REVIEWS: "Early Daze" Album by Neil Young and Crazy Horse

Early Daze  Neil Young with Crazy Horse
 (Click photo to enlarge)

 

Here are a few album review excerpts of "Early Daze" by Neil Young and Crazy Horse.

From First Impressions: Early Daze by Neil Young With Crazy Horse | The Old Grey Cat:

Archival releases are often aural Rorschach tests destined to confound casual fans and critics alike, while sending longtime devotees of the artist into a tizzy. 

Such is the case with Early Daze, a 10-track collection of leftovers from Neil Young’s initial run with the re-named Rockets. Neophytes and others will do better to crank Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere or whatever ad-hoc “best of” playlist the streaming services have on offer. The rest of us, however, will dig listening to all the notes, nooks and crannies.  

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Early Daze isn’t a “lost” album in the same vein as Chrome Dreams, Homegrown or Hitchhiker, however. 

The tracks were recorded in Los Angeles throughout 1969, candidates for something yet set. Among the gems: a rendition of “Down by the River” that was recorded on the same day (January 17, 1969) as the Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere version. It’s a little looser and less polished, but not by much. It’s an enthralling jam. “Cinnamon Girl,” recorded on March 20, is on hand, too, though in its April 1970 single/mono incarnation meant to capitalize on Neil’s then-success with CSNY. The mix features a guitar outro not heard on the EKTIN LP, which was released 11 months earlier.

From Neil Young 71: Early Daze | Everybody’s Dummy:

The biggest surprise is Danny’s “Look At All The Things”, with Neil harmonizing and not quite at the level of the perfect take on the first Crazy Horse album two years later. 

It turns out “Helpless” was tried first with the Horse before CSNY got it, and has a slightly faster but still laid-back lope. “Birds” is the same take as the alternate B-side version, but here includes the second verse skipped on the 45. Then it’s back to the beginning of the year for the first take of “Down By The River”, this time with supposedly the original scratch vocal. 

The music on Early Daze is not incendiary; there are a lot of acoustic guitars, some country influence, and Jack Nitzsche on electric piano. While everything has been freshly mixed—as opposed to done and dusted in 1969—there’s a rehearsal vibe to a lot of it, as opposed to sounding like polished album tracks.

And here is Davy's video review of "Early Daze" by Neil Young and Crazy Horse.

From Weekly Neil: Look At All The Things | Medium Rotation by Patrick Hosken:

But I like focusing in on “Look At All The Things” to hear the real Danny Whitten instead of the myth, or the half-remembered version Neil evokes in a drunken haze midway Tonight’s The Night on the incredible “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” a song Whitten wrote about scoring drugs.

On “Things,” Whitten is bold and assured, his country croon fleshing out what’s really a skeletally thin song embodying horniness. The version he leads on Crazy Horse from ‘71 is borderline Spectoresque in its multi-voice grandeur — almost disorienting in how the voices swallow up the song and disappear down a black hole in stereo. Early Daze captures Whitten and Neil, two birds on the same branch, offering little more than a simple take on a version of a love song. I like that.

I also like to consider the alternate timeline where Whitten cleaned up his act enough to join Neil on the Harvest tour in ‘73 and remained with it enough to sing a tune in the middle of the set, exposing his talent to new audiences. It didn’t happen. But both Rod Stewart and Everything But The Girl covered Whitten’s song “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” — which bears more than a passing resemblance to The Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” a song released a few months later — and found mild chart success in the years after his death.

Also, see:

• A Few Thoughts on Album Early Daze by Neil Young and Crazy Horse by Scotsman
  
• The Flying Scotzman just shared: "Early Daze #1: Look At All The Things"
• Early Daze #2: Winterlong  
• Putting the Early Daze of Crazy Horse in perspective  
• Early Daze: Neil Young with Crazy Horse Album Coming on June 28 
  

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