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ROIO of the Week [Recordings
of Indeterminate Origin]
Click on the panels to download artwork
Neil
Young
Last Album
[Zeus/2CD]
It's not for nothing
that Neil Young has so far refused to release on CD Journey Through The
Past ('72), Time Fades Away ('73) and On The Beach ('74), all made within
months of each other and sharing the same source of guilt, self-doubt
and regret. That's a lot of pain to pour out onto three albums over three
years after hitting the ceiling with Harvest and the million selling single,
Heart Of Gold, in 1972.
Each of those albums
drew long, deep reviews from the leading rock magazines of the time. Everybody
wanted to know why Neil Young was bent on alienating his fans.
Those were chaotic
days. One day Young was showing off his new hi-fi to Graham Nash while
sitting in a small row boat floating in the middle of the lake next to
his home. With the wave of his arms, music boomed across the lake from
two huge speakers on either side of the lake. By late '72, while rehearsing
for his 1973 solo tour, Young dismissed his guitarist Danny Whitten with
a plane ticket and a $50 note. The next night Whitten was dead from $50
worth of raw heroin.
But the show had
to go on. Young was booked into large 20,000-seater venues for a 65-date,
year-long tour. Journey Through The Past was recently released to mixed
reviews. Anticipation was high to see the star of Harvest and Heart Of
Gold.
While the later period
of this tour has been covered in bootlegs like Sunset Strip and Roxy Night,
there has been no complete show until now from the first three months
of the tour, when the gravity of Whitten's death was still fresh in mind.
Last Album is a two-CD set that offers the complete Civic Auditorium show
in Bakersfield on March 11, 1973.
It starkly captures
Young's mood at the time. Nostalgic and pained. He opens with the innocence
of Sugar Mountain and Tell Me Why and a new song, Sweet Joni, about Joni
Mitchell, capturing the folk flavour of Buffalo Springfield. Sweet Joni
remains unreleased.
The popular Old Man
and Heart Of Gold receive loud cheers. The new songs Look Out Joe, about
a Vietnam veteran returning home, and Don't Be Denied, his strongest autobiographical
song about finding himself, pushes the show into the lonely places of
Time Fades Away, New Mama and Last Dance, all unfamiliar new songs you
wouldn't play on your first solo tour in large halls.
These early shows
were reportedly erratic. Drugs, booze and money had opened a gulf between
Young and his band. While The Straygators had Tim Drummond, Kenny Buttrey,
Jack Nitzsche and the sad/tragic pedal steel of Ben Keith, they seldom
matched the power they had in the studio. On the longer numbers like Cinnamon
Girl, Young plays one way while the band strays on another path.
And without Whitten
to offer backup and vocal support, Young sounds out of tune at times and
hoarse. By the time the tour reached Bakersfield, Crosby and Nash were
invited by a sullen Young to offer support and they come on for six songs
here including Alabama, Southern Man, Cinnamon Girl and Are You Ready
For The Country, all of them angry and in no need of the soothing harmonies
of Crosby and Nash. This was rock star excess in self-destruct mode. It
is this strain that lends the bootleg its title, Last Album.
When Young was asked
in 1975 what he was up to with this tour, he said he felt something was
dying when he'd achieved his hit record. "I realised I had a long way
to go and this wasn't going to be the most satisfying thing, just sitting
around basking in the glory of having a hit record. It's really a very
shallow experience. It's actually a very empty experience. It's nothing
concrete except ego-gratification, which is an extremely unnerving kind
of feeling."
He would spend two
years searching for inner satisfaction to balance the material wealth
he was earning. One day when Young feels like releasing those three albums,
don't even hesitate. Buy them.
Last Album is a document
of painful honesty that will likely never be repeated.
There are 11 songs
on Disc Two which are taken from other shows in New York and Florida in
January and February. They are the seldom performed Dance Dance Dance,
LA, Borrowed Tune and Yonder Stands The Sinner (wrongly titled Lonely
Weekend). These are all mono audience recordings with a good live ambience.
Sound is very good. - Michael Cheah
Note: Tonight's
The Night was recorded right after the '73 tour in early '74. Many of
the songs from that album were previewed on this tour. The album was released
in mid-1975. It is the only album from this dark period that is on CD.
The above review
was written before the reissue of On The Beach in 2003. Since the release
of Last Album, many Neil Young shows from 1973 have also surfaced among
collectors.
Click on the highlighted
tracks to download the MP3s (these are high quality, mono MP3s - sample
rate of 192 kibit/s). As far as we can ascertain, these tracks have never
been officially released.
Live at Civic
Auditorium, Bakersfield, CA, March 11, 1973 (* with Crosby and Nash)
Disc
2, Tracks 4-8: Live at Bayfront Center, St Petersburg, FL, Feb 3, 1973
Disc 2, Tracks 9-14: Live at War Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, NY, Jan
14, 1973
Click
here to visit AllofMp3.com to buy Neil Young albums.
For more... email mybigo@bigozine.com
with the message, "Put me on your mailing list."
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February
2, 2007
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