Been a fan since about 1979 when I was seventeen. One day I was driving home from a bookstore/record store and I heard Like a Hurricane on the radio. Blew me away as it were. And ya know how when you hear a song on the radio they play blocks of songs and don’t always identify the artist for every song. And as I was listening to the song I said to myself, please tell me who is playing this. And he did, and the next day I went back to that bookstore/record store looking for that song. The only album I found that had it was on Live Rust. To this day my favorite album of all time. I have seen Neil about 25 times since then, and I have at least that many albums
Including On the Beach. And I have always loved For the Turnstiles, on the Decade album. How is it possible that, until tonight, I have never really listened to On the Beach? This is like a Beatles fan saying they’ve never listened to Rubber Soul.
I had so much fun when he posted his archives on his website. I spent hours and hours and hours listening to stuff I’d never heard before; it totally fucking rocked!
ETA: I think that was over a year ago now; I wonder if it’s all still available for anyone to listen to?
EATA: It looks like it is but you have to sign up/log in.
Great site.You do have to pay now, like a dollar a month. But i was disappointed, I’ve already got almost all of the stuff. I was hoping to find a lot of unreleased songs and expecially videos. But for a novice Neil fan, just join. As some critic once said, I think it was after Rust Never Sleeps came out, “he may be the greatest.” Well that is ridiculous, like “I have seen the future of rock and roll and it’s name is Bruce Springsteen.” But Neil is one of the greatest.
Oh jeez. I became a Neil fan just about the time he started to put out albums that were, well, not great. 80’s Neil. Then the comeback, starting with Ragged Glory. Full blown fucking Crazy Horse. I still remember putting that album on (vinyl) and he starts with a riff of Country Home and plays it for a couple of bars in the intro, with solos in between verses. And I saw him in concert, with opening acts Social Distortion and Sonic Youth. Still the best hard rock concert I have ever seen.
An incredible tour, 3 totally unique and uncompromising bands on the same bill, but Neil & The Horse were the clearly the Elder Statesmen and gave no quarter.
Since then I have seen Neil Young perform live at least 15 different times, with many various bands and in several iconic locations, including Red Rocks, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park (a free show, with Neil playing with both Crosby Stills & Nash and The Grateful Dead) Jazzfest in New Orleans, NYC’s Roseland Ballroom (as an unannounced guest at a Bob Dylan show, alongside Bruce Springsteen) and Berlin’s Olympiastadion, and he never fails to deliver a raw, blistering night of primal Rock & Roll.
So have you got your Pono Player yet? You can’t call yourself a real Neil fan until you do. There are six of them on eBay at the moment…better get on it.
(I’m only half-joking…part of me wants to buy the damn thing myself just to have a cool little quirky piece of music history)
“In December 2018 Young revealed in a post on his Archives website that during the process of remastering the album, engineer John Hanlon discovered 38 minutes of unreleased music from the recording sessions (featuring “five songs, with two versions of one, and one long extended take of another”). The expanded set, named Ragged Glory II, is expected to be released on CD, vinyl and Hi-Res audio in 2019.”
I love Neil Young. His performance of “Keep on Rocking in the Free World” on SNL in 1989 is phenomenal; I remember watching it live and being blown away.
After the Gold Rush was one of the first two albums I ever got.
We’ve been to several of his shows, and some CSNY ones. Mrs. FtG stood in line to get his signature after one.
Prairie Wind (2005) was the last good album we bought. The 2006 CSNY Living with War Tour was the last concert. After Fork in the Road we’ve given up on him. Don’t pay attention to whether he’s released anything or not.
I like Neil Young a lot. He is one of those artists that has managed to put out good work decades apart instead of making a splash and then just staying famous. I like his early folk stuff, and I like his 90s grunge stuff even though he seemed to be just glomming onto a trend (Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam- quirky and great rock). And I like his Crazy Horse stuff.
Ever listen to his techno album, Trans? I got a kick out of that one, too His having-a-bad-day live takes can amount to caterwauling, but I can let that go.
Something abut Neil’s split with Peggy fucked me up. It’s hard to say- I didn’t know those guys, I have no idea why they really split. But it fucked me up like someone I knew had split up. I started an RIP Peggy thread when she died, and I think it got one single response.
The slamming that “A Man Needs a Maid” took is incredibly stupid. That song works on a hundred levels. Whether he needs a literal maid to keep his house clean cause he’s too pathetic to do it, A Maid Marian like Neil said, a maid as in a woman…the man in the song is very self-deprecating and besides, can’t someone write a song, direct a movie, write a book, write an episode of Southpark… without it literally being how the author feels?
On the subject of On The Beach, that is one of my favorite Neil records. It was one of the handful that he waited for a long time to release on CD. The only version I had prior to that was a cassette tape recording of my buddy’s LP. I became familiar with those songs always having the same pops and one skip in the same place every time. When that one and a few others finally came out on CD, I bought 2 copies just to make sure I always would have a clean version. One of them is still in the original shrinkwrap today!
At a live acoustic show my buddy with the LP shouted out in between songs “ON THE BEACH!” and Neil glared right at him. He also played On The Beach as an encore, just Neil and his acoustic about 30 feet away from us.
His having-a-bad-day live takes can amount to caterwauling, but I can let that go.