Neil Young: Archives Vol II: 1972-1976 (2021) review – guitar duels, live jams and onstage banter

From theguardian.com

Featuring countless 70s outtakes over 10 CDs, this long-awaited box set captures the Canadian grappling with fame while boldly pursuing unfamiliar sounds and moods

If you’re fresh to the news that the second instalment in Neil Young’s epochal archive striptease is finally upon us, it’s already too late. The 3,000 copies of this £210 box set – 10 CDs, some not-even-bootlegged rarities, all originally slated for reveal in 2014 – have already found homes in homes other than yours.

Young has said another one will follow, due to ship in March. But like its predecessor, Archives Vol I: 1963-1972, released 11 long years ago, Archives Vol II: 1972-1976 will be available to stream on this maverick artist’s own subscription channel, Neil Young Archives.

Drilling down into these chronologically themed outtakes and ephemeral sweetmeats is made marginally easier by the fact that three of the box’s constituent discs are already in the public domain. The mostly live Tuscaloosa was released in 2019, preceded by Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live (2018) and followed by this June’s Homegrown, a studio album recorded between 1974 and 1975 and so candid that it was sat on for an entire lifetime. The final disc splices together two sets of live performances from 1976 from Tokyo’s Budokan and London’s Hammersmith Odeon; both have been heavily bootlegged, if never officially sanctioned.

Those seeking Young’s live jams, guitar duels, onstage banter and moist communion could do worse than start at the end. If the 131-song tracklisting begins quietly, with a guitar and vocals studio cut, Letter from ’Nam, it climaxes with Young’s most amped history lesson, Cortez the Killer – seven-plus minutes in which he lays into the European destruction of a peaceful native American society, which may be a feat that’s secondary to the edifice of electric guitar Young himself builds along the way.

On the remaining discs, several songs will sound familiar enough, because this is the Neil Young that his most ardent followers think of when they conjure up the Canadian guitarist. Here is the superstar created by After the Gold Rush and Harvest, growing dismissive of fame, trying to chart a course that could encompass myriad approaches and moods. The grunge era did much to seed a new generation with admiration for Young, and this is a Neil Young who Kurt Cobain could really relate to. “I need a crowd of people, but I can’t face them day to day,” Young confesses on a particularly atmospheric unreleased live mix of On the Beach on Disc 6.

Discs 1 (1972-73) and 6 (1974) are the most replete with unreleased material, but rarities crop up regularly. Often, in this vast slew of songs, it’s the strangest that stand out.Fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell makes two surprise appearances, first as the subject of a ditty called Sweet Joni on Disc 1, and, more memorably, cutting loose with a shambolic Crazy Horse on Disc 3 on her own song, Raised on Robbery.

The existence of a Young song called Goodbye Christians on the Shore was rumoured, but it remained unheard until now: a weirdly magnificent tune in 7/8 time whose far-eyed mysticism belies its donkey gait. A few more CDs in, a lovely version of the traditional Greensleeves arrives. Its role in Young’s vast canon? The ballad’s use of the phrase “heart of gold” is certainly a starting point.

Hawaiian Sunrise’s balmy hotel bar vibe almost disguises Young’s inner tussle: between his love and his art

Throughout these recordings, the increasingly troubled troubadour is reeling from the toll that heroin has taken on musicians. He’s taking up once again with his most constant backing outfit Crazy Horse in the wake of the death of guitarist Danny Whitten, for whose death Young blamed himself. Although other musicians feature regularly, Young is most often locking guitars here with Whitten’s replacement, Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, who becomes pivotal to the Young mythos. Autobiography is highest in the mix, though, because Young is also in turmoil over his crumbling relationship with Carrie Snodgress, the mother of his child, Zeke, and half in, half out of the fractious Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young – laying down his bleakest work, but having some rollicking musical adventures regardless.

If Disc 1 has more room for unreleased fun – a terrifically roiling live take on the sprawling Last Trip to Tulsa, a standout from Young’s self-titled debut album – Disc 6 doubles down on introspection. It’s home to Frozen Man, a previously unreleased portrait of the artist as an itinerant musician visiting Amsterdam in winter and pondering his inner void. Contrast comes from Hawaiian Sunrise, whose balmy hotel bar vibe almost disguises Young’s inner tussle: between his love and his art.

Here, too, are no fewer than three takes on one song – Love/Art Blues, a deceptively breezy lope in which the hard-touring musician weighs up the perennial difficulties in maintaining a healthy love life. “My songs are all so long and my words are all so sad,” Young muses with no little wryness, alternating with harmonica and yodelling. It’s a phrase that could easily double as this collection’s subtitle.

Neil Young Archives II (2020)

From spectrumculture.com

There are a number of reasons why rock bands don’t make music as quickly as they used to. In the ‘10s, it wasn’t unusual for established names (U2, Radiohead) and “indie” acts (St. Vincent, Arcade Fire) alike to take three and a half years or more between albums; at the dawn of the album era, artists like the Beatles, Bob Dylan and David Bowie would put out three or four albums in that same span of time, sometimes dropping two or more in the same calendar year. Even by those metrics, Neil Young’s run from late 1972 to early 1976 stands as one of the most phenomenal in the history of popular music. He released Harvest in February 1972 and it became the year’s best-selling album, and over the next several years Young followed it up with four records that equaled or even surpassed it in greatness. He recorded even more, with several of his unfinished works from this period—the fabled Homegrown, a few live albums—recently coming to light as part of the Neil Young Archives project. The second box set in the series, Volume II: 1972-1976, contains 10 discs worth of previously-released and unreleased material—featuring Crazy Horse, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and more—chronicling what’s arguably the peak of Neil’s career.

It was also a time of crushing lows in Young’s personal life. Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten was in the throes of heroin addiction and had been fired from the band as a result. Young had written “The Needle and the Damage Done,” a standout from Harvest, with his friend in mind, and even when Whitten was alive the track felt like an elegy, a farewell to someone already gone. Young invited Whitten to join his new backing band, the Stray Gators, for the Harvest tour but dismissed him in November 1972 when he couldn’t keep up in rehearsals, and he was found dead that very night. (For years afterward, Young blamed himself for Whitten’s death.) Seven months later, another associate, CSNY roadie Bruce Berry, would also succumb to heroin addiction. Young was further drained by the success of Harvest and the grueling tour schedule that followed—including a debauched reunion with Crosby, Stills & Nash in 1974—and his time on the road took a toll on his relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress, the mother of his young son.

Whitten’s death and Young’s discomfort with his sudden stardom laid the foundation for what’s often referred to as his “Ditch Trilogy”—so named for Young’s claim in the liner notes of his 1977 compilation Decade that Harvest and its #1 single “Heart of Gold” “put me in the middle of the road…so I headed for the ditch.” He once called its first installment, 1973’s Time Fades Away, “a documentary of what was happening to me” and “the worst record I ever made” in the same breath: He’d achieved a level of popularity most other songwriters could only dream of, and he marked the occasion with a live album full of songs about how fucking miserable he was, performed by a band whose mutual contempt was amplified by gallons of tequila. (Drummer Kenny Buttrey demanded a $100,000 salary, prompting the rest of the group to do the same, before quitting partway through the tour; David Crosby and Graham Nash were brought aboard when Young developed a throat infection, and they started squabbling almost immediately.) It wasn’t until seven years ago that Young first reissued Time Fades Away, and to this day you get the sense that it’s an album he’d rather forget, having left it out of this box set.

Instead, Volume II features the previously-released Tuscaloosa as a memento from the ill-fated tour. Capturing a single show as opposed to collecting unreleased songs across multiple dates, Tuscaloosa is the more cohesive—and arguably more enjoyable—listening experience, and it’s fascinating to consider how it would have been regarded, not least by Young, had it been released back in 1973. It also challenges the cranky, contrarian image of Young that Time Fades Away helped create: Neil cuts a warm stage presence, cracking a joke about licensing “Heart of Gold” for a burger commercial and, on the Harvest-heavy first half of the set, giving his fans what they wanted to hear. It’s in the second half that Young plugs in his electric guitar and the Stray Gators start making some noise, treating the audience to unreleased songs like “Time Fades Away” and the semi-autobiographical “Don’t Be Denied,” as well as “New Mama” and “Lookout Joe,” which would later turn up on Tonight’s the Night.

Time Fades Away saw Young starting to scrape against the traffic barrier, and Tonight’s the Night is the sound of him breaking through it and leaving the road entirely. Danny Whitten’s death was still an open wound when Bruce Berry overdosed in June 1973, and rather than retreat from the spotlight, Young corralled a group he named the Santa Monica Flyers—Crazy Horse rhythm section Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina, multi-instrumentalist Nils Lofgren, pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith—into the practice space and started rolling the tape. Tonight’s the Night is a record that half feels like the product of a long night of drinking and mourning, and that’s because about half of it is. The title track, one of five songs recorded in the morning hours of Aug. 26, 1973, calls out Berry by name and is brutally frank in how it presents his death: “If you never heard him sing/ I guess you won’t too soon,” Young sings. Later, on “Mellow My Mind,” you can actually pinpoint the exact second when his heart—and from the sound of it, his vocal cords, too—rips in half as he declares that “Lonesome whistle on the railroad track/ Ain’t got nothing on those feelings that I had.”

So Tonight’s the Night is a bleak and fucked-up record, but at the same time it’s full of messy, visceral rock ‘n’ roll that’s not only fun to listen to, but suggests that Young might’ve even had some fun making it. “Roll Another Number (For the Road)” is as elegantly wasted as its title implies, while the inclusion of Whitten’s own “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown”—recorded live in 1970—functions as a séance between Young and his dead friend. The latter is a crucial piece of the Tonight’s the Night, but it predates the window that Volume II covers. The shuffled and incomplete version of Tonight’s the Night that appears in the box set shakes off some of the myth that surrounds the record itself. If you thought the master take of “Speakin’ Out” wasn’t woozy enough, there’s a “Speakin’ Out Jam” that’s so loose that it’s almost it practically threatens to fall apart in real time. And then there are a couple of new songs: Young wrote “Everybody’s Alone” in 1969 but never released it on an album, and it’s hard to think of one where it would’ve fit better than Tonight’s the Night, while Joni Mitchell stops by for a rollicking cover of her own “Raised on Robbery.” These aren’t throwaways, but they feel like something of a gag reel, reminding you that Tonight’s the Night isn’t a documentary so much as it’s a carefully arranged—yet disheveled—mood piece.

Likewise, Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live is actually a composite of three shows, conveying the experience of a live show while also cutting it to fit a narrative. The brief Tonight’s the Night tour, which included dates in Canada and the U.K., was steeped in artifice, with fake palm trees and Young welcoming the audience night after night to “Miami Beach.” But that doesn’t mean it’s not a great live album. Recorded eight and a half months after Tuscaloosa, Young and the band sound much more comfortable onstage even as they’re singing songs of doom and gloom: “First topless girl we get up here gets one of these boots,” he slurs at the start of “Tonight’s the Night,” performing the song not as an onstage exorcism, but as something slower and slinkier. He intersperses these songs with asides about Candy Barr and Perry Como and future label boss David Geffen, and at one point even leads the Santa Monica Flyers in a brief snippet of the “Beer Barrel Polka.” They’re presumably as drunk as the Stray Gators were on Time Fades Away, but they’re not at war with each other, and they’re capable of joyous rock ‘n’ roll as well as achingly beautiful moments like “Albuquerque” and “Tired Eyes.”

Reprise Records was understandably apprehensive about Tonight’s the Night’s commercial prospects, and while they sat on it, Young went back into the studio and began work on an entirely new set of songs. Released before Tonight’s the Night but recorded after it, On the Beach is generally thought of as the second installment in the Ditch Trilogy but it makes much more sense to think of it as its finale—Neil’s still grappling with loss here, but he’s made it past the other stages of grief and is stumbling toward acceptance. “I hear some people been talking me down/ …They do their thing, I do mine,” Young sings on opener “Walk On,” an ode to keepin’ on keepin’ on. But it’s still a decidedly sullen album, with three of its eight songs featuring the word “blues” in their titles, like the Charles Manson-inspired fever dream of “Revolution Blues” (“I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/ But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars”) and the oil industry-skewering “Vampire Blues.” On the Beach’s side B is possibly Young’s greatest single side of an album: There’s the title track—one of the most downbeat meditations on fame ever recorded—and Neil’s “American Pie,” “Ambulance Blues,” in which he reflects on everything from his career origins “in the old folky days” to the state of CSNY to his hatred of Richard Nixon.

Sandwiched between them is “Motion Pictures,” which for 46 years was Young’s final recorded word on Carrie Snodgress. If the couple hadn’t broken up by the time the song was recorded, their romance was beyond saving, marred by infidelities on both sides as well as Young’s life on the road. Many of the songs he wrote in the latter half of 1974 were candidly about their separation, and he collected several of them on Homegrown, which he intended to release in 1975 before shelving in favor of Tonight’s the Night. The long-lost Homegrown took on an almost mythic quality—it was never bootlegged in full, and its track listing wasn’t even confirmed until last year—and for the most part, the album lives up to what fans hoped it would be. A few weedy detours keep it out of Neil’s top five—“We Don’t Smoke It No More” is a goofy jam that would be better suited for a concept album about marijuana than a breakup album, while the spoken-word “Florida” is a baffling misfire—but when Young levels with his heartbreak, it yields some of the most affecting songs of his career. “Separate Ways” is a tender and mature acknowledgement that the end of a romance doesn’t necessarily mean the end of another kind of meaningful relationship: “Happiness is never through/ It’s only a change of ways/ And that is nothing new,” Young croons, only to slur a plea to Snodgress on the very next track, “Try,” that “the door is open/ To my heart.”

In addition to Homegrown, Volume II also contains a disc’s worth of session outtakes that at their best are as good as the album’s highlights. You can trace the progression of “Love/Art Blues” over three recordings from stark, solo demo to a more fleshed-out country lament, complete with Ben Keith’s weeping pedal steel guitar. There are a couple of songs, like “Give Me Strength” and “Bad News Comes to Town,” that have been unearthed on other projects, but have never sounded better than they do in the forms they take on Volume II. And then there are the songs heard for the very first time in any studio form, like “Frozen Man,” “Daughters” and “Homefires,” which are as vulnerable as Young has ever allowed himself to be on record. As with the many bootlegs from the Beach Boys’ Smile sessions, you can create your own, er, homegrown Homegrown track listing from all the songs that were recorded for the album; take the best dozen or so tracks and you’ve got not just his Blood on the Tracks but the best album he never made.

Ultimately, it was Zuma that served as Young’s return from the ditch, and to Crazy Horse. The addition of new guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro made for Young’s most upbeat record in years, featuring some of his greatest guitar workouts (“Cortez the Killer,” “Danger Bird”) and melodic country rock cuts (“Don’t Cry No Tears,” “Lookin’ for a Love”). As great as it is to hear Young and Crazy Horse sowing their wild oats again after years in the ditch, it’s got the same patchwork quality that has kept many of Young’s good albums from being truly great: “Pardon My Heart” is another song that should’ve made the cut for Homegrown, while “Drive Back” just kind of plods along without aspiring to the intensity of “Cortez the Killer” or “Danger Bird.” Nevertheless, it scratched an itch that had been bothering many of Young’s fans since Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and it made it emphatically clear that Neil and his loyal steed were back from the brink.

And, from the sound of it, better than ever. Volume II concludes with Odeon Budokan, a live album collecting dates from both London’s Hammersmith Odeon and Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan in March 1976. Just like Rust Never Sleeps three years later, Odeon Budokan is divided between solo acoustic songs in its first half and full band performances in its second half. As always, “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Cortez the Killer” are barnburners onstage, with Sampedro and Young engaging in the kind of dueling guitar interplay that was missing from much of Young’s output since Whitten’s death. But it’s the recordings from the Odeon that may be the most affecting, hearing Young sing “The Old Laughing Lady” and “Old Man” from a place of experience that he couldn’t have fathomed when he first wrote the songs. The last song we hear from him at this show is “Stringman,” another of the dozens of brilliant tunes that Young has wrote but never put on a studio album. Like many of his greatest songs, it reckons with the failures of his generation, Young turning the burned-out idealism of hippies on its head—singing about the military man and the bohemians who “Tore down everything/ That he was fighting for,” the flower children “kissed by the sun” who went to seed, and the titular figure, for whom free love and music just weren’t enough. Listening to him sing it, you wonder if the stringman was based on anyone he knew, like Danny Whitten or Bruce Berry, or even himself. Then the song ends and the crowd erupts into applause, and you remember why Neil Young has remained one of the most fiercely beloved songwriters of the last 50 years. It almost doesn’t matter who his songs are about as much as it does how many people see themselves in them.

SUMMARYTen discs worth of previously-released and unreleased material—featuring Crazy Horse, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and more—chronicle what’s arguably the peak of Neil’s career.

Review: Neil Young, ‘Archives Vol. 2 (1972 – 1976)’ – An Epic Deep Dive Into The Ditch Trilogy And Beyond (2020)

From bourbonandvinyl.net

I have been extremely impressed with some of the archival releases we’ve seen over the last few years doing B&V. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the wonderful sets we’ve seen from Tom Petty and Prince who both released some great stuff from “the vaults” last year – Tom Petty: ‘Wildflowers & All The Rest – Deluxe Edition (4 CDs)’ – A Petty Masterpiece Lovingly Revisited and Review: Prince, ‘Sign O’ The Times – Deluxe Edition’ – An Embarrassment of Riches respectively. However, with Petty and Prince there’s the sad undercurrent that both artists passed recently in an untimely, surprise fashion which has allowed the guardians of their estates to cull through the archives for those releases. With all due respect to those artists, nobody has an “Archive game” like Neil Young. I love what Springsteen has released over the years, in particular Tracks and all the live vintage concerts he’s released (especially from 1978). Similarly, Dylan’s Bootleg Series has been full of spectacular finds (Dylan’s Bootleg Series – A User’s Guide). All of that has been great, but Neil Young’s archive stuff truly ranks right up there with them, if not above them. The thing that is astounding to me is that all three of those artists – Bruce, Bob and Neil – are still alive to curate the archives which makes it more fascinating. We get their perception and take on their history.

Springsteen has, of late anyway, been focused on releasing vintage concerts in their entirety from 1974 to the 2010s. There are rumors that Tracks 2 is in the works for 2021 in lieu of a tour. Dylan has done that as well, releasing singular concert documents but he’s also released batches of unreleased material usually covering a certain time period in his career. I actually think Neil started all of this with his superb “greatest hits” package Decade from 1977. Neil eschewed any formulaic “greatest hits” record and turned it into a 3-LP vinyl set that was more career retrospective than greatest hits. It culled tunes from almost every LP he’d done up to that point, over the previous decade (hence the name) with the Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, with Crazy Horse and solo. He included deeper albums cuts but more importantly he included a handful of unreleased tracks. I have Decade on vinyl… I bought in college as it seemed like the right place to start my Neil Young collection and I cherish it. I think the make-up of Decade is what inspired Dylan to put out his first box set, the brilliant Biograph, which was made up of hits, deep cuts, unreleased stuff and live tracks… hmmm, sound familiar? And, as I’ve said before, Biograph launched the “box set” industry. It begat Crossroads (Clapton) which begat Storyteller (Rod Stewart)…but perhaps I’m getting off track here. Suffice it to say you wouldn’t have Clapton combining his work with the Yardbirds, John Mayall, Cream and Blind Faith on one big box if Young hadn’t given him the idea on Decade. 

There were rumors dating back to the early 80s that Young was going to do Decade II. For years I’d heard he was “working on it.” I think at some point the technology changed and the ability to pack a box set with 10 or 12 CDs appealed to Neil. It allowed him to really dig into telling the retrospective story of his career. Eventually he shelved the whole Decade II project in favor of his Archives series. Eventually he even launched an archive website, https://neilyoungarchives.com, that is simply astounding in the depth and breadth of material. There’s a subscription fee, but if you’re into Neil, it’s worth it. Finally in 2009 Neil released The Archives Vol 1 1963 – 1972. It not only contained discs dedicated to one concert but it also, like Decade, had previously released cuts – “hits” and deep cuts – alongside previously unreleased material. It’s kind of a blended approach of Springsteen (concerts) and Dylan (previously unreleased/released from a specific period) mentioned above. The sound quality is so good it may induce weeping… Vol 1 had stuff from his first band, the Squires…but I was disappointed it didn’t have any material from the Minah Birds, his Motown cover band that featured Rick James. It covered much of the same time period of Decade. I was excited about Vol 1, but in the lead up, he kept releasing live albums and I kept snapping them up (Live At the Fillmore East (with Crazy Horse), Live At Massey Hall and Live At Canterbury House) and when it came out I was surprised and disappointed to see they were all included in the box set. I didn’t want to double buy all of this… (The same thing happened with Vol 2 and I failed to warn people about this to my shame, but I’d forgotten). I was also slightly turned off by all the previously released stuff. I owned all of that already. Vol 1 covered some of Neil’s most popular work including stuff with CSNY and his biggest selling LPs, After the Gold Rush and Harvest. In the end, I chose not to buy Vol 1. The hefty price tag was also an inhibitor at the time.

While it could be argued that Vol 1 covered the period that was really Neil’s commercial zenith, I was always more attracted to his work in the 70s that came after that. I was eagerly awaiting a follow up that covered the mid 70s. Neil is not a man who worries about deadlines so it took 11 years for him to release the next major set, Vol 2. Some of you may be wondering why I’m only writing about this now as the release date was Nov 20th, 2020. Yes he put out Vol 2 last year but it was a limited “collector’s” release of 3000 copies for $250. I love Neil Young, but hey man, even I have a limit. On March 5th he’s actually releasing a more reasonably priced (but still expensive) “retail” version. Only then will everybody have a chance to buy the physical copy or download music from the box set. Seeing the track list, I bit the bullet and purchased the physical copy, which I’m still waiting for but it came with a download. I’ve spent the last two weeks in a Neil Young 1972 to 1976 haze. Vol 2 didn’t cover the 10 year time frame of Vol 1, such was Neil’s huge output in the 70s, it only goes from 72 to 76, but what years those were.

Vol 2 picks up right where Vol 1 left off, the latter half of 1972 right after Harvest. Neil did not react well to the enormous, breakout success of Harvest (Artists Who Changed Their Music to Escape Fame), it freaked him out. He formed a band of session musicians in New York to tour behind Harvest. Drummer Kenny Buttrey demanded $100k in payment, to make up for missed sessions and the rest of the band followed suit. Neil said, in the original, deleted liner notes of Decade, “Money hassles among everyone concerned ruined this tour and record for me but I released it anyway so you folks could see what could happen if you lose it for a while.” He’d hired Crazy Horse’s guitarist Danny Whitten to join the band – he probably needed a friend in the band – but Whitten was lost to drug addiction and couldn’t pull it together, he couldn’t remember the songs. Neil fired him and a day later Whitten died from mixing booze and valium (not quaaludes as Rolling Stone reported at the time). Neil, freaked out about being a superstar, feeling intense guilt about Whitten and at odds with his backing band made for an… explosive tour. Young had discovered tequila, which even I refuse to drink. Add to that the angst of the death of the ideals of the hippy dream and Nixon’s reelection and it made for a heavy time for Neil. On the tour, instead of an evening of laid back country rock like “Heart of Gold,” Young was rocking out to tracks like “Time Fades Away” with it’s famous opening line, “Fourteen junkies too weak to work…” Naturally Neil brought along a tape recorder and that’s how he recorded the follow up to Harvest, a unique approach.

That’s exactly where Vol 2 starts, with the material from Time Fades Away (Neil Young: The Elusive 1973 “Time Fades Away” LP). It was recorded in 72, released in 73 and it is the first in what is now called “The Ditch Trilogy” based on Neil’s quote (above) from Decade. Neil has never really liked Time Fades Away, and I think it’s telling there’s only really one song from that album on disc 1 of Vol 2. There are a number of unreleased songs on the first disc, subtitled ‘Everybody’s Alone.’ “Letter From Nam” opens the set (a track he redid and released as “Long Walk Home” on Life). He does a great acoustic version of “L.A.,” that perhaps he should have subbed in for the version on the album. “Come Along And Say You Will,” and “Goodbye Christians On The Shore” are two great unreleased tracks. The disc ends with a version of “Human Highway” with Crosby, Stills & Nash singing backup from their aborted studio followup to Deja Vu. Supposedly, in 1976 when they made another attempted stab at a new studio album,  Neil became frustrated and was said to have erased Crosby & Nash’s backing vocals on this track and the others they recorded… it’s the thing of legend but apparently that’s not true. I have to wonder if there’s been any interest from that camp to try and reassemble that album, which was tentatively titled Human Highway… I can dream. Disc 2 is the previously released concert album from the Time Fades Away tour, Tuscaloosa, reviewed here, LP Review: Neil Young & The Stray Gators’ Live ‘Tuscaloosa’ From the Archives. Including the live album with the unreleased material really gives us a feel for where Neil was as 1972 waned.

Disc 3, subtitled ‘Tonight’s The Night’ is just that – tracks from the album Tonight’s The Night. The angst and despair Neil expressed on this album is irresistible to me. While Time Fades Away and Tonight’s The Night were sort of designed to destroy his commercial standing and the expectations that went with it, they’re still stunning records, favorites amongst his fans. Although they sold abysmally. I’ll willingly admit here that “Albuquerque” and “Roll Another Number” rank among my favorite Young tunes. There is a tasty unreleased track where Joni Mitchell shows up and Neil and the boys play her “Raised On Robbery.” Why it’s here is anybody’s guess. I’m the rare fan whose not crazy about Joni, but I dig the track. Disc 4 keeps the focus on the Tonight’s The Night period with another live concert, Tonight’s The Night Live At The Roxy, Review: Neil Young’s ‘Roxy: Tonight’s The Night Live’. While Neil recorded the album in 1973, his record company refused to release it until 1975 but the fans react enthusiastically to all the tunes and Neil almost sounds… happy?

Disc 5, subtitled ‘Walk On’ takes us to 1973-74 and the sessions for the third installment of the Ditch Trilogy, and another of my favorites, On The Beach. He throws in the Decade track “Winterlong” which was recorded at the time but not included on the album. There’s also a great version of the unreleased track “Traces.” Like Tonight’s The Night, this album didn’t sell very well so it makes sense that he’d include most the tracks from the album with this box. There’s always been this feeling that all truly brilliant art comes from pain. I would suggest that this album is proof of that. I like that this disc is entirely dedicated to the sessions for On The Beach. While it’s received a positive critical reevaluation, it’s time it gets a commercial one as well. Again, there isn’t a Neil Young fan worth his salt who doesn’t revere this album.

Disc 6, subtitled ‘The Old Homestead’ focuses on 1974. Neil reunited with Crosby, Stills and Nash for what was at the time the biggest stadium concert tour ever. They spent most of the money they made on coke, but it was a great tour. There are a couple of tracks from the tour here that didn’t make the great live album they put out a few years ago, 1974. For the most part though, this disc is all stuff that Neil recorded by himself with an acoustic guitar or piano. Towards the end we find a reconstituted Crazy Horse with Frank “Poncho” Sampedro on second guitar. I love the way Sampedro and Young’s guitars intertwine. This disc may be my favorite, there’s so much unreleased here. Or versions that were unreleased like “Homefires” and “Love/Art Blues.” “L.A. Girls and Ocean Boys,” one of his more famous unreleased songs, about his break up with actress Carrie Snodgress is here as well. Neil goes through all of the emotional hell of the Ditch Trilogy only to find his girlfriend/baby mama has cheated on him and they break up. The guy couldn’t get a break in the 70s but man did it fuel some of his greatest music. None of the solo, acoustic stuff here sounds like a demo, these are fully realized songs.

Disc 7 is the recently released vault album that Neil pulled in favor of releasing Tonight’s The Night entitled Homegrown (Review: Neil Young’s ‘Homegrown’ – The Lost Masterpiece, In The Vaults 45 Years. Again, I don’t know how I didn’t include a warning that this album was going to end up in the next box set when I reviewed it so if I enticed someone to buy an extra copy of the album, I’m sorry. I do love this album and wish it had been released a long time ago… we might be saying Ditch Quartet. Undecided whether to release this album or Tonight’s The Night, Neil played both for a group of friends and on the advice of the Band’s Rick Danko he chose Tonight’s…

Disc 8, subtitled ‘Dume’ focuses on 1975 and the great Zuma album. This was another great record that was a commercial disappointment but it showed signs that Neil was moving on from grief. He’s got Crazy Horse along for the ride on most the tracks. There’s an early version of “Ride My Llama” which eventually appeared on Rust Never Sleeps in a completely different version. Its interesting to hear tracks that were released later in different forms. Every session for each album has a distinct sound and the songs that are recorded and rerecorded tend to take on the sound of the sessions for which the versions are recorded which is an interesting glimpse into Neil’s creative process. Another “famous” unreleased track, “Born To Run” is here… no, it’s not Springsteen’s track. An early version of “Powderfinger” is here. I like the Rust version better, it’s truly definitive. There’s a full band version of “Pocahontas” here and again I think the acoustic version is definitive. I think Neil generally makes the right decision as to when a song is finally right. Zuma is at heart a break up album with tracks like “Drive Back,” “Pardon My Heart” and “Stupid Girl.” Neil was moving on from grief but it appears he chose anger as his next predominant emotion.

Disc 9, subtitled ‘Look Out For My Love’ is another great collection of songs. Many stem from the Stills-Young album. There are versions of the tracks I mentioned above, that have Crosby and Nash singing harmonies that Neil legendarily purportedly erased, notably “Ocean Girl,” “Human Highway” (again) and “Midnight On the Bay.” I have to admit, I like these versions even more than the ones that Neil released with Stills. “Like A Hurricane” one of Neil’s most epic guitar jams is here…recorded but unreleased until 1977. There are a number of tracks who wouldn’t see the light of day until Comes A Time. It’s another favorite disc in this collection of 10 CDs of music.

Disc 10, the final disc, subtitled ‘Odeon Budokan’ is a live album of sorts. The first half, all acoustic Neil, recorded at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. The second half, with Crazy Horse and full on rocking, was recorded in Budokan, Japan. I love all live Neil and I think this music has been widely bootlegged. I was glad it was included but couldn’t help but wish that maybe Neil would have included an additional disc of studio stuff… 1977, anyone?

I’ll admit you have to be a bit of a Neil Young fanatic to dive into this 10 disc boxset, but man is it rewarding. It’s an immersive way to get into and understand Neil as an artist from 1972 to 1976. I highly recommend this set to any Neil fan but to those who are more novice Neil fans, this is a way to learn about him. To me it’s his most tumultuous, rawly emotional period but also one of his most rewarding. While I love his Gold Rush/Harvest stuff, I guess I’m just more fascinated being in the ditch… you really do meet more interesting people there. I can’t wait until Vol 3 where we’ll ride out the 70s and the dawn of the 80s…

Neil Young’s ‘Archives: Volume II’ Is a Stunning Look Back at His Prolific Peak (2020)

From rollingstone.com

On August 26th, 1973, Joni Mitchell arrived at Studio Instrument Rentals in Los Angeles, where Neil Young and his band the Santa Monica Flyers were recording the boozy Tonight’s the Night. Joined by guitarists Ben Keith and Nils Lofgren, drummer Ralph Molina, and bassist Billy Talbot, Mitchell and Young tore through “Raised on Robbery,” soon to be released on her album Court and Spark.

If the Tonight’s the Night sessions were indeed a “drunken Irish wake,” as Talbot later recalled, this take on “Raised on Robbery” was the eulogy. Mitchell and Young, two Canadian Scorpios whose paths had crossed well before that night, joined together for the chorus, with Young’s slurred vocals trailing behind her. “Hey honey, you’ve got lots of cash,” she sang over the messy instrumentation. “Bring us round a bottle/And we’ll have some laughs/Gin’s what I’m drinking/I was raised on robbery.”

Mitchell’s visit to the studio has been steeped in myth since then, completely unheard until now. It’s one of the many, many gems off Young’s Archives Volume II (1972-1976), out this Friday after years of anticipation. 12 songs have never been released in any format, while 50 are previously unreleased versions of known songs. Whereas the first volume of Young’s Archives project — released in June 2009 — spanned the years from 1963 to 1972, the second covers only four years. That period is widely considered the peak of Young’s career, a time when he was so prolific that he was churning out music faster than his label could keep up with.

Of the ten discs on Volume II, three present recent archival releases: the 1973 live albums Tuscaloosa and Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live, and the 1975 lost album Homegrown. Several songs appear more than once in different iterations; “Love/Art Blues” is included three times on the same disc (The Old Homestead), leaving the listener in an endless loop not unlike our everyday life in the pandemic. The track first appeared on the 2014 live album CSNY 1974, but the three versions offered here were each cut at Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch. The first is arguably the best of the three: Young performs solo, stripped-down without a band, and it’s difficult not to well up with tears as he describes having to choose between the best things he’s ever had.

For casual listeners, the inclusion of already-released material and repeated songs may feel bloated and unnecessary. But hardcore fans have craved this for years, and they’ll be more than happy to indulge in any and all versions of these tracks (ahem, “The Losing End” at the Roxy!). Young’s completist mindset means that he’ll include warts and all — and he knows it.

“Some of it is good, some of it is crap that wasn’t released — there’s a reason,” he said of Vol. I to Shakey biographer Jimmy McDonough. “That’s what a fuckin’ archive is about, not ‘Here’s Neil Young in all his wonderfulness — the great, phenomenal fucking wonderfulness.’ I want people to know how fuckin’ terrible I was. How scared I was and how great I was. The real picture — that’s what I’m looking for. Not a product. And I think that’s what the die-hard fans want — the whole fuckin’ thing.”

Volume II kicks off in the fall of 1972 and concludes with Crazy Horse shows in London and Tokyo in March 1976. Disc One, Everybody’s Alone, includes rarities like the poignant “Letter from ‘Nam,” “Come Along and Say You Will,” and “Goodbye Christians on the Shore.” The live recordings here show Young acting playful with the crowd: Before launching into “L.A.” at Sacramento’s Memorial Auditorium in 1973, he sings the second verse of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” “The one time in my life I figured it was a toss-up between Bob Dylan and Sonny Bono,” he jokes. At the Bakersfield Civic Auditorium that same year, he prefaces “Sweet Joni,” his piano ballad for Mitchell, with, “My closest friends have never heard this song. I may screw this song up!” (In true “Circle Game” fashion, Mitchell’s own recent archive release includes a cover of “Sugar Mountain.”)

For roughly two decades, Young has set his exit music at shows to “Greensleeves,” the English folk tune that is heavily associated with Christmas. It closes Disc Five, Walk On (1973-1974), capping off material from On the Beach in addition to the original “Traces” and a full-band version of “Bad Fog of Loneliness.” For those who are used to hearing that last solemn rocker on Live at Massey Hall 1971, Young sounds even more dignified and mature than he did two years prior, bolstered by Keith and Molina on vocals.

Some of the unreleased tracks are unfathomably great, including “Daughters” with Nicolette Larson and “L.A. Girls and Ocean Boys,” one of the many songs inspired by Young’s crumbling relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress. The lines “’Cause you’ve been with another man/There you are and here I am” would end up on “Danger Bird” from 1975’s Zuma. That album is documented on the disc Dume, named after Young’s house in Malibu. It marks the entrance of guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, who joined Crazy Horse following the 1972 death of Danny Whitten and can be heard playing twinkling mandolin on the shattering “Too Far Gone.”

Young’s off-and-on-again bandmates David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash appear on Vol. II, too, most notably on the ninth disc, Look Out For My Love (1975-1976). The highlights all derive from sessions at Criteria Studios in Miami, particularly from the time when Stills and Young were recording Long May You Run; they trade off rollicking solos on “Separate Ways,” complete with Jerry Aiello’s organ. Crosby and Nash joined them that spring in South Florida, where they added vocals to “Ocean Girl,” “Midnight on the Bay,” and “Human Highway,” but Young ended up taking them off the tracks. “[Crosby and Nash] sang ‘Midnight on the Bay’ and it was great,” he told Bill Flanagan for Musician magazine in 1985. “It really was. I never should have erased that. But I thought I was doing the right thing at the right time.” All these years later, he’s made up for it.

If Volume II says anything about Young’s nearly six-decade career, it’s that he worked just as rapidly back then as he does now. Prior to the pandemic, the 75-year-old was at an all-time high on stage, throwing curveballs into his setlists (“New Mama” for the first time in 42 years) and hitting the road whenever he felt like it (Winnipeg with Crazy Horse during a polar vortex). That he’s unable to do that right now is a huge disappointment, but he’s making the most of it by digging into the vault and plotting several releases at a time. We may not be able to walk down the aisle of a historic theater to “Greensleeves,” but hearing it at home offers a new kind of comfort.

Neil Young Archives II (2020)

From uncut.co.uk

It begins quietly in A&M Studios, Los Angeles, on November 15, 1972, and ends several thousand miles away on March 10, 1976 in a blaze of feedback at Tokyo’s Budokan Hall. The intervening years – those covered, no less, by this ambitious second instalment of the expansive Archives project – remains a critical period for Neil Young, not just for the stellar run of albums he made during this time, but for the way it continues to dominate our thinking about his long, capricious career.

After The Gold Rush and Harvest made Young a solo star at the start of the ’70s, but his legend took shape during the turbulent, hugely productive phase that followed. It is a transportive and gripping narrative – the “Ditch” trilogy, the “lost” albums, the death of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and the arrival of his replacement Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, his break-up with Carrie Snodgress – and one which still exerts a gravitational pull from which it is difficult to escape.

So what does the arrival – at long last – of Archives Volume II tell us about 1972 to 1976? Does this new boxset – 10 discs, a handsome trove of music, all for a correspondingly handsome sum of £210 – deepen our knowledge of Young’s fertile mid-’70s period? Or instead do these 131 tracks take us so far behind the curtain that the power of the original music gets lost along the way?

Archives II begins with the artist pared back to his essential elements: voice and guitar. Here he is in A&M Studios in 1972, with producer Henry Lewy on the other side of the glass. There are three songs from their session here. The unreleased “Letter From ’Nam” is a bitter beauty, which Young later reworked as “Long Walk Home” in the ’80s. “Monday Morning” appeared as “Last Dance” on Time Fades Away – in this early acoustic iteration, it’s much less manic and ironic, landing on a genuinely anthemic vibe. “The Bridge”, one of Young’s most affecting piano ballads, is exquisitely rendered. In between takes, he banters with Lewy.

“I can hear those people so loud that it’s weird,” says Young before “Monday Morning”, presumably referring to noise from a neighbouring studio.

“Yeah, he’s a rock’n’roll producer and he listens full volume,” agrees Lewy. “I went and asked him [to turn it down], he gave me a dirty look.”

“Well, fuck him,” says Young before diving into this warm, wide-eyed take.

The rest of Disc 1, entitled Everybody’s Alone, homes in on the Stray Gators, the band of session players Neil recruited for Harvest and who subsequently cycle through Archives II. The previously unheard rehearsal tapes recorded in late ’72 at Young’s Broken Arrow ranch offers plenty of delights, if not revelations. There are rollicking takes on “Time Fades Away” and “Come Along And Say You Will” alongside a never-before-heard song, “Goodbye Christians On The Shore”, highlighted by Ben Keith’s droning dobro and a 7/8 time signature that makes it sound, curiously, like a country rock cousin to Pink Floyd’s “Money”.

Young takes an abrupt left turn when Disc 1 picks up unreleased live recordings from the beleaguered Time Fades Away tour – which saw him battling with his band, his audiences and his demons in the aftermath of Whitten’s death. As demonstrated here – and on Disc 2, Tuscaloosa, recorded during that tour – Young could shape great art out of chaos, almost by sheer strength of will. The Stray Gators sound fierce, whether they’re taking a wrecking ball to “Last Trip To Tulsa” or blasting through “The Loner”. There are quieter moments, too. “Sweet Joni” is an affectionate piano ballad – “My closest friends have never heard this song,” he says at the start. “I may screw it up, I’ve never done it before.” Elsewhere, Young prefaces an acoustic take on “LA” with a stoned monologue that begins with a pass at “I Got You Babe” and ends with a shaggy dog yarn in which Young and Gators’ drummer Johnny Barbata head off down Venture Highway, while fires rage behind them. “I’m heading to the hills with my gold records!” he goofs. Disc 1 ends where it began: Young and his acoustic guitar in a studio. It is now June 1973 and he is working through his original version of “Human Highway” – a song he struggled to capture satisfactorily over several years. It sounds beautiful here, with his weary delivery elegantly cushioned by autumnal harmonies from Crosby, Stills & Nash.

While Everybody’s Alone acts as a widescreen take on where Young is coming from in 1972 – the old folky ways gradually giving way to the tumult of the Ditch trilogy – Tuscaloosa zooms in for a close-up. Recorded a third of the way though the Time Fades Away tour, it gives us a fuller picture of what Young was up to onstage at this crucial point. Though audience tapes from the tour sometimes show Young in a confrontational mood, he’s easy-going here, cracking jokes and making light of his newfound success (he introduces “Heart Of Gold” as “Burger Of Gold”). Think of Tuscaloosa as Time Fades Away’s kinder, gentler cousin. It is one of three previously released albums that appear in Archives II – along with Roxy: Tonight’s The Night Live and Homegrown. Young has form here, of course – he released Live At The Riverboat 1969 and Live At The Fillmore East 1970 ahead of their inclusion on Archives I. But while they might feel extraneous, if you purchased them earlier as standalone releases, they nevertheless feel like a necessary part of the Archives II story.

Young devotes Discs 3 and 4 to Tonight’s The Night and accompanying live album Roxy…. Disc 3 opens with a wobbly and woozy “Speakin’ Out Jam”, with Neil slithering into his lounge lizard alter ego. “I’m feeling pretty laidback,” he slurs while cranking out a sloppy piano riff. The rest of the Santa Monica Flyers – a reconstituted Crazy Horse with Nils Lofgren and Ben Keith – sound suitably refreshed. It’s followed by “Everybody’s Alone”, with Young’s voice stretching against some invisible shackles. The song starts with Young resting “in the shade of the mountains and trees beneath the cool summer breeze” before paranoia sets in: “Someone saying that I’m not the same, that’s not easy to be.” He concludes, “All I want you to know is that I love you so much I can hardly stand it/But everybody is alone.” You can find an earlier version on Archives I, recorded with the Whitten line-up of Crazy Horse during the After The Gold Rush sessions. Young perhaps chose to have another pass at it during the Tonight’s The Night recordings as tribute to Whitten; but it finds Young vulnerable at a time when his prevailing mood was of defiance.

Best of the unreleased material on Disc 3 is an appearance from Joni Mitchell, who leads Young and the Santa Monica Flyers through a wild rendition of Court And Spark’s “Raised On Robbery”. On paper, Mitchell and Young’s band – who, for the most part, sound like they’re being held together by gaffer tape – seem like a mismatch, but the results are brilliant. There’s some terrific interplay, with Lofgren laying down a bed of barroom piano chords over which Young’s solos scythe and wail while Mitchell throws herself gamely into the shenanigans. Barrelling along at a fair clip, it’s a chink of light amid a collection of otherwise desolate songs.

Filling out the Tonight’s The Night picture is Roxy…, recorded with the Flyers on the Sunset Strip a week after the album was completed. It’s the same as the standalone album from 2018, with the addition of Crazy Horse’s country-flavoured “The Losing End” as an encore. Chief among the Flyers’ players for his distinctive yet mellow pedal steel playing is Ben Keith, a sympathetic presence across much of Archives II. After first hooking up with Young on Harvest, he provided musical stability in the years immediately after Whitten’s death. He’s not quite a sparring partner in the way of Whitten, David Briggs or even Elliot Roberts, but as an accomplished sideman Keith is on hand during the Time Fades Away tour and as Young hurls himself further into the ditch with Tonight’s The Night, On The Beach and Homegrown.

Disc 5 – Walk On – finds Keith operating in a kind of interim version of Crazy Horse, alongside Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina, on “Winterlong”, “Walk On” and an unreleased version of “Bad Fog Of Loneliness” in November/December 1973 sessions. Held at Broken Arrow a few months after tracking Tonight’s The Night, they feel like a glimpse into a Crazy Horse that never quite made it out of the barn. Keith’s pedal steel adds a genuine wistfulness – a quality you may not associate with Crazy Horse over distance, but one that feels entirely appropriate in this moment. What a punishing couple of years. By the time Disc 5 ends with an unreleased solo version of “Greensleeves”, Young sounds like the loneliest man in the world…

Neil Young Announces ‘Archives Volume II 1972-1976’ Shares previously unreleased “Come Along And Say You Will” (2020)

From glidemagazine.com

Neil Young is pleased to announce the release of Archives Volume II: 1972-1976, available beginning November 20, 2020. The enormous box set is the second installment in the definitive, comprehensive, chronological survey of Young’s legendary body of work, which was kicked off by 2009’s Archives Volume I: 1963-1972. This long-anticipated new volume focuses on an especially prolific and intense era of Young’s career during which he—often joined by thunderous co-conspirators Crazy Horse—released some of his heaviest and most visceral albums, including Time Fades Away, On the Beach, Tonight’s the Night, Zuma, and Long May You Run. Homegrown, just released, is part of this history as well. The deluxe edition box set of Archives Volume II: 1972-1976 contains 10 CDs with 131 tracks, including 12 songs that have never been released in any form, and 49 new unreleased versions of Young’s classics—studio and live recordings both solo and with Crazy Horse (Odeon Budokan), The Stray Gators (Tuscaloosa), the Santa Monica Flyers (Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live), Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and The Stills Young Band. It also includes a 252-page hardbound book with hundreds of previously unseen photographs, additional archival materials, a partial tape database, a detailed description of the music, a fold-out timeline of the period. In addition, each purchase includes the hi-res 192/24 digital files of all 131 tracks, as well as a free one-year membership to the Neil Young on-line archives. The box also includes a massive poster. Box sets are strictly limited worldwide to 3,000 units.

Archives Volume I: 1963-1972 offered an unprecedented look at Young’s early work, shedding light on the road he travelled during his time with The Squires and Buffalo Springfield, as well as exploring iconic LPs like Harvest. Archives Volume II: 1972-1976 offers similarly extensive documentation of a particularly tempestuous time in Young’s career that saw his music take heavier turns in both tone and subject matter. The records he crafted during this time, including the haunting “Ditch Trilogy”—Time Fades Away, On The Beach, and Tonight’s The Night—are dense with darkness and wildness also reflected in Young’s electrifying live shows from the era.

Archives Volume II: 1972-1976 will also be available digitally on Neil Young Archives and at all major DSPs. Labelled “a revolution in fandom” by The Guardian, NYA is the first totally immersive fan-experience website and remains the only portal for all things Neil Young. Only at NYA can you find Young’s music in the highest possible digital audio resolution and a seemingly infinite store of archival files. It’s also the home of Young’s virtual daily newspaper, The Times Contrarian, and The Hearse Theater, where you can watch rare footage from Young’s career and stream live performances. NYA is a fittingly sprawling home for Young’s work; few artists—perhaps none—have explored such a vast spectrum of sounds and styles over more than half a century.

Archives Volume II: 1972-1976 track listing:

* = previously unreleased song

** = new unreleased version

Disc 1 (1972-1973)

Everybody’s Alone

1. Letter From ‘Nam *
2. Monday Morning **
3. The Bridge **
4. Time Fades Away **
5. Come Along and Say You Will *
6. Goodbye Christians on the Shore *
7. Last Trip to Tulsa
8. The Loner **
9. Sweet Joni *
10. Yonder Stands the Sinner
11. L.A. (Story)
12. L.A. **
13. Human Highway **

Disc 2 (1973)

Tuscaloosa

1. Here We Are in the Years
2. After the Gold Rush
3. Out on the Weekend
4. Harvest
5. Old Man
6. Heart of Gold
7. Time Fades Away
8. Lookout Joe
9. New Mama
10. Alabama
11. Don’t Be Denied

Disc 3 (1973)

Tonight’s the Night

1. Speakin’ Out Jam **
2. Everybody’s Alone **
3. Tired Eyes
4. Tonight’s the Night
5. Mellow My Mind
6. World on a String
7. Speakin’ Out
8. Raised on Robbery (Joni Mitchell song) *
9. Roll Another Number
10. New Mama
11. Albuquerque
12. Tonight’s the Night Part II

Disc 4 (1973)

Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live

1. Tonight’s the Night
2. Mellow My Mind
3. World on a String
4. Speakin’ Out
5. Albuquerque
6. New Mama
7. Roll Another Number
8. Tired Eyes
9. Tonight’s the Night Part II
10. Walk On
11. The Losing End **

Disc 5 (1974)

Walk On

1. Winterlong
2. Walk On
3. Bad Fog of Loneliness **
4. Borrowed Tune
5. Traces #
6. For the Turnstiles
7. Ambulance Blues
8. Motion Pictures
9. On the Beach
10. Revolution Blues
11. Vampire Blues
12. Greensleeves *

Disc 6 (1974)

The Old Homestead

1. Love/Art Blues **
2. Through My Sails **
3. Homefires *
4. Pardon My Heart **
5. Hawaiian Sunrise **
6. LA Girls and Ocean Boys *
7. Pushed It Over the End **
8. On the Beach **
9. Vacancy **
10. One More Sign **
11. Frozen Man *
12. Give Me Strength **
13. Bad News Comes to Town **
14. Changing Highways **
15. Love/Art Blues **
16. The Old Homestead
17. Daughters *
18. Deep Forbidden Lake
19. Love/Art Blues **

Disc 7 (1974)

Homegrown

1. Separate Ways
2. Try
3. Mexico
4. Love Is a Rose
5. Homegrown
6. Florida
7. Kansas
8. We Don’t Smoke It No More
9. White Line
10. Vacancy
11. Little Wing
12. Star of Bethlehem

Disc 8 (1975)

Dume

1. Ride My Llama **
2. Cortez the Killer
3. Don’t Cry No Tears
4. Born to Run *
5. Barstool Blues
6. Danger Bird
7. Stupid Girl
8. Kansas **
9. Powderfinger **
10. Hawaii **
11. Drive Back
12. Lookin’ for a Love
13. Pardon My Heart
14. Too Far Gone **
15. Pocahontas **
16. No One Seems to Know **

Disc 9 (1976)

Look Out for My Love

1. Like a Hurricane
2. Lotta Love
3. Lookin’ for a Love
4. Separate Ways **
5. Let It Shine **
6. Long May You Run
7. Fontainebleau
8. Traces **
9. Mellow My Mind **
10. Midnight on the Bay **
11. Stringman **
12. Mediterranean *
13. Ocean Girl **
14. Midnight on the Bay **
15. Human Highway **

Disc 10 (1976)

Odeon Budokan

1. The Old Laughing Lady **
2. After the Gold Rush **
3. Too Far Gone **
4. Old Man **
5. Stringman **
6. Don’t Cry No Tears **
7. Cowgirl in the Sand **
8. Lotta Love **
9. Drive Back **
10. Cortez the Killer **