Neil has said he doesn't like either.

Yeah, that's definitely what he said recently ... Still weird though -- I'm assuming that he is the one who put the album together and wanted it released in the first place. I'm sure that the record company would've loved a more conventional live album from him at that point, but Time Fades Away is not that! It's just weird that you can go on to Amazon and order 'Everybody's Rocking" but can't get "Time Fades Away."

I guess in a recent interview, he said he was going to "re-create" TFA on the Archives using different performances. Whatevs!

He won't, though.

well it'd be truly nuts if he just skipped that tour for the next archives ... it is wild, though -- he could have a 10-disc box just covering 73-74. So much activity -- TFA, TTN, OTB, Homegrown, CSNY ... The mind boggles. It'll probably be terribly disappointing .... :(

i've been listening to TFA cos of this thread and i realised that i always imagine these songs as being recorded at huge outdoor festivals, but they weren't, were they? not sure if it's the sound of the thing or the ~~vibe~~ that makes me think of wide open spaces.

yo - i just put up the three "ditch trilogy" bootlegs mentioned above over at http://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/ Enjoy!

you star - thank tyler

ditch mix coming soon

awesome!!!

i've been listening to TFA cos of this thread and i realised that i always imagine these songs as being recorded at huge outdoor festivals, but they weren't, were they? not sure if it's the sound of the thing or the ~~vibe~~ that makes me think of wide open spaces.

― jabba hands, Thursday, December 3, 2009 4:13 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

not big outdoor shows but they were recorded at live shows, digitally i think which neil said was one of the reasons it hasn't been reissues which is a lie probably

digital wouldn't even exist then, would it? a lot of the album was recorded in the winter of 1973, Jan.-Feb ... I have a theory that the reason the tour was such a bummer is that they were traveling through the midwest/Canada in the middle of winter!

you haven't heard of the compufuck?

per wiki, this is probably accurate:

Along with the soundtrack to Journey Through the Past, Time Fades Away remains the only officially released Neil Young album unavailable on CD, which may be due to technical issues: Time Fades Away was recorded directly from the soundboard to final 2-track masters using the Quad-8 CompuMix, the unreliable first digital mixing soundboard—against the wishes of producer David Briggs, who referred to it as the "Compufuck" but was forced to yield to the desires of Young. This resulted in a murky-sounding release; because the final mixes were those rough cuts, the album cannot be remixed for improved clarity:

actually the tour was a bummer cuz danny whitten died shortly after being dismissed from the touring band

but yeah, the difficulty in getting time fades away up to neil's audio standards are bound up in the way it was recorded, there's nothing to "mix down" from because the only thing left is the mixed masters

same thing goes for journey through the past

ditch trilogy is fueled by

not only the actuality, but the timing of whitten's death
neil's difficulty dealing with post-harvest fame
general post-woodstock malaise

also tequila

and yeah, i know whitten's death is the main catalyst for the darkness of this era, just saying that playing sheds in toronto and milwaukee in january can't have helped the mood much!

was reading this excerpt from a melody maker interview w/ young from '85 about the ditch trilogy and came across this:

I was pretty down I guess at the time, but I just did what I wanted to do, at that time. I think if everybody looks back at their own lives they'll realise that they went through something like that. There's periods of depression, periods of elation, optimism and scepticism, the whole thing is.... it just keeps coming in waves.

You go down to the beach and watch the same thing, just imagine every wave is a different set of emotions coming in. Just keep coming. As long as you don't ignore it, it'll still be there. If you start shutting yourself off and not letting yourself live through the things that are coming through you, I think that's when people start getting old really fast, that's when they really age.

^ seems like he was very connected to this on the beach/waves breaking metaphor for things, if he was still talking about it 10 years later, which put me in mind of the wave passage from fear and loathing in las vegas, 1972:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I've been listening a lot to the bottom line '74 version of "roll another number (for the road)"

when he starts singing it, to a crowd that had likely never heard the song before, the audience picks up on its rollicking "everybody must get stoned" vibe and starts clapping along like it's a hootenanny

now, I might be forcing an imaginary narrative framework over events, but I find it interesting how the audience loses its steam and stops clapping shortly after he hits the lyrical bomb in the chorus - "my feet aren't on the ground, but I'm standing on the sound of some openhearted people going down"

the second verse is even more pointed in its denial of hippie freewheeling, by the time he says "I'm a million miles away from that helicopter day" about woodstock, you can hear a pin drop, no hooting and hollering here

with the right kind of ears you can almost hear the high-water mark, that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back

yeah that whole show is kinda like that -- the crowd yuks it up on "Long May You Run" and even chortles at the "you're all just pissin' in the wind" line in "Ambulance Blues (which IS funny) ...

I think they're yukking it up during "long may you run" cause neil mentions it's about his car

which is kind of funny, when compared to how it sounds, his typical heavy maudlin loved-and-lost stuff

but yeah, a lot of his material from this era is about shoving the audience's laughter back down its throat

ditch mix y'all

http://www.sendspace.com/file/zsh19g

Woo-hoo! (Even if I have all the stuff, it's nice to have a curated collection)

here's the track list

01 borrowed tune (tonight's the night)
02 time fades away (time fades away hdcd)
03 revolution blues (on the beach hdcd)
04 albuquerque (tonight's the night)
05 relativity invitation (journey to the past)
06 love in mind (time fades away hdcd)
07 tonight's the night part ii (tonight's the night)
08 greensleeves (live at the bottom line 1974)
09 ambulance blues (on the beach hdcd)
10 mellow my mind (tonight's the night)
11 l.a. (time fades away hdcd)
12 new mama (tonight's the night)
13 on the beach (on the beach hdcd)
14 tired eyes (tonight's the night)
15 for the turnstiles (on the beach hdcd)
16 yonder stands the sinner (time fades away hdcd)
17 motion pictures (live at the bottom line 1974)
18 soldier (journey through the past)
19 beach boys - let's go away for awhile (journey through the past)

thx bro 4 real

http://www.hulu.com/watch/110736/late-night-with-jimmy-fallon-neil-young-sings-fresh-prince

f u i lol'd :-/

ok that is pretty funny

sendspace dl rates been sucking it lately, so... ditch mix via mediafire, this bummerz 4 U

http://www.mediafire.com/?ym5zemoiwy5

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

thx bro 4 real
--being being kiss-ass fake nice (gbx)

ur welcome, glad ya dig it

Say what you will about Dave Marsh, but this is a helluva review of Tonight's the Night:

"I'm sorry. You don't know these people. This means nothing to you."—Neil Young, in the liner notes.

Tonight's the Night finds Neil Young on his knees at the top of the heap, struggling to get back to his feet. The musical difficulties of last year's On the Beach have been resolved as directly as possible by a return to recording with Crazy Horse and Nils Lofgren, with whom Young recorded his 1970 masterpiece, After the Gold Rush.

Yet even Crazy Horse isn't what it once was: Lead guitarist Danny Whitten died last year of a drug overdose. The track on which he appears, "Come on Baby, Let's Go Downtown," recorded at Fillmore East four years ago, serves as a metaphor for the album's haunted, frightened emotional themes. Musically, Whitten's guitar and voice complement, challenge and inspire Young. The rest of the album strains to keep up.

It does so only occasionally but the effort is almost quixotically exhilarating. The successes—the ironic "Tired Eyes," the deceptively sweet "Albuquerque," the thunderous "Lookout Joe" and the two versions of the title song—are Young's best music since Gold Rush. Lofgren's guitar and piano are forceful and direct, Ralph Molina's drumming apt on both the rockers and the weepers (the latter driven by Ben Keith's steel guitar). Young's playing, on piano, harp and guitar, is simple but constantly charged.

Still, the album shares with On the Beach a fully developed sense of despair: The stargazer of "Helpless" finds no solace here. The music has a feeling of offhand, first-take crudity matched recently only by Blood on the Tracks, almost as though Young wanted us to miss its ultimate majesty in order to emphasize its ragged edge of desolation. "Borrowed Tune," for example, is set against Young's stark harp and piano. The tandem guitar and bass on the opening version of the title song sounds like the crack of doom itself and Young's singing—especially on the concluding version — alternates between sheer panic and awful Old Testament threat. "Tonight's the night," he shouts, threats, begs, moans and curses, telling the story of roadie Bruce Berry, who ODed "out on the mainline." Sometimes it feels as though Young is still absorbing the shock of his friend's death, sometimes as though he is railing against mortality itself, sometimes as though he's accepted it. But never as though he believes it.

More than any of Young's earlier songs and albums—even the despondent On the Beach and the mordant, rancorous Time Fades Away—Tonight's the Night is preoccupied with death and disaster. Dedicated to the dead Berry and Whitten, its cover, liner and label are starkly black and white. The characters of the songs are shell-shocked, losers, wasted, insane, homeless—except for the ones who are already corpses. The happiest man in any of them, the father in "New Mama," acknowledges that he's "living in a dreamland." Ultimately, he too is tracked down by the ghosts from outside as he sits staring out at his frozen lake.

Young is simultaneously terrified by this pernicious landscape and fascinated by the disgust and lust it evokes. The only resolution seems to be ennui and the ritual of the music, which pounds incessantly, until the sanity of everything, including (or maybe especially) the singer and the listener, is called into question. Tonight's the night, all right, but for what? Just another kick?

Searching for a way to make sense of it, a lost Raymond Chandler story, "Red Wind," offers a clue: "It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen." This is desert music, for certain, and the roughest part of the desert at that.

What finally happens, in "Tired Eyes," is material for a novel; in fact, as Bud Scoppa has pointed out elsewhere, the similarity to the plot of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers — a novel which shares Young's obsession with heroin and the refuse of the war—is startling. "Well, he shot four men in a cocaine deal," Young sings matter-of-factly. "He left 'em lyin' in an open field/ Full of old cars with bullet holes in the mirrors."

The whole album has pointed to this, song after song building the tightness with the endless repetition of phrases—musical and lyric—until the rasp of the guitars on the rockers and the sweetness of the singing on the weepers begins to grate, aching for release. Young's whole career may have been spent in pursuit of this story—remember the sinister black limousines lurking in the shadows of "Mr. Soul" and "Broken Arrow"?—but it is only now that he has found a way to tell the tale so directly.

Much has been made of Young's turn from pretty melodies on the last three albums. On this album, there are hints of the same kind of beauty that, overused, finally bloated Harvest with its own saccharine excesses. "World on a String" and "Roll Another Number" wouldn't have sounded out of place on that album, except that they would have exploded its pretensions.

If the songs here aren't pretty, they are tough and powerful, with a metallic guitar sound more akin to the abrasiveness of the Rolling Stones than the placid harmonies of CSNY. The melodies haven't disappeared (as they seemed to on On the Beach), but they are only sketched in, hints of what could be.

There is no sense of retreat, no apology, no excuses offered and no quarter given. If anything, these are the old ideas with a new sense of aggressiveness. The jitteriness of the music, its sloppy, unarranged (but decidedly structured) feeling is clearly calculated. The music draws us in, with the wonderful guitar line crashing through the ominous "Lookout Joe," with the steel guitar on "Albuquerque," the almost folkish suggestion of melody that drives "Tired Eyes" but—and here is where it is new—it also spits us back out again, makes us look at the ugliness on the surface and beneath it.

Yet the musical change doesn't reflect a similar toughening of subject matter, though that is what the casual listener might think. The tensions have always been there. only they are now unrelieved. To suggest, as some have, that Young's current music is an apology for the sweetness of his success—much less to suggest that he has only recently discovered a world in opposition to the rock scene—is to ignore the bulk of his work. The titles alone tell the story: "Broken Arrow," "Out of My Mind," "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" (with no hint that anything can mend it again), even "Helpless." "Ohio," Young's other great CSNY contribution, speaks explicitly of the same horrors: "What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground/ How can you run when you know?" Finally, those four dead in "Ohio" equate directly with the four dead coke dealers in "Tired Eyes": casualties in different battles of the same war.

All of this is half incoherent because all of the names Young could put to it are clichés. It is the measure of Young's achievement that when he sings, so calmly it's spooky, "Please take my advice/ Open up the tired eyes," it brings this message home to us in a new way. Suddenly the evil is no longer banal but awful and ironic, in simultaneous recognition that the advice is silly, or that if taken, it might not help or it might only aid in enlarging the wounds.

Crying over the death of his real and imagined friends, Neil Young seems at once heroic and mock heroic, brave and absurd. Like the best of both, he leaves us as he found us, ravaged but rocking.

DAVE MARSH

(Posted: Aug 28, 1975)

http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/neilyoung/albums/album/197063/review/5940431/tonights_the_night

i just e-mailed that to two of my best non-ILX friends. thanks for the post.

Yeah, Missta Marsh he sure pretty thorough.

Still, as far as Neil's concerned, I'm a Beach boy.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

wow

close!

time fades away really does deserve more than 3 votes imo!!!!

eh, like M@tt said upthread, Time Fades Away is great, but I couldn't imagine voting for it over the other two ...

i've gone through phases...

I kinda instinct voted OTB right off, but an hour and one TFA re-listen later I was ready to finally make the switch. LA and title track were killing me.

I voted Tonight. On the Beach is amazing, but most often I just listen to the 2nd side. Tonight I want to hear the whole thing straight through.

LA is incredible.

results are hilarious. Laughable that 'Tonight's the Night' didn't win this. Absolutely laughable. Hipsters are cute but ultimately there for source of ridicule.

This poll means about as much as the shit I took ... anyway, I'm gonna pour myself a glass of wine and work practice the chords on 'Mellow My Mind' and 'Albuquerque' again, good job on "discovering" 'On The Beach', ILX. My mint LP cost me exactly one dollar from the Reckless Records in Lakeview on Broadway in '96, maybe? nobody cared about that record. anyway, you youngsters are cute

i always liked on the beach but man, tonight's the night is like the royal scam gone darker and more country and minus the humor to lighten the mood and with the added grimness of the fact that the dead guys and the drug burnouts are neil young's personal friends.

right on, Omar ... so true, it's kinda like 'On the Beach' is almost a parody of 'Tonight's the Night' when I really think about it. Like, Neil wanted to self-consciously TOP IT's vibe, or something. Anyway, I love both records, but if you actually look at songwriting and so forth, there is no question that 'Tonight's the Night' was a herculean effort. I mean, yeah it's easy to smoke up and put on 'On the Beach', but come on..

but yeah, this is just ILX stuff, i pay it no mind. everybody knows that 'Tonight's The Night' is the classic Neil LP..