Being a weeklie podcaste from Madison, Wisconsin featuring several remarkable curiosities therein occurring being a compendium of live music from divers artistes
Show #153: Archives Be Damned
February 11th, 2008
Arch Stanton recently pointed out to me that Neil Young is finally getting around to his long-delayed archive project. It’s been well over a decade since Young started talking about venturing into his vaults and culling live & unreleased material from throughout his career for release. The delay has no doubt been to many reasons including the fact that Young has continued recording and touring ever since his initial announcement. Plus there’s his well known dislike of the sonic fidelity of the CD format.
(Photo from An Aquarium Drunkard.)
And so the good news is that we can expect a whole lot of long-lost Neil Young material this autumn. The bad news for a lot of fans is that the releases are only going to be on Blu-ray and DVD only.
“I know it’s in technical production now, but it’s only coming out on Blu-ray and DVD,” he said during an interview at the Sundance Film Festival, where he and his Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young bandmates unveiled their “Deja Vu” documentary. “There won’t be CDs. Technology has caught up to what the concept was in the first place [and] how we’re able to actually present it. But there’s no doubt it will come out this year.”
That’s right: no CDs, a format Young has long despised due to its audio limitations. Instead, Young is utilizing DVD capabilities to present an interactive “time line” for the music, allowing users to experience articles and film clips from a song’s given era as well as ephemera like lyric sheets.
(Photo from Captain is Dead.)
Young’s archives are probably much more extensive than the bootlegers know. He has several unreleased albums which were shelved in favor of something else and a list of known unreleased songs is available.
In 1995 Steve Peck, a huge Neil Young fan with a large collection of bootlegs, decided not to wait for Young and scoured his collection and created the original Archives Be Damned featuring early demos, rare studio recordings, and a wealth of live versions of songs that had never seen the light of day on an official release. The set was updated in 2000 and became a 5 CD collection.
I recently finished downloading ABD2K and am posting some bits for Arch and to whet the appetites of Neil Young fans everywhere for the impending release of the first installment of the official album.
The material here comes from CD 3 and I’ve weeded out the studio material for this podcast. We’re left with live tracks from various periods of Young’s career. I believe that they’re all sourced from audience recordings so quality varies greatly here and goes from mediocre to quite good.
Setlist:
Love Hotel (Birmingham, UK 9-24-82)
Kansas (Oakland 3-20-99)
Homefires (Upper Darby, PA 3-24-92)
Love Art Blues (Seattle 7-9-74)
Separate Ways (Torhout 7-3-93)
Crime Of The Heart (Albuquerque 10-25-88)
Bad News (Wantagh, NY 8-27-88)
Stranger In Paradise (Mtn View 11-6-93)
Find Another Shoulder (Santa Cruz 11-2-87)
Guilty Train (Boston 11-22-76)
Dog House (Detroit 9-4-88)
Windward Passage (Santa Cruz 8-22-77)
Here’s a live performance of “Separate Ways” featuring Young with Booker T & the MG’s.
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