Neil Young Archives Volume II (1972 - 1976)
Thrasher's Wheat proudly presents this exclusive retrospective on the legendary Neil Young Archives by the ever intrepid and dauntless Lone Red Rider.
enjoy!
Neil Young Archives Volume II (1972 - 1976)
Neil Young Archives – The
Next 10 Years (2010-2020) – A Retrospective by Lone Red Rider
"I'd rather be making
new music.
But I want to set the record straight as much as I can. Through
outtakes and chosen cuts I'm going to try to bring out more of the feeling
that's hidden in those records. I think I can enhance the experience by putting
them all in a long line, shortening them, and changing them." – 1989 – The Village
Voice.
When Neil
Young Archives Volume One was released in June of 2009, it was both
groundbreaking and anachronistic all at once.
On the one hand, it was released
in the highest fidelity format of the day, Blu-Ray, allowing for high-resolution
sound simultaneous with 1080p picture. Beyond that, it enabled Neil to realize his
vision to allow a user to browse archival content while listening to the music.
The graphical presentation was a brilliant Steam Punk homage to an old filing
cabinet and a schoolteacher’s timeline. There was also a feature by which the
archive could be dynamically added to, via a download mechanism called
“BD-Live”. But on the other hand, the interface was clunky for what it needed
to do. A remote control was needed to scroll through the archives in order to select
and zoom into various artifacts. Things were hidden, needing effort and
perseverance similar to what would be required in an old-school point-and-click
treasure hunting video game. And a basic search feature was non-existent. More
than once, I had wished I could move the experience from my TV to a desktop or
tablet, and just swipe my way through the content.
But in the end, after 20
years of waiting for Volume One, I
was satisfied to finally get “The Neil Young Box Set” whose idea had become a
myth in my mind. How many more volumes lay in wait?
NYA Vol #1: Coming in 2007! (according to official Reprise site in 2008, still?!)
“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. 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 (Time Fades Away). 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.” – October 2009, Guitar World.
1st night with Neil Young Archives Vol#1 by John R., New York
“Volume 2 promises even
more content than Volume 1, with many unreleased tracks. Four unreleased albums
from this period are being rebuilt and will be available in the NYA Special
Release Series. Chrome Dreams, Homegrown and Oceanside-Countryside are the
three unreleased studio albums. Also from this period is the unreleased
Odeon-Budokan live recording produced by David Briggs and Tim Mulligan.” –
Neil’s Website, NY Times, 2010.
Upon release of Volume One, manager Elliott Roberts announced a 3 years gap to the
next installment in the Archives box series, Volume Two, considered by many to contain the crown jewels of Neil’s
unreleased works. Neil had already started to tease its contents in the press
and on his website. “Archives Guy”, Neil’s archives public relations agent, was
probing the fandom for suggestions on upcoming BD-Live releases and teasing
progress on Volume Two (ie: “Disk 0
is sitting in my truck” or “Working on Disk 6, Zuma out-takes”). But within a year of the release of Volume One, cracks were already forming
in the edifice. The steady stream of monthly (usually coinciding with full
moons) BD-Live downloads suddenly stopped. The road for Neil was forking again,
but why, and how? Shortly after Volume
One was released, Neil formed a company to bring high-resolution music to
the masses. In 2012 on the Letterman Show, Neil surprised the world by presenting
a yellow, prism shaped device called the PONO player for high-resolution audio (HRA)
playback. Ultimately, he delivered a full music delivery ecosystem including
the player, a music manager and a download store. How would this new technology
influence (or side-track) future installments of the Archives saga?
Zak Claxton and Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 Review
“So, we're making good progress on Volume 2 and we've actually compiled it all
the way up to volume five. So it's a matter of manufacturing and putting it
finally together and also figuring out the technology and working it into
PONO.” Neil Young, WMMR, Neil Young with Pierre, 2012.
Whiskey (Heidi's dog) Admires NYA Vol#1 - 2009
"We are making it
suitable for computers. We are also altering Volume 1 for that, that isn't a
lot of work. The advantage of the computer version is that we're not
constricted by the disks, and that the digital file cabinet that we started can
go on infinitely.” – NY. Biarritz,
Constant Meijers interview, July 2013
“ (Archives Volume 1 and –
eventually – Volume 2 will arrive on PONO). We’ll be doing enhanced metadata in
the store, you will be able to click on that album, and download an extremely
large .pdf with all the news that’s fit to print about when it was recorded,
who recorded it, who produced it, who were the musicians…all that kind of good
stuff…”–Bruce Botnick, PONO, VP of content acquisition, UNCUT, April 2015
NYA Vol#1 Box set Design by Gary Burden
Were the Archives somehow transitioning from a
physical medium into the digital realm? I could not fully grasp the messages in
the press, trying to wrap my head around the big picture of how this all would
work. Would I be scanning through the extended meta-data for videos and photos on
a laptop or tablet while the music played from the PONO player? Would I be
experiencing the Archives on a computer? Not really knowing, I suspected that Volume Two would somehow require a PONO player
to experience it and so I purchased one. With PONO in hand, I patiently awaited
the release of Volume Two while
updating my music collection to HRA. But the wait was proven fruitless. PONO
went belly up before it could be a part of anything interesting for the
Archives. In fact an HRA download of Volume
One was never even made available in the PONO store. What, then, of the
future of Volume Two?
“It'll be finished this
summer. All of the music will be done. It goes just past Rust Never Sleeps.
It's full of albums that weren't there before: stuff I did that I never put
out. The rest will come out pretty quickly. While we've been working on 'Volume
II,' we've been working on the other volumes. I've gotten to the point where
I've made a template for how to release it in the future, if I can't do it myself.
I've also done a lot of it myself. The quality is there. It’s a model for how
to preserve music.” – NY, Rolling Stone, May 2014.
“ At the moment I speak,
the contents of the box is defined. It's finished but it will leave only when
we have the right technology to present the way I want.” –Neil Young, Rock and
Folk, June 2016.
NYA Vol #1: The Holy Grail
As the decade
neared it’s halfway point, roughly 5 years after the release of Volume One, there were finally comments
in the press that one seemingly could hang their hats on. The musical contents
of Volume Two were complete. This was
also a period of transition for Neil. Amidst a divorce from his wife of 36
years, Neil was vacating his Broken Arrow Ranch home studio, Redwood Digital, the location where all
of his archival work had been done to date. Neil’s studio staff was moving on
as well, some leaving vague-yet-tantalizing hints on their on-line professional
profiles as to what they had been working on during their end days at the
ranch. But there was still no indication as to what the delivery technology for
Volume Two was intended to be. My
latest fear was that now the wait would be for high resolution streaming which
did not seem to be anywhere on the horizon.
There is the not so small matter of his ongoing Archives project; specifically,
the status of Vol2. "I'm putting a website out, probably just before
Christmas," (Neil) reveals. "It'll be my entire archives on a
website. You can listen to music, and you'll see where the albums are that are
penciled in, not finished. From throughout a 40 or 50 year span, you'll see
unfinished records behind you, in front of you, right now, way in the
future." -NY. UNCUT, June 2016.
Neil Young Archives Storyboard
After he wraps his current tour in
October, Young will continue work on Archives II, the follow-up to 2009's
Archives, which collected unreleased material up to 1972. Young says the
project will include Dume, an album of songs from the Zuma era, and Hitchhiker,
an acoustic LP from the mid-Seventies. The major hold-up has been developing
technology for presenting the ambitious project: "We're gonna have a
website that's, like, 60 years of music in chronological order, with links so
you can look at my archives and play the music off the high-res source at the
same time."– Rolling Stone, July 14, 2016.
In the summer of 2016, the next point of clarity
on Neil’s Archives arrived. The Archives would be presented as an on-line
experience. Though, initially, how it would fulfill the requirement of
high-resolution music delivery was unclear. Then in April of 2017 Neil
announced that Xstream, a high resolution streaming service, was on its way.
Built on the adaptive bitrate streaming platform of Orastream, but optimized
for 192/24 playback, the technology would stream music at the highest of
thousands of possible levels of resolution that ones internet connection could allow.
It was to be a demonstration of Neil’s goal to stream high-resolution music at
low-res prices. But the low-price concept was a huge stumbling block for
Xstream, contractually. No label went for that deal except for Neil’s own label
Reprise. So, the only demonstration of Xstream was to be for Neil’s music
alone. The project would be known as “Xstream-by-NYA”.
The Shroud of Archives: Tracklisting of NYA Vol #1 UnfurledNeil Young @ JavaOne Conference - 05/06/2008
In mid 2017, NYA (Neil Young Archives) made its
first web presence in the form of an image of the familiar file cabinet with a
sticky note: “Coming Soon”. On December 1st, after what turned out to be more
than seven years in development, the cabinet formally opened as a free music
streaming service. It stood apart from other music streaming services in that
it offered single artist high resolution streaming (using Xstream-by-NYA
technology). But it also replicated the full functionality of the Neil Young
Archives Blu-Rays, including the timeline and file cabinet interface, updated
for web technology. While NYA addressed many of the complaints of the Blu-Ray
navigation upon launch, it was not quite what many archives followers were
expecting. Firstly, it was glaringly incomplete as an archive. It was omitting
materials released as a part of the Volume
One box set so many years ago. Many of the now-familiar videos, set lists
and BD-Live contents made available in the Volume
One Box Set were not present on NYA.
Secondly, whole eras of music were initially unavailable: the Geffen
years, CSNY content, the Buffalo
Springfield Box Set and cover songs scattered throughout Neil’s discography
were all missing. And thirdly, Volume Two
was nowhere to be found among the contents! Many, but not all, of these issues
were resolved by the time NYA matured to the point where it could be offered as
a subscription service with a mobile app component in late 2018. But at that
point it was clear that NYA was just another tool to distribute released music.
The Archives Vault
An Undisclosed Bunker Location
In 2019, NYA expanded into video content streaming
in the form of a “Movie Night” feature, effectively a 24x7 pre-programmed Neil
Young TV channel. Fan engagement with NYA in 2019 was enabled through a
“Letters To the Editor” feature. This proved to be another mechanism for Neil
to hype added NYA features including the forthcoming Volume Two content, now known to be a 10 CD set spanning 1972-1976.
There would be no Blu-Ray version of Volume
Two because the website would cover the high-res music and overall
organization aspects of the physical Blu-Ray disks. One intriguing promise was
the delivery of exclusive song content through NYA. But throughout all of 2019,
promises to deliver exclusive musical content were left unfulfilled. Neil suggested in a letter response to fans that
contractual reasons were preventing unreleased tracks from being added to NYA
until 2020, but that by 2020 “it could be a deluge”.
Joel Bernstein, NYA Archivist
With a July 2020 release date penciled in for Volume Two, a global pandemic strikes,
delaying all of Neil’s planned release projects. But by early summer, we did
get the legendary Homegrown release
from the Volume Two time frame. By
late summer, the first salvo of NYA exclusive outtakes and demos was added,
including a Harvest era outtake, “Dance, Dance, Dance” with Tony Joe White’s
distinctive guitar playing. Additionally, the BD-Live updates from Volume One have been promised as a part
of the Outtakes/Demos release program. And now, I think we can actually believe
it. The promise of exclusive material on NYA is being fulfilled.
Ben Johnson sets up a scene filming NYA#1
On September 20th the complete track
listing for Neil Young Archives Volume II
(1972-1976) was finally unveiled on NYA. It was immediately clear that this
set had some interesting differences compared with the first volume. The
maniacal chronological ordering which characterized the first set is not
present on the new set. Volume Two is
presented approximately
chronologically. Neil still roughly follows his template with the
focus on related eras and locations. The Time
Fades Away, Tonight’s The Night, On The Beach, Zuma and Long May You Run albums are re-extruded
through the die of pseudo-chronology with some familiar cuts omitted and outtakes
interspersed throughout. The exceptions are Homegrown,
Tuscaloosa, and Odeon-Budokan (live 1976 Crazy Horse, appearing for the first time
in Volume 2), which are presented as
originally conceived, even though they break the overall chronology of the set.
Certainly having the on-line version of NYA to
cover the purely chronological exploration of Neil’s work could liberate that
requirement from the box sets and allow Neil an additional degree of freedom to
create the listening experience he wants for his Archive Box Set Disks. Here, all retrospection, introspection,
speculation and theorizing stops. All that is left is to finally listen, when the
set becomes available (currently scheduled for 20-Nov-20). The reviews that count
the most are the ones to be written in your hearts.
John Nowland (left) w/ Will Shanks and the Green Board
In summary, the thrilling, stomach-churning
last eleven years between the release of Volume
One and the imminent release of Volume
Two has been absolutely fascinating for me, as fan and student of Mr.
Young’s work. Few artists have demonstrated the breadth of scope and focus of
vision in their work as Neil has. While the times and technologies available
have driven subtle changes to the over all box set plan, the overarching vision
has remained surprisingly constant.
NYA#1: "The Cutting Edge of Filing Cabinet Technology"
As a post-script, there is no doubt in my mind
that Volume Two is coming out way too
late. There was a version of Volume Two
ready to go in 2014, which by one account was more compelling than the current incarnation.
The number of people alive who would care about it is a dwindling fraction of
what it was just 20 years ago. Many of Neil’s musical partners and associates
have been the collateral damage of his single-mindedness over the years. Most
recently, it is his fans that have been suffering. Was all of the churn worth
it, in the end? Neil would be the first to admit that what he is doing, he has
done for himself only. He has been the consummate artist in that regard. As
such, has Neil really served himself and his legacy well with his execution of
his Archives project?
Thanks so much for the analysis, scholarship and retrospective on NYA Lone Red Rider! Your attention to detail and love of all things Neil is inspirational to rusties around the EARTH.
It's all been such a long, strange trip but we wouldn't buy, sell, borrow or trade anything we have to miss this experience. We'd rather just start all over again.
NYA Vol #1 - 2009
"And I've been waiting for you.
For such a long time now."My Little Box at the Top of the Stairs: The Archives Finally Arrives! June 2, 2009 ... it was a rustie equivalency to the opening of Arc of the Covenant...
DON'T BE DENIED! ... ever
peace
Labels: archives, neil young, nya
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