Neil Young - Live at the Cellar Door (2013)

Live at the Cellar Door is the latest release in the Neil Young Archive Series, a series of releases which similarly to the highly successful Bob Dylan Bootleg Series features a mixture of already released, as well as unreleased remastered studio and live recordings. This latest offering is a live recording containing performances from the six concerts Young performed in 1970 at Washington DCs. Cellar Door.

On here Young treats the smallish audience to some acoustic performances of tracks off his then just released album “After the Gold Rush”, mixed in with some old Crazy Horse and Buffalo Springfield favourites, as well as some earlier renditions of songs which he had yet released namely “Old Man” and “See the Sky About to Rain”. The performances on this album feature just Young by himself playing acoustic guitar and occasionally piano, giving the audience present an unplugged minimalist interpretation of his country and folk rock compositions. This in itself works well as his early-70s output was mainly made up of acoustic folk tracks meant for smaller live settings like the Cellar Door club. It is also very interesting to hear laidback acoustic versions of songs such as “Cinnamon Girl” and “Down by the River” of which the original recordings done with Crazy Horse were exercises in heavily distorted guitar madness.

Live at the Cellar Door all and all has much the same feel as the 2007 released “Live at Massey Hall 1971”, just not as good. “Massey Hall” had an intimacy and a performer-audience connection which I think is lacking a bit on this album. This seems to have something to do with the production on “Cellar Door”, with the songs themselves sounding as if Young could have been sitting in a studio booth playing to himself, with some overdubbed audience applause thrown in for good measure to make it appear like it’s live. That’s not to say that all of the tracks on here are bad performances, or are lacking in quality. There are gorgeous versions of the Buffalo Springfield song “I Am A Child” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” from “After the Gold Rush” among other gems dotted across the album, it’s just that if you liked “Live at Massey Hall” which was a brilliant live album recorded around the same time, you won’t really be missing out if you don’t hear this one. Live at Cellar Door is probably best left for Neil Young fanatics and album collectors, or those into historical and archival recordings.

 

B

 

- Sam

Neil Young - Revolution Blues (1974)

Neil Young - On the Beach (1974)

After the success of his previous album “Harvest” propelled him to the status of megastar, Neil Young took a massive change of direction on his next studio release “On the Beach”. The long awaited follow up to “Harvest” was interestingly enough recorded after what would be his 1975 release “Tonight’s the Night”, but released before that album in 1974 and stylistically was a big departure from the commercially successful folk rock sound he had perfected on both “After the Gold Rush” and “Harvest”. “On the Beach” is quite a dark, bleak sounding record both lyrically and musically, as Young lays bare for all to see his feelings about the 1960s counterculture, as well as the 1970s music industry on what is largely a bare bones rock record amidst small splatterings of acoustic folk just to keep the purists happy.

Young is quite savage in places as he takes aim at various people (largely unnamed) from his life during the previous few years. Some of the people he has it in for on this album include the critics and music press who he mentions on “Motion Pictures” singing the line “all these headlines just bore me now”, big business in the music industry “For the Turnstiles” and the counterculture “Ambulance Blues” with the famous line “You’re all just pissing in the wind”. On the whole, “On the Beach” could have been Young’s way of saying to the fans and critics alike how he didn’t care what they thought of him, this after  the preceding “Tonight’s the Night” tour got bad press and a lukewarm reaction, with Young being derided for playing mostly new material and hardly anything from “Harvest”. By this stage it was fair to say Young had long given up caring what people thought of him or his music, a belief that comes through strongly on “On the Beach”.

Musically “On the Beach” is a very sparse and under-produced sounding album, something which in many ways lends itself well to the subject matter in the songs. There is not much going on here musically, which is a good thing in this case as the songs do not need much in the way of virtuosity or brilliant instrumental escapades. In fact the music on the album in many ways is just a support act for what Young has to say in the lyrics. The backing instrumentation is minimal in terms of sound and musical exploration, working well as a subtle addition underneath the strong and vivid themes portrayed in the lyrics. The quality of the songs comes through in their subtle nature and I feel that if Young went all hell for leather with wailing guitar solos and extended jams like he has a tendency to do on occasion, the same intimacy and connection these songs portray to the listener would not nearly have the same effect.

Despite not being commercially successful at the time, “On the Beach” has become a favourite Neil Young album amongst fans and critics. For a couple of decades On the Beach even became a cult like record in that it became a rare collector’s item after it had stopped being printed during the 1980s.  The fanfare and longing for this record came to a head in 2000 when 5000 people signed an online petition to have the album released on CD, a request which Young eventually responded to in kind with the album finally getting it’s long overdue CD release in 2003. “On the Beach” is one of Neil Young’s best albums (all be it quite underrated it seems) and contains some of his best songs. Here he is drawing a line in the sand with his life and says goodbye to the 1960s generation he was very much part of, rejecting rock stardom and the counterculture in the process. “On the Beach” is a nice little collection of songs (eight in total) and is worth a listen if you are a Neil Young fan, or a curious rock fan looking for something new to listen to. I thoroughly recommend it.

 

High A-

 

- Sam