Neil Young Archives Vol. III Takes has gone for three spins in my house, once via Apple Music and Skullcandy earbuds upon its 9/5/24 11PM CST release, and twice this weekend on the living room turntable.
For the second go-around on vinyl, I opted for a reverse-order sides playback: 4-3-2-1. This is now my go-to track listing for the typically idiosyncratic compilation. For, while the Vol. III full set seeks to restore order to Neil’s fractured discography, placing album tracks back into their home session contexts, Takes does the complete opposite. It pits these different styles and eras against each other, rarely continuing a theme or even a production value from track to track.
However, Takes does attempt to accomplish this chaos chronologically, and fails in doing so, as it cannot commit as fully to that conceit as the comprehensive Archives volumes successfully do. Approaching the teetering structure of the sampler with an aim of highlighting the chaos of Neil’s late 70s-80s output, I am taking advantage of vinyl’s flexibility in sides playback within the confines of its insistence on allowing a whole side to play before going over to the deck to switch or flip it.
Such a limited-selective technique affords the opportunity to start the album with (subjectively speaking, of course) an absolute high point: Razor Love.
I love how Neil frames the concept of the Evolution disc: rockabilly, country, and “trans” (his description for the synclavier/Linn drum production that might otherwise be labeled simply “electronic”), all within the same year. The cooled, synthetic instrumentation of Razor Love typifies the strangeness of that era’s work perfectly, and it’s a beautiful, haunting rendition where the spare arrangement casts a glow on the familiar words, taking us into a place more lonesome and lovelorn.
From there we get to bounce between two live styles, the International Harvesters’
tearjerkingly populist state fair country (This Old House), and the 70s throwback garage-based rock of Crazy Horse staple Barstool Blues, performed a year and a half earlier.
Side 4 concludes with Last Of His Kind, a true hybrid of Volume III genres: a paean to the working man carried over from the Harvesters’ oeuvre, accentuated by overdubbed acoustics and synclavier touches derived from the digital era of Geffen releases. It’s great to hear the genius work of Summer Songs represented; should a full vinyl release of that project be announced, it would be a very welcome addition to the Special Release Series.
Continuing the backwards-ish journey through the Vol. III era brings us to Side 3, where the original Devo/Young rendition of Into The Black jolts us out of any hazy countrified reverie we might have slipped into. Simply having this absurd genesis of the NYCH classic pressed to vinyl is, as they say, worth the price of admission. It does whet the appetite for a fresh viewing of the undersung director’s cut of Human Highway though! There’s nothing in the world like seeing Neil wail away on Old Black while our old friend Booji Boy opines on the state of rock & roll from his crib synth pulpit.
The cassette-grab rarity of Bright Sunny Day follows brilliantly, contrasted of course by the gloss of the Hawks & Doves band with Winter Winds, a fine example of that group’s twangy sound.
Now: taken in this preferred order, the halfway point is achieved with If You Got Love. I know this one has been floating around on the YouTubes and such for a long time, but I’ve been waiting for Vol. III’s release to hear it. My introduction to the song was at last year’s Coastal Tour, where its swirling pump organ and wizened melodies sent the Berkeley Greek Theatre into a zone of reverential bliss.
Now hearing the original studio version of If You Got Love is a true revelation. It’s one of his greatest songs of the 80s for sure, and would’ve been a bonafide hit if not for its 11th-hour removal from Trans.
The controversial side of this take will surely be that the early half of Takes (all 70s) is the one I find less impressive, although it’s still excellent overall.
I’m moving onto Disc 1, Side 2, which is kicked off with Sail Away. Unfortunately, this is not the new-to-us original version of Sail Away as advertised on all versions of Vol. III Takes; it’s the one from the Ducks album that came out already as an entry in the Official Bootleg Series, mistakenly included in place of the earlier recording supposedly featured in the box set.
Don’t get me wrong, this was a key slice of High Flyin’, the masterful 2023 debut 3xLP album by The Ducks. But such a slip-up is a permanent record of the cracks that show as a result of the marketing of the unwieldy behemoth that is Archives Vol. III. Sorry, but more on that in a minute.
For now, let’s keep going with Side 2 because we get a sneak peek at the lost Oceanside Countryside album that begat the Comes A Time record. Overdubs were the name of the game at the Triiad Recording Studios sessions in Ft. Lauderdale Florida, and Neil’s solo stacked guitars sound lovely in this version of the eventual title track to the 1978 album. Next, he takes to the skies with the soaring Lady Wingshot, part of a rehearsal tape I really can’t wait to hear in full. Side 2 goes out with Thrasher, another performance from the Boarding House shows that gave us the definitive Rust Never Sleeps edition. This one is somehow just as gripping as that classic album track.
Our last batch of tunes comes from the oddly sequenced Side 1, jumping straight to 1977 (tomatron’s birth year) with Hey Babe. The American Stars ‘N’ Bars version of this song is one I had ignored for ages, with that easygoing half of the album so dwarfed by Like A Hurricane and Will To Love. But it’s really a sleeper hit, and Neil’s demoing of it here for the future Bullets (Linda Ronstadt & Nicolette Larson) shows off its undeniable hummability.
Next up is a step back to Odeon Budokan and the blistering Drive Back, Crazy Horse at their ‘76 grimiest. The fast and loose chronology played with on Side 1 suggests that Takes, when enjoyed digitally, might actually benefit from the shuffle function, a move I usually avoid but which would make for one wild ride across 11 years of Neil Young music.
Hitchhiker (1976): its inclusion on this compilation is a head-scratcher. If Vol. III is a “just for the real fans” affair, then its Takes companion is no greatest hits package. But why throw the previously-released title track on there? We’ve all had the Hitchhiker album for 7 years now, where the song is perfectly placed.
In the box set, it’s part of an abridged selection of tunes from Hitchhiker, along with picks from Songs For Judy, another recent Archives vinyl release that doesn’t need the Reader’s Digest treatment. Why not include on Takes one of the Last Waltz tracks? Maybe the original version of Lost In Space? Or skip that disc and throw on something from the end of Road Of Plenty? They got so close to putting out an album with no reruns, but in the end they just couldn’t do it.
More unnecessary limitations are now exposed.
This pressing of Hitchhiker is tinnier and flatter than the 2017 LP’s. Missing is the robust resonance of the full-bodied acoustic guitar recording and the depth of reverb signature to Indigo Ranch studios. Does the team care about analog vinyl sources anymore? Or only when it’s convenient? Maybe analog wasn’t possible, with the variety of tracks, but was Takes even taken from a hi-res master? Probably not.
The likelihood is, it was assembled to provide a CD sampler incentive to buy the overpriced CD box set, with vinyl as an afterthought, mastered from the 44.1/16 CD source. A shame, coming from the camp that touts “quality whether you want it or not.” Well, we want it. “Be great or be gone,” said Briggs. But is quality being sacrificed to move more units? This weekend we’ve seen NYA/Reprise unprepared to meet demand for downloads, a demand which could have been mitigated had they delivered streaming of the full set to subscribers upon release as promised. This access is an expectation we have when we become Rust- and Patron- level members. Shipping was lax, so people who shelled out $500 don’t even get to hear the music the day it was purported to have been released.
We should not settle for lowered standards when the company already has our hard-earned dollars in hand. Since the download debacle, Neil has posted an apology and an explanation for the corrupted file transfer process (currently the only method to get full-quality sound, by the way). Instead of holding subscribing listeners hostage while Warner tries to sell out of box sets, NYA should have been streaming Vol. III on day one.
These gripes now aired, Hitchhiker is a great song, and that album/session has been mined thoroughly, over half its tracks making their way to releases that date from 1977 (Decade) to 2023 (Chrome Dreams), so I suppose it’s in keeping with tradition that its title track too should be recycled. Taken from back to front, Vol. III Takes nearly comes to a close with this Neil Young truism: any given song is just as likely to be found on some other album too, often from the very same take. Rounding out the compilation though is its earliest recording, Let It Shine from the Nippon Budokan Hall, which actually falls into the Archives Vol. II period as well.
The ambience of this performance accentuates the high caliber of songwriting at its core, a quality perhaps distracted by the rollicking good times of Let It Shine as played by the big ol’ Stills-Young band a month sooner. Rolling generally backwards in time is a fun way to rock the catalog with plenty of unexpected treats as well as challenges. Ending with Let It Shine, almost the oldest take in the whole set, feels like a fitting way to go out and leave the decade-plus era on a wry and hopeful note back at the start.
Having rewound through the chaos, I’m ready to start again with the full Neil Young Archives Vol. III set tomorrow and let its author bring his own particular brand of organization to this sprawling collection.
A most excellent Comment of the Moment tomatron! You're heading to the TW Hall of Fame.
Thanks for sharing all of the insights. Your love of vinyl and catching that perfect wave is palpable and enviable.
Looking forward to more of your insights as physical delivery by humans on EARTH catches up with the digital bots in cyberspace.
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