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or YOUR COUNTRY's FLAG. Thank you!!!)
An unofficial news blog for Neil Young fans from Thrasher's Wheat with concert and album updates, reviews, analysis, and other Rock & Roll ramblings. Separating the wheat from the chaff since 1996.
Labels: concert, neil young, review
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/30/2014 11:45:00 PM
16 comments
For Young, too, there seems to be a ritualistic aspect of his periodic return to the solo acoustic format of his live shows, alternating with high-decibel sessions with Crazy Horse or the various other settings he’s explored over what’s fast approaching a half-century career. It’s as if it reconnects him with the musical and spiritual foundation of his art, stripping the process back to its fundamental components of one person, one instrument and a muse.
Without a word of introduction, Young sauntered on stage, grabbed a guitar and — as he did at Carnegie Hall in January — delivered his theme statement in the form of the song “From Hank to Hendrix” from his 1992 album “Harvest Moon”:
From Hank to Hendrix
I walked these streets with you
Here I am with this old guitar
Doin’ what I do
The 2½-hour show, which included a 30-minute intermission, stretched across his career, hewing closely to the songs he’d played in New York, yet still brimming with his signature sense of spontaneity, of mercurial artistry alive in the moment, that makes Young such a hallowed figure to so many. It’s the same kind of show Jonathan Demme documented in the 2012 concert film “Neil Young Journeys.”
Labels: concert, neil young, review
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/29/2014 06:38:00 PM
27 comments
Labels: neil young
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/28/2014 06:00:00 PM
2 comments
Labels: ditch trilogy, neil young
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/25/2014 12:44:00 PM
41 comments
More of An Interview with Neil Young and Pono CEO John Hamm | The Absolute Sound by Spencer Holbert.
The Absolute Sound: When you’re at home, vinyl or digital?
Neil Young: Both. Depends on my mood and the quality of the digital. Old vinyl is great, but Pono is great. Pono through a good system is really great. In my car I use Pono.
...
The Absolute Sound: What kind of stereo do you have at home?
Neil Young: I have a lot of McIntosh equipment that I use for listening. My studio is full of different stuff, Tannoy and an old pair of Altec [Lansing] speakers with Mac 275s running them. It’s the old Voice of the Theater speakers. They’re ridiculous [laughs]. Also some reel-to-reel gear.
TAS: Speaking of reel-to-reel, how does Pono source its material?
NY: We make sure to go to the Master Tape, right to the original. That’s what our goal is. When we do Thriller, we’re going to get the master.
TAS: So when can we start buying music from PonoMusic?
NY: October. We’re trying to have it available before that, but October for sure.
TAS: Why use Kickstarter to fund this project?
NY: Now that we have some funding, we can actually do this. Before, we couldn’t find anyone that wanted to support this and save an art form. The money is coming from people who actually care about music. It’s the absence of format availability that’s driving this movement, because people didn’t have a choice, they were stuck with compressed, low-res music that was sucking the life out of the art of music.
TAS: You mentioned that everyone understands the importance of high-res photography and other digital media. Why do you think there is a disconnect between high-res music and the general public?
NY: It’s because they’ve never had a choice. When digital music downloads became available, there was only low-res. It’s simply not there. In America, of all places, there’s no freedom of choice when it comes to digital music like there is in France and Germany and elsewhere. There are the niche sites, but most people are handed MP3s, and that’s it.
The giants who sell that music have actually created the largest opportunity yet for a renaissance in music.
Labels: neil young
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/23/2014 12:59:00 PM
2 comments
Labels: neil young, pono
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/20/2014 08:34:00 PM
13 comments
CC: What would it take for you to say, "I've succeeded with Pono?"More of interview with Neil Young on PONO over on Computer Audiophile.
NY: If I succeed with Pono it might not be that Pono makes millions of dollars.
It may be that we made out and we were able to be a company. Maybe we just survived because someone much bigger than us cam along with million and millions of dollars and out-spent us and out-did us and out-everythinged us and did what we did and brought this to the world in a way that we couldn't. Although I think we can. It's just in my history nobody has been interested. I know when they see success they become interested in how they can monetize it. It's a win-win for music and audio to find out what's missing today. If Pono does that it's a huge victory. Were on our way to doing that.
You can see something is happening. I'm sure that people in the audio community are encouraged to see the reaction of the people on the street. That's what we've always been about. Were not an audiophile company. We are about bringing the quality to the people the way it used to be. In other words we made analog records that became vinyl and that was the quality we made in the studio then it went to the people. We're not doing anything new. All we're doing is saying, in the studio today make your digital music in whatever resolution you want to make it at. We're going to say what it is on our player you'll know. It will be there somewhere. People will learn when they listen to things. When it sounds great they'll get curious. They'll want to know what it is. Some of them may some of the may not. They'll choose to take a look. A go, look at that, I love this, and it's 192. It's one of three things I have that are 192. All the others are lower res, some are 48, some are 96. They may, in their mind, go "oh shit" this is what it sounds like at 48, really great. I wonder what it would have sounded like at 192.
The awareness of those differences and the palette musicians have to play with will change. Producers will now be able to use resolution as an effect. It can be super clear if you want that. Or, it can be dull if you don't want that. Even within one recording you can go from low res to high res. You can use it as a tool. You can use it creatively. You can turn it on and off. The whole recording will have to be presented at it's highest resolution. But if the chorus and the hook are at 192, and the rest of the song is at 44.1 or 48, something compatible, then it's mixed at 192. The source was low res, the chorus was super high res, some of the vocals are really high res, some are dull. It's a new way to play. A whole new thing. That kind of creativity in the studio is possibly a new tool for the hip hop and rap community. It's not one of the things they've done. They are very creative and incredibly poetic in their way, which I appreciate.
Yet, guys like me can do what we do. Create things the way we create them. Whatever we do in the studio, we finish, we can hand it in to Pono and it's going to sound exactly like what we did. Through the best player you can get. You may be able to make some improvements to our player, maybe not in our size. We really got a great sound. It's an odd shaped player because of what's in it. We had to make some things big to make those earphones sound good. There's a reason for everything. It's not just because we thought it was cool. Although we do think it's cool. We think it stands for something. That's who we are. That's what we do. We're not a format. We are anti-format. We don't want the musicians to ever have a format again. Formats are for computer companies.
Like every product brought to market, Pono has its share of fans and detractors.
I was initially surprised by the comments of a few skeptics that railed against Pono for its lack of specifics about the PonoPlayer and the PonoMusic Store, and its Kickstarter campaign. In addition, a few people just had to go on record as the first folks to predict Pono's demise. The surprising part was this negativity emanated from some in the audiophile community. Nobody commenting had heard a single song on the Ayre Acoustics designed PonoPlayer, yet some were stating how Joe Sixpack will never tell the difference between Pono and a lossy iTunes track. Give Pono room to breathe people. Pono is something many audiophiles have wanted for decades. It's a movement with the ability to bring awareness of good sound quality to the masses. Plus, all ships rise with the tide. If Pono succeeds, sites like HDtracks and Acoustic Sounds will grow exponentially. High end manufacturers will benefit from an influx of new customers seeking better sound quality at home, in the office, or in the car. Imagine the traffic in David Wasserman's Stereo Exchange at 627 Broadway in New York City when he places a Pono banner in the front window. People who saw Neil Young's CNBC interview from South by Southwest may waltz through the door to see what Pono is all about. The opportunity to give this industry a shot in the arm is ripe.
There are no losers if Pono succeeds.
Labels: neil young
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/19/2014 09:56:00 AM
15 comments
Blogger Harm said...To which we said:
With all due respect, but I don't believe in PONO if PONO just means 24 bit, 192 kHz.
In that case there is no difference between Blu-Ray audio and PONO except the fact that it's portable. If that's the whole idea, to make Blu-Ray quality audio portable, then it might stand a chance.
However, anyone that's saying that 24/192 is a huge difference with respect to 16/44.1 is being mislead, or just doesn't know anything about how the Nyquist Sampling theorem works.
The problem with many CDs (loudness war apart) is that they haven't been mastered properly. CDs are a different medium than vinyl, so they require different mastering that benefits the CD. There is no reason why a CD shouldn't sound better than an LP. If you compare the remastered versions of EKTIN and the original LP, the CD sounds way better.
So if PONO means better mastering (I'm assuming Neil uses the same masters for PONO as he did for NYA) combined with a better DAC, than that's enough. No need for 24/192, as 192kHz digital music files offer no benefits. They're not quite neutral either; practical fidelity is slightly worse. The ultrasonics are a liability during playback.
From http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
Neither audio transducers nor power amplifiers are free of distortion, and distortion tends to increase rapidly at the lowest and highest frequencies. If the same transducer reproduces ultrasonics along with audible content, any nonlinearity will shift some of the ultrasonic content down into the audible range as an uncontrolled spray of intermodulation distortion products covering the entire audible spectrum. Nonlinearity in a power amplifier will produce the same effect. The effect is very slight, but listening tests have confirmed that both effects can be audible.
The clip that shows a number of musician rave wbout an new revolution is kind of misleading. First of all, are they listeing to the same recording, but a different sampling rate, or do the versions (MP3, CD and PONO) have different mastering too? This isn't mentioned in the clip.
If Neil would use the PONO files at 24/192 and downsamples to 16/44.1 and do an ABX test (double blind) I am 100% sure that when using the same DAC and speaker set up, at the exact same volume no-one would be able to tell the difference between 24/192 and the 16/44.1.
Untill that double blind test happens (which is a whole lot different than a 2 minute trip in the LincVolt), I'm unconvinced. Sorry folks, do your homework before spending 400 bucks.
Thrasher Wheat said...To which Harm replied:
@Harm - Thank you for that detailed analysis. Clearly, you have some serious technical knowledge and understanding of digital audio.
While we can't dispute what you've said or debate the merits of your points, can we ask you this in all due respect?
What would you suggest for the average music fan who wants a better experience but isn't technically savvy? That seems to be the market that PONO is aiming at.
Is there really a better, cheaper and *simpler* solution than PONO?
Thrasher, for portable audio, no. But 24/192 is just a waste of space. 16/44.1 or even 24/48 will suffice. As I said before, a double blind test to see if people hear the difference between 24/192 amd 16/44.1 would be interesting. No previous test has shown that people do.So thank you Harm for the detailed replies.
For home enjoyment, there are better options. They're called CDs. I did some further reading and most PONO releases won't be remastered, not in the traditional sense anyway, but just re-digitized to 24/192. In that case the same argument holds as stated above. The PONO Player is only a minor improvement on user convenience with respect to CDs. If there would be an iPOD like docking station that would allow you to operate the PONO player from your sofa using your receiver's remote, that'd be nice, THEN it could beat CDs. Not in terms of sound quality, it can only equal that, but convenience.
If a future version of PONO would be Spotify-like subscription, complete with a dedicated device that would also allow for other streaming possibilities, such as Netflix, with the same DAC as the PONOPlayer has, you got a real winner.
So far, all the advertising has been about resolution (i.e. 24/192) and the DAC. I say, lose the 24/192, keep the DAC, spend some time on mastering stuff right and problem solved. 24/192 isn't the answer.
By the way, did you know that new EKTIN remaster actually has less dynamic range than the 1990 CD?
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=&album=everybody+knows+this+is+nowhere
Same goes for Harvest:
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=neil+young&album=harvest
I'll tell ya, if any current vinyl release has a better dynamic range than a CD, it's inherent to the mastering, NOT the medium.
Neil Young should be applauded for taking a stand against the stranglehold which companies like iTunes have over our digital music enjoyment.It sometimes seems as if that quest for a perfect echo is just an illusion afterall...
I’ve just spent the last couple of weeks writing a series of articles called Death to iTunes where I’ve tried to find a better alternative. It’s harder than you may think. At least with PonoMusic there is a better alternative for sound quality.
In regard to the arguments about the negligible improvements in sound quality in terms of bigger files, these are missing the point. PonoMusic is about preserving the integrity of the original recordings. All of the extra information that is lost in studio recordings after being compressed to MP3, will be available again.
There’ll be sounds in songs you won’t have heard since playing the vinyl three decades ago or that you never knew were there in the first place.
In terms of memory, as well as the 128GB available in the player itself, PonoPlayer can accept microSD cards of up to 64GB each, so if you do need more music then you can always swap cards. It also has two output jacks, one for headphones and another stereo output specifically for your home audio system.
All in all, it seems like a pretty exciting package. Besides, I haven’t paid any attention to anything Eric Clapton has ever said, so I’m not going to start now.
Labels: neil young, pono
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/18/2014 11:29:00 AM
10 comments
Per JamBase: Neil Young will perform at the historic Chicago Theatre on April 21 and 22.
Labels: neil young, tickets
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/17/2014 11:18:00 AM
31 comments
Labels: interview, neil young
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/15/2014 12:27:00 PM
4 comments
Wow, it's clear folks are really getting worked up over nothing.Well, what John said.
For me, the big complaints were that it looks too much like Neil Young (yellow model). That and my favorite band didn't sponsor one of the $400 limited editions...
The bottom line is this product is trying to fill a niche that isn't currently being filled. It isn't going to be "as something" as other products that fill a different niche. It won't make phone calls or play apps like my iPhone. It isn't small like my iPod/Sony Product/etc. It isn't really super expensive like my A/K. It won't play DSD like my dongle DAC.
But guys, it looks like it is going to be the best option for a hi res iTunes store that is still compatible with HDTracks and Acoustic Sounds, and all the other hi res storefronts. It only costs $300 early/$400 going forward. This is all a good thing. The issues about features that seem to make sense such as a 128GB card are likely to come out on the next model they release. Look at the iPhone's first model and look at it now. Look at the A/K's first model and look at it now.
These product evolve. I know folks know this but why pretend it isn't so? The whole "what will the twenty somethings think" thing doesn't worry me too much. They love vinyl for all the reasons the experts say they will hate Pono.
I believe there is a movement against convenience over quality and I see this as part of that universal movement that is open to all ages, all genders, and (I hope) all levels of income. Slow food, not fast food. Conversation, not shouting. Full audio, not lossy audio. This is part of something that says, "I want more than my fits in my pocket MP3 player while I text fight with strangers over a Big Mac for dinner." This says, "I want real music while I exchange ideas with my friends over a home cooked, health dinner."
The funny thing is that there is something that caught my attention and that thing was Neil Young back in May 2011 saying that 2012 was the year that the music industry would put the soul back in digital music. I posted that odd announcement on one of my audio forums back in 2011 asking if anyone knew what this was all about. It turns out that following Neil's vision progressed in 2012 and 2013 to the point where I was thinking about "what is Pono?" but knew that if Neil was pushing it, it had to do with putting the music back into digital audio. Now I see this is far more open and accessible to many than I thought it would be (no special format, no DRM…heck, they use an open source format for crying out loud).
This is a good thing if you love music…
Best, John
Labels: neil young, pono
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/14/2014 07:56:00 AM
47 comments
Not to distract from the subject of this post, but in answering the NYA V2 questions...And in other Neil Young news, here's some info on a future Neil album with a 'Full-Blown Orchestra' from Neil Young's Agenda: Jack White Project, Second Book, 'Full-Blown Orchestra' Album | Billboard by Gary Graff:
At this time we are still planning on physical release for NYA V2 and yes it will be available on Pono, too in full 24/192 sound quality. I'm happy to report that we are in full on production of NYA V2 right now. Maybe I'm biased, but I think V2 might be the best one. A plethora of previously unreleased tracks.
Dunno if anyone noticed it yet, but there are some new Artist Signature Series Pono players up on the Kickstarter page today.
Young predicts he'll have new original music to release, too, but he's not saying when.That Neil. Such a slacker.
"I have new songs that I'm working on, and I haven't stopped doing that," he says. "I do it when I feel like it and I'm collecting them. And sometimes I play them live before they come out as a record, and because of the way everything is people hear them before they come out, on the Internet. But I still feel like I'm gonna make records of them."
And if Young has his way, he'll also do something symphonic in the near future.
"I'd like to make a record with a full-blown orchestra, live -- a mono recording with one mic," he explains. "I want to do something like that where we really record what happened, with one point of view and the musicians moved closer and farther away, the way it was done in the past. To me that's a challenge and it's a sound that's unbelievable, and you can't get it any other way. So I'm into doing that."
Young is also in "the final editing stages" for his second book, "Special Deluxe," a follow-up to his 2012 memoir "Waging Heavy Peace." This book, Young says, will be out this year and "focuses on my life as regards to my transportation, as regards to my love for cars. So it's a history through automobiles, and it's a history of automobiles and it's a history of the environmental impact of automobiles. And it's a projection into the future of automobiles. It has it's own agenda that develops over the book."
Labels: neil young
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/13/2014 11:16:00 AM
14 comments
Quite a thread and conversation you have going here, Mr. Thrasher.
People talking about music, being passionate about their feelings, what they can/can't hear, speculating about the future of listening and enjoying recorded sound.
So great to see a conversation that elevates music beyond being wallpaper and background sound.
As you might expect the entire Pono team is thrilled with the response on Kickstarter within the first 24 hours.
Here in the tranches of the archives we are eager to get more music out to you, with the best digital sound ever.
Admittedly I'm a tech neophyte, not much of an audiophile, and was also somewhat skeptical about Pono ... after watching the video and seeing the rollout of the past days my perspective is evolving ...
at its core this is Neil leading a movement dedicated to establishing a high quality digital music standard ... since the advent of CDs until today's MP3s it has literally been a race to the bottom in terms of digital music quality and both consumers and artists have lost out big time ...
probably, the average listener (like me) is 'tone deaf' to realize how watered down the music quality has gotten but nevertheless they're (we're) getting robbed ... for the artists its much worse, their art gets ransacked for the sake of mass distribution ... Neil to his credit is an audiophile extraordinaire / savant and is dogged enough to try to be a change agent in this respect ...
I have huge admiration for his vision and skill to take on this initiative and the video shows how necessary and revered this initiative is among his peers ... while the PONO device and the music ecosystem Neil envisions are both extremely ambitious initiatives, the heart of Neil's thrust is for an upgraded digital music standard ... if Neil is successful in an upgraded standard and helping it to become commercial / available / mainstream then he'll have given society a huge gift and help the trajectory of recorded music in our culture take a very significant step forward ...
Hats off to Neil for spread heading this, and I hope he'll be successful ... the naysayers will line up and complain about everything from A to Z, accuse him of being greedy, naive, ect .... all of those miss the point (Neil's not getting rich off this), we should all seek to evangelize this movement and help in what ever way we can ... maybe we don't have the $5,000 we wish we could spend to join the private dinner ... or even $400 to pre-buy the player but we can at least want it to succeed ...
in my view if 5 years from now iTunes is offering these higher quality digital files Neil will have been the one to ride in on a white horse to save the industry, changing its trajectory from a race to the bottom to a standard that honors the art of so many at the level it deserves to be presented at ...Kickstarter Campaign Begins For Neil Young's Music Player : NPR
Labels: neil young, pono
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/12/2014 03:15:00 PM
19 comments
Labels: neil young, pono
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/11/2014 07:57:00 AM
60 comments
Neil Young will play two shows in Dallas, TX at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center on April 17 and 18. The shows will occur at the end of Young’s brief tour that includes four shows at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, CA. Tickets for the two-night run will go on sale March 14 at 10 A.M. Info here.
Labels: neil young, tickets
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/10/2014 04:49:00 PM
11 comments
For Immediate Release:Already, the PR has kicked up a fair amount of discussion over pricing, storage, etc.
NEIL YOUNG ANNOUNCES THE LAUNCH OF PONOMUSIC
March 10, 2014 - (Burbank, CA.) - PonoMusic is a revolutionary movement conceived and founded by Neil Young. Our mission is to bring the highest-quality digital music to discerning, passionate consumers, who wish to experience music the way the artists intended, with emotion, detail and power intact. "It's about the music, real music. We want to move digital music into the 21st century and PonoMusic does exactly that. We couldn't be more excited about bringing PonoMusic to the market," said Neil Young, founder and chairman of PonoMusic.
PonoMusic encompasses both an online music store (PonoMusic.com) and a playback device (The PonoPlayer). The PonoPlayer is a digital-music experience unlike any other, offering the finest quality, highest-resolution digital music from both major labels and prominent independent labels, curated and archived for discriminating PonoMusic customers. The PonoMusic desktop media management application allows customers to download, manage and sync their music to their PonoPlayer and other high-resolution digital music devices.
"Our goal was to offer the highest quality digital music available from all the major labels with the world's greatest sounding, user-friendly portable music player. We've achieved our goal and we are excited to launch our Kickstarter campaign next week to invite music lovers everywhere to join the PonoMusic community and reserve a PonoPlayer for their own enjoyment," said John Hamm, CEO of PonoMusic.
The PonoPlayer is a purpose-built, portable, high-resolution digital-music player designed and engineered in a "no-compromise" fashion to allow consumers to experience studio master-quality digital music at the highest audio fidelity possible, bringing the true emotion and detail of the music, the way the artist recorded it, to life. It also features a convenient, easy-to-use LCD touch screen interface that is totally intuitive. The audio technology in the PonoPlayer was developed in conjunction with the engineering team at Ayre, in Boulder Colorado, a leader in world class audio technology.
PonoMusic and Ayre have collaborated their ideas to achieve their goal -- to make the power and majesty of music available to everybody. "We are absolutely thrilled to be a part of this project. We will always be grateful to Neil Young for changing the landscape of recorded music," said Charlie Hansen, CEO of Ayre Acoustics (www.ayre.com).
The PonoPlayer has 128GB of memory and can store 1000 to 2000 high-resolution digital-music albums. Memory cards can be used to store and play different playlists and additional collections of music. The PonoPlayer will be sold at PonoMusic.com for $399 MSRP and is available for pre-order at a discounted price on Kickstarter.com as of March 15th. PonoMusic recommended earbud and headphone products will also be available for purchase on PonoMusic.com.
Contacts:
PonoMusic: John Hamm / CEO, Pono Music
650-464-7766 /john@ponomusic.com
Neil Young: Rick Gershon at Warner Bros. Records
818-953-3473 / rick.gershon@wbr.com
www.ponomusic.com
www.neilyoung.com
More info about Ayre's contribution to the PonoPlayer.Regardless of the hardware side, PONO will demonstrate true high resolution music. If more people become appreciative of high quality music, than both artists and consumers will benefit.
1) Ayre's custom designed and implemented digital filter. It is minimum phase, with no unnatural (digital sounding) pre-ringing. All sounds made always have reflections and/or echoes after the initial sound. There is no sound in nature that has any echo or reflection before the sound, which is what conventional linear-phase digital filters do. This is one reason that digital sound has a reputation for sounding "unnatural".
2) All circuitry is zero-feedback. Feedback can only correct an error after it has occurred, which means that it can never correct for all errors. By using proprietary ultra linear circuitry with wide bandwidth and low output impedance, there is no need for unnatural sounding feedback.
3) The DAC chip used is the ESS ES9018, widely recognized in the audio and engineering community as the best sounding DAC chip available today.
4) The output buffer used to drive the headphones is fully discrete so that all individual parameters and circuit values and parts quality can be fully optimized for the absolute finest sound quality. The output impedance is very low so that the Pono Player will deliver perfectly flat frequency response to any headphone made.
Labels: neil young, pono
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/08/2014 11:56:00 AM
46 comments
. (Just a reminder, purchases thru Amazon help support Thrasher's Wheat. Thank you for supporting both fellow rusties & TW!)
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/07/2014 12:25:00 PM
3 comments
"YOUNG: 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."
I agree with all the reasons stated for releasing and revering the album, but my guess is that there must be something personal beyond what has ever been revealed about that tour and album that causes Neil to short shrift it. Must be something big given it's the only album left unrepresented on Decade- The Bridge at the very least was worthy of being included.
I always thought it was just too painful because of Danny Whitten's 11th hour death preceding the tour. There is also the money disputes that went on, but I think we're grasping at straws, Neil has his reasons is all. The Detroit leg of the tour was the first concert I ever went to, and it was a great experience, especially the first half acoustic set. When the whole band appeared for the electric second half there was a discernible disconnect between band members, no interaction, very removed. It probably didn't help that they partook during intermission- I'm assuming.
The only song that stands out in my mind is Don't Be Denied, and a very lethargic Alabama with Neil playing the Wing guitar. I also think that it is totally in the spirit of Archives to get an alternative version. In the meantime, we can only speculate so much. Hopefully if we ever see TFA II, Neil will fill us in a little more on the details, but only if it's not excruciatingly personal.
Greg M (A Friend Of Yours)
I've read in some publications that several songs were recorded at the A & M studios by Henry Lewis and during the TFA rehearsals at The Broken Arrow Ranch. Look Out Joe, later released on TTN, comes from these sessions. Some songs, unreleased yet, could have been recorded. I mean Goodbye Christians On The Shore, Come Along And Say You Will, Letter from 'Nam. Nothing officially confirmed, but speculations of some studio recordings during the TFA timeframe exist.
From Decade liner notes:The biography Shakey by Jimmy McDonough quotes a 1987 interview:
"Time Fades Away. No songs from this album are included here. It was recorded on my biggest tour ever, 65 shows in 90 days.
Money hassles among everyone concerned ruined this tour and record for me but I released it anyway so you folks could see what could happen if you lose it for a while.
I was becoming more interested in an audio verite approach than satisfying the public demands for a repetition of Harvest.
So if you haven't done so already, go and sign the petition!My least favorite record is Time Fades Away. I think it's the worst record I ever made—but as a documentary of what was happening to me, it was a great record. I was onstage and I was playing all these songs that nobody had heard before, recording them, and I didn't have the right band. It was just an uncomfortable tour. It was supposed to be this big deal—I just had Harvest out, and they booked me into ninety cities. I felt like a product, and I had this band of all-star musicians that couldn't even look at each other. It was a total joke.
Labels: neil young, vinyl
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/03/2014 12:06:00 PM
30 comments
"Young returns with more unforgettable stories about his six decades in the music business as told through the prism of one of his life’s passions: cars. An avid car enthusiast, Young will showcase the cars he’s owned throughout his life and the stories associated with them. He will also discuss his dedication to clean energy and his recent awareness of the environmental impact the emissions of his past cars had on the environment.The book will also contain Young's own sketches and tracings.
This work is an eclectic amalgam of memories, artwork, and political pondering from one of the most genuine and enigmatic artists of our time."
At 68, Young remains more restless, unpredictable and hyper-productive than any other artist of a comparable age and reputation.So, we sometimes joke, "That Neil -- such a slacker." If only we could all be so slack. ;)
Since 2000, The Rolling Stones have released one new album, while Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney have managed five each. Bruce Springsteen has produced six; Tom Waits, four; Leonard Cohen and David Bowie three apiece. In that time, Young has come up with an autobiography, seven personally-curated archive releases, five films, an environmentally-friendly car and a new audio format, plus the small matter of ten new albums.
It is an eccentric, if not always magnanimously received, body of work that tells the tale of an artist driven to spontaneous creation, whim, rough-hewn experiments and rapid emotional responses that pay little heed to the expectations of his paymasters and, sometimes, his fans.
Labels: book, neil young
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/01/2014 06:20:00 PM
9 comments
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