Comment of the Moment: A "Dream Mix" for Neil Young Archives Vol #3

Neil Young - ~1972

Archives Vol #3: Neil Young Says "Coming in 2022" 

 

Last week's episode of  Thrasher's Wheat Radio 2.0 Podcast - Episode #15 featured our Special Guest Mark "Don't Spook The Horse" in Manchester, U.K. who discussed Neil Young's Archives Volume #3 and what it might contain upon release.

In response, we featured a very substantive Comment of the Moment by  Lone Red Rider who  speculated on What Will Neil Young Archives Vol #3 Contain?  

And in response to Comment of the Moment by  LRR, here is a "Dream Mix" for Neil Young Archives Vol #3 by Tomatron: 

Summer Songs [see First Impressions: Summer Songs by Neil Young] will bring an interesting close to the set.

Its inclusion certainly will benefit Volume 3. If the end of the third set coincides with the end of the Geffen era, we are reminded that he was still in that contract when Summer Songs was recorded. It’s easier to think of the album, as presented this past winter, as a beginning; all the songs done that summer of ‘87 were farmed off to new projects, most secretly remaining the definitive studio versions, shelved. None had an album spot until Freedom finally hit stores’ shiny new CD racks in 1989.

Freedom and Eldorado are both excellent albums, but they render each other incomplete. Now that Eldorado is *finally* reissued, we can remedy this by uniting the two on a NYA playlist. Here is a potent recipe:

1. Rockin’ In the Free World
2. Crime In The City (Sixty to Zero Part I)

Freedom’s initial acoustic statement is essential first track status. Being the sole live version here, it finds the listener in the crowd to invite us into the studio for a beguiling collection of sounds. Here come the lyrics to announce a fury distinctly hinted at by the heavier of Neil’s 80s productions such as Landing On Water.

Crime In the City, with its hushed and sculpted mix as it continues the disaffected urban world-building, presents a contrast that would define the ebb and flow of Freedom. Listening today, I noticed for the first time a low chuckle from Neil after the line “he was sure he was right.” That little laugh suits the bitter tone of the whole album.

3. Cocaine Eyes
4. Don’t Cry
5. Heavy Love

While Freedom is all about dynamically zigzagging between styles, Eldorado seeks to pound away for track after track, to get loud and stay that way. At the Hit Factory sessions, poor Larry Cragg had to wrangle a usable signal out of Neil’s blistery amp-linking experiments.

Times Square was a dry run at what would become Freedom (its unreleased Boxcar take might fit nicely at the top of this trio). When that record was scrapped, Neil put out the mini-LP Eldorado to showcase his most real and raw, unrelenting sound. Don’t Cry stands on its own in any rendition but is strongest in its original, uncut presentation between these two other brutal rockers. Don’t Cry’s restored Old Black freakouts might just set your skull on fire. Freedom really needed more intensely overdriven screeds like Cocaine Eyes and Heavy Love. Now it has them.

6. Hangin’ On A Limb
7. The Ways Of Love

Freedom knew it needed a come-down from the assault of its first few tunes, after what those amplifiers just did, and Hangin’ serves that relaxation up beautifully with Linda Ronstadt’s delicate harmonies. Her valuable contribution is highlighted by placing the two together, going right into The Ways Of Love. Now that the album is expanded, there is room to breathe. But these love songs are restless. Like Neil told Niko Bolas when the producer was going through some heartbreak, “Dig it- that means you’re alive.” Although Neil’s domestic bliss paeans are lovely, his tales of love coming undone are among his most compelling.

8. Someday
9. On Broadway
10. Eldorado
11. Wrecking Ball

On the sixty-one minute long LP of Freedom, oddball Someday kicks off Side B. Why did the Volume Dealers make this choice? The album is such a classic today that it’s possible to forget what a studio achievement it was. Niko Bolas had been working his ass off all through the mid 80s to successfully create a formally shaped work of studio artistry with Neil Young, a digitally crafted match for Young’s brilliant assemblages of the 70s. (Hell, even David Briggs quixotically tried it on Life.) But Bolas finally hit a vein of gold with the Freedom material. Someday is the earliest-recorded track; Shakey was still with the Bluenotes, giving the Volume Dealers plenty to work with in the mix. Someday earned its place at the top of Side B by virtue of being so damn showy - the crazy bastards pulled it off, they really did it. The juxtaposition of Someday’s earnest ritz with the pummeling On Broadway accentuates the ironic arch of the entire collection. Neil Young is serious and/or shitting you.

The epic tale of Eldorado is reinstated beside Broadway to round out the mini-LP set, adding only the acoustic guitar of Poncho Villa to the Restless core of Chad Cromwell and Rick “The Bass Player” Rosas. But wait. There is one more released track from New York’s Hit Factory sessions: Wrecking Ball. Summer Songs recently revealed the haunting ballad’s bitter-with-addiction lyrical roots. For Freedom, Wrecking Ball wore something pretty and white, barely skirting the recrimination at the song’s center.

12. No More
13. Too Far Gone
14. Rockin’ In the Free World

The final tracks of Freedom remain as iconic as those that opened the album. No More is quite possibly the best tune on the whole record. The guitars seem to hang suspended against a dead quiet, black night sky. The feel change from the verse and back through an implied swing seems to sagely mock the listener, the subject, and the narrator all.

Then the harrowing paranoia gives way to an all-time live classic, Too Far Gone, done up here in near-tribute to the squeaky-clean country of Old Ways like rhinestones on worn denim. Where previously this version might have come off as a cheaply polished throwaway, the extended and intensified flow of the record now plays up the need for another wind-down. Too Far Gone has always been a hangover song. It doesn’t deviate from the albums’ themes of destructive intoxication, but it does musically soothe.

The effect is ever more extreme, then, when Rockin’ In the Free World blasts in, taking the vitriol of the Eldorado EP and amplifying it further, the atmospheric keyboards of perennial MVP Ben Keith synthesizing the band’s heavy noise with the pristine textures of Freedom’s album tracks. This song rocked out so hard it literally created the 90s. 

So much to unpack here Tomatron.  What a great "what if" comment.  Always nice to have our dreams.  And who knows?  Such dreams are now achievable thanks to the wonders of digital playlists.

btw, does anyone remember mix cassettes?

More on  What Will Neil Young Archives Vol #3 Contain? , as well as,  LOST ALBUM: First Impressions: Summer Songs by Neil Young. 

Also, check out last week's episode of  Thrasher's Wheat Radio 2.0 Podcast - Episode #15 which featured our Special Guest Mark "Don't Spook The Horse" in Manchester, U.K. who discussed Neil Young's Archives Volume #3 and what it might contain upon release.

 Special Guest Mark "Don't Spook The Horse"

 Thrasher's Wheat Radio 2.0 Podcast - Episode #15 | Archives Vol #3 Preview | Hosted by WBKM.org

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