Time Fades Away

Pasta-damn, love me some internets. Yesterday was official Neil Young day, which reminded me of the out-of-print near-masterpiece, Time Fades Away. A friend was able to locate 7 of the 8 tracks, via various sundry sources, including some high resolution files found here

This is a live record that only came out on vinyl and is from the tour that Neil Young did right after Harvest. Everyone came to the shows wanting to hear the hits like “Harvest”, “Old Man” and prolly even the stinker “Every Man Needs A Maid” but just to be a dick he didn't play any songs off Harvest on that whole tour. Neil's punk and he's psyched to sing about Canada on this record.

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Neil Young
Anyway, the story goes that soon after his back got better after he cracked his spine around 1972, Neil took to the road again, and the original plan was to take both the Stray Gators, with whom he'd recorded Harvest, and Crazy Horse. Except that Crazy Horse guitarist, Danny Whitten, was way too bad on heroin - so Neil had to fire him in the midst of the rehearsing, and Danny died of an overdose soon after. This certainly set a hell of a mood for the tour.

But the tour itself was actually good - loads of material, both old and new, both shitty and genius, a whole bunch of backing people, and even Crosby and Nash joining in sometimes and helping Neil on the harmonies (you can hear both of them propping him up on 'Last Dance' here). The reception was warm enough at first, but it was pretty hard for Mr Young to find himself in the position of a hit-churling superstar which he had accidentally transformed himself into with Harvest. Eventually the tour ended in a drunken, disillusioned mess, and when the dust cleared, people found themselves face to face with this album: nothing like the clean, glossy, mainstreamish (and boring) perfection of Harvest, just a bunch of poorly-recorded, not-too-carefully-played songs, none of which anybody'd heard before: Young's anti-commercial “antidote” to the overt commercialism of the previous album.

update: my friend found the eighth track too (albeit low resolution)

Tags: music