Next Release: Neil Young Live At Cellar Door 1970, 'Performance Archive Series'

The Cellar Door (original w/ hinges)
Winnipeg, Canada
via Joey Gregorash Collection
(Click photo to enlarge)
For some time now, we've been hearing rumors that the next Neil Young release will be Live At Cellar Door 1970 from the Performance Archive Series.

As we discussed last night on Thrasher's Wheat Radio on WBKM.org, a listing for the release has appeared and disappeared on Amazon listings over the last month with a vinyl version currently listed on Germany's Amazon - Cellar Door [Vinyl LP] as a pre-order.

According to Sugar Mountain - Neil Young Set Lists, there were 6 shows at The Cellar Door, Washington, D.C. on 30th November, 1, 2 Dec. 1970 with an early and late show each day.

From a Oct. 2009 interview with Guitar World magazine:

Guitar World: So how many Archives sets are we looking at?

Neil Young: Maybe four, maybe five. It depends on how much cutting and paring down we do, and how much we get into using BD-Live, which is a really remarkable thing. It's tremendous. It's remarkable because we really only saw that aspect of it for the first time six or seven months ago....One thing that we figured out is that we're going to be able to do progressive download updates. So for instance, around 1970 I played a show at the Cellar Door club in Washington, D.C. That show was taped, but we don't have enough great takes to release it as its own disk.

Instead, I'll probably make the songs available as downloadable updates to Archives. We'll drop them onto the timeline one at a time... One thing I'll tell you about the next volume of Archives is that Time Fades Away II is in there. And it's interesting because the whole thing has a different drummer than what was on that album. I switched drummers halfway through the tour- Kenny Buttrey was in there for the first half, and Johnny Barbata came in for the second. It's a completely different thing, with completely different songs. So that's interesting. There's lots of stuff like that that I'm working on right now for the second volume.

Track list for Live At Cellar Door 1970:

1. On The Way Home
2. Tell Me Why
3. Only Love Can Break Your Heart
4. Old Man
5. Down By The River
6. After The Gold Rush
7. Expecting To Fly
8. Flying On The Ground Is Wrong
9. Bad Fog Of Loneliness
10.See The Sky About To Rain

The release is tentatively set by Warner Reprise on September 6 2013.

Note that "See the Sky About to Rain" on Archives Vol. 1 Disc 6 is an edit of Dec. 1 and Dec. 2 shows.

From Steve Hoffman Forums:

All the 6 shows(30th November,1,2 Dec.1970) were recorded by Henry Lewy for a planned double album combined with the electric songs at the Fillmore East. The Cellar Door were 8-track recordings. It's likely that some multitracks from these concerts still survive . Most of the original reels from these shows were shown at The Visit To The Archives(2000, Neil.Young.com). Some of the master logs are also listed in the Archives Book. The Neil Young Archives have all the 2 tracks from these shows. Sugar Mountain by Tom Hambleton takes his information from the Ghost on The Road(Pete Long), which sources are provided by Joel Bernstein. Neil promised the release of this record in Waging Heavy Peace, so this is really a great news.

Obviously, there's a lot going on with "The Cellar Door".

"The Cellar" was a Winnipeg club that Neil Young & The Squires once played.

The song "The Needle and the Damage Done" has the lyrics "knocking on my cellar door" line.

A very young Nils Lofgren talked his way backstage and introduced himself to Neil Young at Cellar Door club in Washington, D.C.

More interestingly, cellar door is a combination of words in the English language once characterized by J. R. R. Tolkien to have an especially beautiful sound. In his 1955 essay "English and Welsh", commenting on his affection towards the Welsh language, Tolkien wrote:

"Most English-speaking people...will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant."
Tolkien's discourse is the most likely origin of this concept and the only documented one. Nonetheless, this phrase has been subject to a legendary degree of misattribution. In common circulation, this pronouncement is commonly attributed to "a famous linguist". [1] It has also been mistakenly attributed to Edgar Allan Poe, Dorothy Parker[2], and Robert Frost although no such texts have surfaced. The most detailed account alludes to a survey, possibly conducted around the 1940s, probing the word in the English language generally thought to be the most beautiful. Contributing to this survey, American writer H. L. Mencken supposedly claimed that a Chinese student, who knew little or no English, especially liked the phrase cellar door — not for what it meant, but rather for how it sounded. Some accounts describe the immigrant as Italian rather than Chinese. Another account suggests that it is a mispronunciation of the French words C'est de l'or, which can be translated as "It is gold".

Tolkien also once used the phrase to illustrate a point about his writing process during an interview:

"Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me - 'cellar door', say. From that, I might think of a name, 'Cellardoor', and from that a character, a situation begins to grow."[3]

I caught ya knockin' at my cellar door...

---