NEIL YOUNG ARCHIVES BOX: IT'S REALLY HAPPENING

"The video – clearly a webcam recording of Old Shakey chomping on an apple, mouthing along, cotton buds in his ears – doesn't inspire much confidence. A few minutes in, he sings about blogging. Later in the video he plays air guitar as a flat-screen TV seems to be repossessed."

LOL

"A few minutes in, he sings about blogging."

... lol?

cd box set version is pretty reasonably priced :)

would love to see the blu ray thing but not for $300

yeah I'll be getting the cd version, even $200 for the dvd is kinda ridic. I mean how often are you going to want to watch Journey Through The Past? Hopefully I can borrow it from somebody once, but if not, the tunes are where it's at.

yeah, it's not ridiculously priced or anything -- hopefully the book does not take its layout cues from the booklet in the Buffalo Springfield box set ... !

yeah i am bummed they didn't include that but you're right, that seems like something you watch once and never again...

99 for 8 CDs and nice packaging is pretty awesome actually...glad i held out on buying massey hall, though i couldn't stop myself from buying the fillmore gig

xpost: you are going to watch Journey Through the Past exactly once.

xpost: you are going to watch Journey Through the Past exactly once.

and i am apparently posting that twice

feeling glad I didn't buy the massey hall or crazy horse cds, and I think it's pretty lame to include them here.

yeah, I bought a bootleg of Eat the Document a few years back, watched it once, got nauseous, and gave it to my brother. From what I've heard, Journey Through the Past is less worthy.

eat the document at least is kind of beautifully filmed in parts. Journey is just kind of gross and boring for the most part. There's some LOLs in there, but it's pretty tiresome overall.

"Got a pot belly," Young sings, "It's not too big / Gets in my way / When I'm driving my rig."

^^A+

So glad there's going to be a CD-version! If it ever actually comes out. But kinda bummed that I was over-eager and bought the Fillmore and Massey discs.

yeah, well, who could resist? the fillmore and the massey discs are incredible! just irritating that i'm going to pay for them twice ...

I got the Fillmore one on vinyl recently, its great.

fillmore's gotta be one of the top 10 live albums of all time for me.

yeah...cowgirl in the sand is so epic on that

these neil young fans who don't like "fork in the road" are dumbasses, the song is hot stuff. the video's kinda lame in a funny way - OH SHOCKER, NEIL YOUNG FANS - neil thinks videos are a joke? really? you don't fuckin say.

I'm a big rock star
my sales have tanked
I still got you
thanks

i'm still trying to wrap my head around the greendale movie which i saw a few months ago

but honestly i never get mad if neil makes stuff that is really painfully o_O or just bad...that's all part of neil being neil. he's gotta make like 4 weirdo records for every normal-ish "good" one

Greendale's about the same level of quality as the rest of Neil's movie projects.

I find it weird that there are still Neil Young fans who get angry at him for doing weird, inscrutable, fairly half-assed things. This is what he's done his entire career!

I never bought Fillmore and Massey because I knew they were going to be on here -- and i'm getting this as soon as it comes out obviously -- but woah, there is no Canterbury thing on here!

Hadn't bought that yet either ... now I guess I have to, yay!

look I love Neil's half-assed stuff too but writing about blogging...

not too far removed from "computer love"

he's not really "writing about blogging" - it's one verse in, what, ten? -

keep on blogging
til the power goes out
and the battery's dead
twist and shout -

I think it's pretty self-aware, not "maybe if I say 'blog' I'll seem current"

Neil Young is a tremendous artist, possibly on par with The Who but in a different style, playing his country rock. My favorite record has always been Ragged Glory for White Line. About trucking or cocaine I wonder?

It's not about cocaine - he wrote it decades before Ragged Glory, slightly different lyrics and the title 'River of Pride'. Great song though.

Oh I see. Yes a great song.

Also I think 'Fork in the Road' is great, or, at least the idea of it is great. I probably won't listen to the song more than 10 times in my life, but it does have some great lines. 'I got hope. But you can't eat hope' = zeitgeist of 1/2009 in 8 words.

He's an old fogey and it comes through once in a while (Twist and Shout reference, vinyl stubbornness) but he's the type of old dude who's always willing to live in the contemporary world instead of the 1960s - both musically and politically.

ok I'm getting kinda excited about this, I am appreciating the positive anticipation for this here

Excited about the new album Neil's going to put out instead of the archives? YEAHHHH. But for real, stuff like "Fork in the Road" is a big part of being a Neil Young fan! He's a lovable curmudgeon! Does what he wants! It's been that way ... forever.

haha, that archives site is now:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

no way! vicious, as that trailer was pretty cool.

finally listening to A Treasure the Neil country International Harvesters thing....gotta say, while it's certainly better than Old Ways which as bad as some of his albums have been might be the absolutely worst for me personally....a lot of this is kinda shit :|

I like Amber Jean and the version of Flying on the Ground is Wrong is pretty...actually I really like the version of Southern Pacific and Grey Riders

buuuut...man the real "country songs" on here are really fucking phony and annoying....god "Motor City" is right up there with "Let's Roll" or "This Note's for You"...obv I love Neil to death but his real strident obvious songs are just barf to me

or basically haha the album isn't bad when Neil Young is being Neil Young with a slightly kooky country band but when he tries to play the role as some kinda country singer it's really fucking bad in my opinion

it makes a case for the country years, for sure -- things like "southern pacific" and "grey riders" are fantastic. but neil's "voice of the people" country stuff can be a bit hard to swallow, it's true. you kind of want to think he's just trolling reagan america, but that might be giving it too much credit.

it's missing this great version of "interstate" which is a shame.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc65mHWrS1k

you kind of want to think he's just trolling reagan america, but that might be giving it too much credit.

yeah i'm reading shakey again now and i think he was into that schtick for real - he seems really changeable (haha obviously)

i mean, it's good he put it out, at least you see well there was SOMETHING going on there, cuz god like i said Old Ways is just awfully produced and just such a horrid attempt at "country"...but hell, I guess it's got a few gems I would put on a Neil mix like Grey Riders especially

yeah, i think it's an interesting release for sure -- a lot of the 80s albums would be better served by live collections like this. i need to re-up those "Bad News" 80s comps I did a few years back --did you get those?

since this is the neil young thread on the front page today ... here's this.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/neil-young-trademarks-new-audio-format-20120403
sounds ... intriguing?

yeah, i think it's an interesting release for sure -- a lot of the 80s albums would be better served by live collections like this. i need to re-up those "Bad News" 80s comps I did a few years back --did you get those?

― tylerw, Tuesday, April 3, 2012 10:22 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha i think so? I have an "album" called "Weird Young" in my ipod hahahaha

it's these things
http://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/104317711/more-bad-news-neil-young-in-the-1980s-vol-2
http://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/101626891/bad-news-neil-young-in-the-1980s-vol-1

The audio format is a good idea, and more power to him...but "Neil Young says this audio format is sonically superior" is right up there with "mastering personally overseen by Pete Townshend." In other words, someone who's spent decades playing loud, and is pushing 70, maybe doesn't have the hearing to be the go-to authority on this kind of thing.

he blames the mixing sessions for arc/weld for permanently damaging his hearing, appara

I blame Neil for supporting too many stupid audio/video formats. Just remaster your fucking albums, you knob.

Yeah, Neil's got a history of dabbling with sketchy audio wankery:

Time Fades Away was recorded directly from the soundboard to 16-track 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.

There were no 2 track masters ever made of this record. The master discs were cut directly from the 16 track masters through the Compumix system. A mix was recorded to a second 16 track machine--we had 2 that would run perfectly together--to feed the variable pitch system of the lathe--but was discarded when we were through. I was the mastering engineer who cut the masters.
—Phil Brown[citation needed]

Because no two-track stereo master tape was ever made as would commonly be done, the album cannot be remastered in a traditional manner. If any new release was to be attempted, a new mix would need to be made from the original multitrack tapes.

Nice new interview w/Poncho over at Rolling Stone. Includes this set of nuggets:

RS: Neil brought you guys back into the studio in 2000 to cut an album called Toast. What happened there? It never came out.

P: Everybody got sick. (Laughs) We were recording the album and really playing pretty good. Then we went on this tour of South America right in the middle of it. One of them was Rock in Rio. It was a huge amount of people, like 300,000 or something. The audience was going wild and it really inspired us. We did "Like a Hurricane" and they were humming the melody the whole time like a soccer chant. It just blew us away. I looked over and saw Neil and he was gone. He just threw his head up in the air and was just playing guitar. It was gigantic. All of us remember it.

Then we came home and went back into Toast. Everything we tried to play, we kind of played Latin style. [Laughs] We got confused down there. I don't mean we didn't know how to play our instruments or we didn't know what we were doing or Toast is shit, but all of a sudden we were going in different directions. We just weren't in the same place as when we left. We kept playing and recorded some things, but it just didn't work out.

RS: I spoke to Neil about five years ago and he was super excited about Toast. He said he had big plans for a release, but it obviously didn't happen.

P: I remember during the making of Sleeps With Angels I found myself in the studio without the rest of the band. All of a sudden, here comes [Warner Bros. Records chairman] Mo Ostin and his son Michael with some other cats. They had nobody to talk to besides me, and they basically cornered me and said, "When are the archives coming out?" He was talking about them coming out that Christmas [of 1994.] I said, "As far as I know, man, he's all over it. He says he's got it ready. It's really coming out." And here we are.

RS: He did finally release that first box set a few years ago, but imagine part two is still a ways away. I feel like he lost interest.

P: Do you think Volume Two will have Bluenotes material?

RS: I think that's Volume Three. I think Volume Two will be 1973 to 1979. It's a real big six years.

P: I remember once a long time ago, someone around the studio said there's 154 unreleased songs.

haha, i like that the dude in neil's band has as much of a clue about this stuff as anyone.

yeah wtf he's asking RS what's on Volume 2? lol

Being jerked around on what's happening and when is annoying enough as a fan; can't imagine how much more annoying it must be for a bandmate ("We're going on tour! Wait -- no we're not!")

Yeah, people are making a thing out of Sampedro's "gut" telling him this is the last Crazy Horse tour, but come on, he has no idea.