NEIL YOUNG ARCHIVES BOX: IT'S REALLY HAPPENING

I mean, it takes all kinds, really. I'm sure I've mentioned an older friend of mine who, when I told him I was listening to the new Neil Young, "Le Noise" (this is right when it was released), said, "oh man, I love Neil Young, how is it?!" I told him it was great, lots of electric guitar and feedback and stuff, and he wrinkled his nose and said, "oh, I don't like any of his loud stuff."

great announcement, both iconic neil boots

When I look through the windows
And out on the road
They're bringing me presents
And saying "we don't want this!"

I hope it was "NORmal CONcert" clap, clap....clapclapclap

i'm imagining just a standard key of c scale being played along to that, repeatedly

All I can say is that the rumors must be true. The real Neil Young is dead.

lol how many artists have had this rumor go around at some point? poll?

That tonight's the night UK tour really was kind of a deep dgaf move on Neil's part — he'd barely played there before (just a handful of times solo and with CSNY). I can imagine that anyone who had seen him previously would've been kind of shocked by his pure sleazoid vibe in late 73.

"Normal Concert" is going to be my new go to heckle

Imagining Glenn and Don in front of the stage, yelling "Play 'Old Man'!"

Well, yeah take a look at my life

I wanna live, I wanna give
I've been a minor at don henley's home

wasn't it a UK gig where he played all of the then-unreleased Tonight's the Night, telling the booing fans he'd play something they'd heard before at the end, and then in the encore played TNT, which he'd also opened with, thus fulfilling the "something you'd heard before" quotient of the set?

As for people demanding "a normal show", 9 years ago Neil played Hyde Park in London, and there was this weird thing with shows there that summer where you could get crazy cheap tix to the shows, so the audience was very much not Neil-obsessives, and he played, so I heard, long 20 minute versions of Cowgirl or River, full of discursive guitar work (my dream, basically), and Twitter was awash with people complaining that a Neil Young show would involve long guitar solos. Hilarious.

In the same way you get people going to Dylan shows in the last 20 years complaining about his voice being different and no acoustic Blowing In The Wind, you def get the same vibe of disgruntled boomer anger at Neil shows.... so let me think back to some UK ones i've been to....

Neil at Hammersmith on the Greendale tour - my first time seeing him - playing Greendale in full... acoustic/electro-acoustic solo with boring ass explanations of the already boring songs between each one... had to side with the crowd here, it sucked and he only kicked into some old ones about 90 minutes in.

He was then back at same venue a few years later, Chrome Dreams II tour? did a 60+ minute acoustic show followed by about 90 minutes of loud as fuck electric jams including The Loner and Roll Another Number! Def. some of the older crowd leaving, couldn't take the volume which was really pushing the PA hard.

Fast forward a few years, The O2 with Crazy Horse - similar to that Hyde Park Show, opened with four or five 10 minute jammers including 3 newies from Psychedelic Pill. some unhappy faces sat around me....

So I think at that Hyde Park show the exact quote after playing about 6 or 7 long and loud electric workouts was “You sad bastards out there stop crying and complaining. This one’s for you sad bastards” and then did Needle & Damage... so yeah he knows what he's doing and that some don't like it at all....always gonna be people who just want Old Man and Heart Of Gold.

the '73 rainbow release is supposedly an audience tape.

the bootleg that made the show famous is and the clip in Neil's mail about this sounds like it is too yes :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy8kvRwhKjo

the Ducks release is soundboard though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZKPGkZk5Ds

My uncle claimed to have seen a show sometime in the 70s where after a slew of audience requests for hits he exclaimed “this ain’t Gordon Lightfoot!” and stormed off.

Neil at Hammersmith on the Greendale tour - my first time seeing him - playing Greendale in full... acoustic/electro-acoustic solo with boring ass explanations of the already boring songs between each one... had to side with the crowd here, it sucked and he only kicked into some old ones about 90 minutes in.

Ha, I would’ve loved to have seen this, and I’m bummed I missed that tour (especially since he toured Greendale at least a month or so before the record was out). What’s hilarious is the “boring-ass explanations” — those songs were decidedly on-the-nose, and not exactly open to interpretation. What’s even left to explain?

Weren’t there scenes acted out too, or was it just that there was a play-like stage set?

somehow i've never heard greendale. but it does have quite the reputation

that Hyde Park show and others on that tour got borderline industrial with the noise and feedback, amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzSr0GpUeEk

wow! is that what all of greendale is like?

if any of you ever saw the wet hot american summer tv reboot (which is way better than everyone says imo), i'm getting heavy Electro/City vibes

Are any of the bootleg series crucial? I like Neil a lot and I've got both the archives and most of the classic era live albums. I'm assuming that the boots are for hardcore fans that don't mind a lot of redundancy.

Way Down in the Rust Bucket for sure

wasn't it a UK gig where he played all of the then-unreleased Tonight's the Night, telling the booing fans he'd play something they'd heard before at the end, and then in the encore played TNT, which he'd also opened with, thus fulfilling the "something you'd heard before" quotient of the set?

LMAO, I would've laughed and enjoyed that as a bold FU.

FWIW, The solo acoustic St. Vicar show for Greendale is wonderful. It really comes together beautifully and it's the one time where I thought the whole concept really flourished. I thought the album with Crazy Horse was okay (initial copies were thankfully packaged with a DVD or the St. Vicar show) and the live shows as seen on the recent Return to Greendale were kind of disastrous, coming off as bloated pretentiousness. But when he kept it simple, just him doing this understated and intimate storytelling, filling in the details between songs, it's pretty great.

I saw the Psychedelic Pill tour, the last with Pancho before he retired - only a handful of classics but the epics from Psychedelic Pill sounded glorious live. One of my greatest concert experiences. Helped that I was very close to stage center and Patti Smith opened with an awesome set (my first time seeing her), but Neil & Crazy Horse's performance alone was pretty much everything I would've hoped for.

Poncho, not Pancho

so there was an initial european run of shows where he played the whole thing over 90 mins.... this was 3 months or so before the album even came out. then he did a world tour with crazy horse, with actors and a painter(?) on stage. i'm totally open to the idea of the solo thing having its own special vibe; but for me as someone who had been listening obsessively to On The Beach, Live Rust, Time Fades Away for 3 or 4 years and was heavily anticipating seeing him live, just getting the greendale thing (and this was without any warning - it wasn't pitched as being that), it hurt me deeply in my heart :'-(

* ^ greendale

after all this talk of neil mixing it up - which he does! - i looked back at the setlists of the 6 times i saw him between 2003-2012... turns out the songs he played most were Old Man, Heart Of Gold and Hey Hey My My - all of which he played 4 out of the 6 times.

...shrug emoji...

it's funny to hear people in here talk about being disappointed by an all-unfamiliar greendale set while i recall being enamoured by an old co-worker's reminisces of seeing one of the time fades away era shows. paraphrasing them: "i was tripping on acid and having a hard time reconciling the boos and angry requests for popular songs with the music they were playing, which i did remember liking even though i didn't know any of it. it all kind of reminded me of "cowgirl in the sand." i was very high, but remember thinking neil was in very poor shape physically. i walked out feeling mildly disappointed."

me listening to time fades away in 2003: golly it would have been neat to be there! lol until you're actually there.

(also 70s neil vs 2000s neil big difference, yes)

(i owned the cd/dvd of greendale for a while and i liked it okay. but yeah: didn't hang on to it. second tier riffy neil and the acoustic versions were a bit trying.)

I've only seen Neil once, at the Hop On The Farm festival shortly after he resumed touring following his aneurysm. It was great - he had an artist onstage painting along on their canvas while the band played, and they did a majestic A Day In The Life, and Neil was feedback-happy and would hammer his guitar into the amp.

Bandit is top tier acoustic Neil

Greendale is Good. I'm not willing to go to bat for it as a masterpiece, but for a late-period (maybe mid-period at this point) experiment from an established, iconic artist, it's pretty impressive. I think I prefer the original solo acoustic performances to the album itself — and it's not like he completely shunned those looking for a "normal concert" on that tour. The second sets were filled with hits, as well as some pretty amazing deep cuts.

I mostly know greendale via return to greendale, which is great imo, just really superb performances.

xp Probably the same with me. If I can count the St. Vicar performance of Greendale as an album, I would say that DVD and Prairie Wind were the two keepers from the '00s (and FWIW Jonathan Demme's Heart of Gold is excellent as well), but at the same time, I wouldn't call either work one of his masterpieces.

the version of Living With War without the choir is worth hearing

Bandit is top tier acoustic Neil

otm, greendale rules!

Yeah, "Bandit" made me a fan of the album. Can't find the video but the audio from St. Vicar is up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaflBpAIIxI

This Citzen Cain Jr. Blues album (5/16/74 at The Bottom Line) is freaking savage. Just a guy with a guitar hitting the crowd with classic after classic they've (mostly) never heard before. In Long May Your Run, the crowd laughs at the Beach Boys reference - I imagine in 74 the Beach Boys were kind of viewed by jokes - but I don't think Neil means it as a dig, he's down.

Maybe; the hits collection Endless Summer that went to #1 on the charts and really ignited their commercial comeback, particularly as a concert draw, would be released the next month.

all the neil live acoustic archives series stuff is marred by smug, giggly crowds laughing at odd moments, i think the hippies were just unbearable

1000% sure the "Caroline No" lyric is nostalgic/reverential. Has Neil ever put down another musician by name in a lyric? Probably--drawing a blank. (I know that's there obliquely in "This Note's for You.")

And "Walk On"...but no names.

Does "Hippie Dream" count?

He drops a lot of hints in "Thrasher" and "Hippie Dream".

Neil Young likes the Beach Boys.

Also, since the 2nd Archives came out, it was revealed that he was writing a lot of beachy songs around that time: Hawaiian Sunrise, L.A. Girls & Ocean Boys, Ocean Girl, Midnight on the Bay. Plus touring with a bunch of inflatable palm trees.

Looked up the lyrics to "Hippie Dream"--nothing specific. I mean by name. Like "I hope Neil Young will remember/southern man don't need him around anyhow."