Live At The Cellar Door by Neil Young

Live at the Cellar Door is the latest in Neil Young’s Performance Series of archive concert releases. That it is numbered 2.5 in the series, chronologically following volume two (Live at the Fillmore East from March 1970) and preceding the third instalment (Live at Massey Hall 1971), suggests the tapes for this gig have surfaced since the original release schedule was drawn up. Or maybe it’s just Neil being Neil, cantankerous as ever. Indeed, much of the early talk around this release has focused on how chronologically close the performance is to the Massey Hall concert, which was recorded only one month later. There has therefore been some disgruntlement that this has been an opportunity missed to release something from another period, say the late ‘70s, which is as yet uncovered by the Performance Series. This of course will not stop people buying it, not least because those who already own Massey Hall will most likely be Neil devotees and they’ll want this too. And rightly so. This comes from arguably Young’s most fertile period, when he was so prolific he was playing songs live he would not get round to recording released versions of until years later, if at all. But with Massey Hall considered by many to be the last word on early 1970s solo Neil live, does Cellar Door have anything to add?

Cellar Door shares seven of its 13 tracks with Massey Hall. Where Massey Hall points towards Harvest, Cellar Door focuses on his third solo album, After the Gold Rush (released just three months before this gig), along with songs from his time with Buffalo Springfield. Interestingly, it ignores his first self-titled solo album altogether. This set feels more intimate than Massey Hall but also more tentative, reflecting perhaps the fact that these shows were considered a warm-up for a Carnegie Hall gig a few days later. Given the quality of the songwriting this isn’t really a criticism and the tracks come over as fresh and new born. There is also less of the rambling, albeit charming, between-song banter that peppered Massey Hall. The main exception is the introduction to ‘Flying On The Ground Is Wrong’ when Young gives a suitably stoned-sounding explanation that the song is about dope. If anything, the crowd is even more polite than Massey Hall, which only adds to the intimacy.

As with Massey Hall, Cellar Door mixes acoustic guitar tracks with songs demonstrating Young’s elegant and understated piano playing.  In fact, it’s the piano songs that provide many of the highlights, such as a majestic ‘Expecting To Fly’. Most notable though is the rare, and beautiful, piano version of ‘Cinnamon Girl’, which given it is one of his early signature guitar songs, shouldn’t work but does (“That’s the first time I ever did that one on the piano” he notes at the end). It also features the first performances of ‘Old Man’ (the only track to appear from Harvest, which was still over a year away) and ‘See The Sky About To Rain’, which didn’t surface officially until On The Beach, four years later.

Given the man’s track record, Young fans are used to erratic release schedules and they should soon stop worrying about what could have been released. With Neil you never know what’s around the corner anyway. Whether Cellar Door is better or worse than Massey Hall is somewhat irrelevant – it’s just wonderful to have both. As one contributor to a discussion board on a Neil Young fan site says, “Repetition doesn’t matter, hearing the performances does.” We couldn’t agree more.

This review originally appeared for Muso's Guide in December 2013.

As a postscript, Neil Young News, a news blog from fan site Thrasher's Wheat, returned to the old Cellar Door venue to 'recreate' the gatefold photo used for the album. Read more here.

A Different Way To Be: in praise of a grassroots approach to releasing records

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Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones

"About as unrehearsed as a hiccup" Bobby Keys

"'Cinema verite? I got into audio verite..... Hey, I've made records where you analyze everything you do 3,000 times and it's perfect. I'm sick of it. I want to make a record that's totally stark naked. Raw. I don't wanna fix any of it. I don't care if it's totally out of tune, man, let's play. Fuck it.... I like the idea of capturing something. Record something that happened. I'm a musician. I don't wanna sit there and build a record. I built a couple of records. Big deal. Tonight's the Night doesn't care. And that makes you feel good about it. There's no pretence.'"

Despite being a quote about one of his own albums, Neil Young captures what, by many accounts, were the circumstances surrounding the recording of Exile on Main Street (or at least the tracks they laid down in France before doing some polishing in Sunset Sound, LA). Take "Happy", a Keith Richards track, "recorded in a single take when Richards woke up one morning – or evening – and gathered up the only other people who were awake, saxophonist Bobby Keys and producer Jimmy Miller, who was drafted in to play drums in place of the absent Watts. The whole record was, says Keys, a good ol' boy from Texas, "about as unrehearsed as a hiccup"." (The Guardian)

Dark, haphazard, ragged, the recording of Exile was a play with large cast of actors, an "extended retinue of session players, studio technicians and hangers-on." and with the drug-use, a "retinue of shady characters and criminals". This feeling is echoed on the front and back covers of the album, with the back cover being inspired by the front.

The front cover image is from Robert Frank's photo documentary “The Americans”, taken of a wall in a tattoo parlour in New York City (although another account has it taken on Route 66, colloquially, and perhaps coincidentally, known as the Main Street of America). The wall is covered with photos of strange and unusual people, displaying neat symmetry with the recording sessions.

Frank also filmed the Stones with a Super 8 camera. The stills of individual frames were used to compose the back cover to match his original wall picture. The back cover also features a "mystery woman" pictured in the lower left side, who turns out to be Chris O'Dell, their personal assistant.

Layout and design was by John Van Hamersveld and Norman Seeff. Describing his contribution, Van Hamersveld was very clear on its impact: "my arrangement of materials...would go beyond Frank’s photo style, creating an identity that would become the basis of the PUNK FASHION MOVEMENT. To the spectators, critics, and others in the Establishment, I had made a package that was not glamorous. It was not a friendly image to put on display in the record stores, but it was THAT image that established the anti-establishment look of PUNK."

Playlist #2

A selection of tracks from the last few albums featured (plus our short Daytrotter interview):

1. Otis Redding - I'm Sick Y'all

2. Neil Young - Tell Me Why [Live]

3. Robert Johnson - Love In Vain

4. Terry Allen - My Amigo

5. The Beatles - I've Got A Feeling

6. Talking Heads - Crosseyed and Painless [Live in Rome]

7. Plant and See - Put Out My Fire

8. The Beach Boys - Feel Flows

9.The Band - King Harvest (Has Surely Come) [Live in the studio]

10. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi - Radiohead [Live from the Basement]

11. Time Fading Lines - Woods [Daytrotter Session]

Click below for the playlist via YouTube:

Immediacy and Impulse: The Vibration of the Take

Reflecting on my continuing fascination with recorded music in the After The Goldrush feature,  I couldn't articulate it better than that fascination being rooted in the recording process' ability to "capture a real performance, and in so doing, document a moment that can move you." It's what M C Taylor called the 'vibration of the take'. Below we collect some of our favourite thoughts on the topic:

“I got the chance to go back after hours and tried to improve some things and I realised it wasn’t possible. It was part of something that happened at the moment and you just couldn’t change it. It might have been more perfect, but it wasn’t as good. So I just said, That’s it. He knew what he was doing and this is how the baby came out. Honour the moment….I wish there was more of that stuff in music because as grateful as we are for the technology to do things we couldn’t do early on, sometimes we get seduced trying to get things perfect when actually I don’t think there is such a thing. Desire just has a feel to it. It’s visual. Bob was like a painter who was throwing paint on a canvas, but he knew what he was doing.” 

 

Emmylou Harris on recording Desire (as told to Mojo Magazine)
 

The ethos is to keep-it-simple so that what the bands leave behind is "four absolutely collectible songs that often impart on whomever listens to them the true intensity that these musicians put into their art, sometimes with more clarity than they do when they have months to tinker with overdubs and experiments. These songs are them as they are on that particular day, on that particular tour – dirty and alive."

Daytrotter

"Cinema verite? I got into audio verite..... Hey, I've made records where you analyze everything you do 3,000 times and it's perfect. I'm sick of it. I want to make a record that's totally stark naked. Raw. I don't wanna fix any of it. I don't care if it's totally out of tune, man, let's play. Fuck it.... I like the idea of capturing something. Record something that happened. I'm a musician. I don't wanna sit there and build a record. I built a couple of records. Big deal. Tonight's the Night doesn't care. And that makes you feel good about it. There's no pretense."

 Neil Young

"Don't spend too much time or too many takes on each song, try to capture the vibration of the first couple of takes even if it means leaving mistakes in. Keep overdubs to a minimum unless the song is begging for something special. Immediacy and impulse."

 M C Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger)

"At Stax the rule is: whatever you feel, play it. We cut everything together - horns, rhythm, and vocal. We'll do it three or four times, go back and listen to the results and pick the best one. If somebody doesn't like a line in a song, we'll go back and cut the whole song over. Until last year, we didn't even have a four-track tape recorder. You can't overdub on a one-track machine."

 Otis Redding

“[On Mirage Rock] a less-is-more approach freed up a lot of mental space just to enjoy the moment, I'd also say it stopped us from worrying too much about what we sounded like or what we can program into a computer to make it sound more cohesive. It was more organic, haphazard even, and I think that is so important when making a record. Because of modern technology, it's so easy to over think the process and lose focus on the actual songs. That was the most enjoyable part of the whole experience for me, and hopefully it's something I'll take away and use in the future.”

Ben Bridwell (Band of Horses)

After the Gold Rush by Neil Young

"There was even a credit for Susan Young's patches, featured in the back-cover close-up of Neil's ass."

 

 

After thinking for a long time that The Beatles were my band, the group that I enjoyed most completely above all others, I've had to admit to myself they are not. This comes after years of having invested a lot of time and money into their music and I was reluctant to give them up easily. But if I had to pick one artist whose music really means something to me, it is Neil Young. This is aided in no small part by learning more about the man after reading Jim McDonough's biography Shakey.

You can always question how much you really learn indirectly. I get the impression that McDonough gets as close as anyone is likely to to someone who, as Pitchfork's review of the book observed, is both 'inscrutable' and 'media-shy'. It's a book already heavily quoted in these pages. What comes across is a willful passionate musician who is compelled to make the music in him at the moment in time it hits him. I've never got that sense with The Beatles, hence I can now understand why, while greatly admiring them and their music, I have never fully felt connected with them.

With the exception perhaps of the early blues recordings, for me, most of Neil Young's records encapsulate the magic and fascination I have with recorded music; capturing a real performance, and in so doing, documenting a moment that can move you.

Despite being the album of Young's most likely to be reeled off in greatest album discussions, After the Gold Rush is the album of his I have taken longest to fully appreciate. Harvest is an obvious and easy starting point and by the time I came to hear On The Beach and Tonight's The Night I was immediately intoxicated by their powerful intense and dark looseness (or sloppiness even). Along the way, After the Gold Rush got slightly overlooked.

Pitchfork's review sets things straight: "Members of Crazy Horse appear in various combinations on a few of tracks, and songs like "Southern Man" and "When You Dance I Can Really Love" have the hypnotically stoned but sneakily intense groove of the previous record. But more precisely crafted songs like "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", "Birds", and especially the astonishing title track, which has become a rock standard, show Young's gift as a writer of original melodies of extraordinary beauty in full flower. It's an aspect of Young's work that can be overlooked: the guy can write a simple tune over a chord change that hollows you out completely. Sure, the record has a phrase or two that might sound a little dippy to those with an aversion to hippies (Young was one of those, though of a very individualistic sort), but After the Gold Rush is basically unassailable. There's a reason why it's the favorite Neil Young album for so many."

As for the back cover, as Jim McDonough notes: "Young's album packaging was becoming more personal: Gold Rush included a foldout insert of handwritten lyrics, plus - just to make everybody wonder - a list of songs that didn't make the cut. There was even a credit for [Neil's first wife] Susan Young's patches, featured in the back-cover close-up of Neil's ass."

Joel Berstein was again the photographer (see also Harvest), with art direction by Gary Burden.

Playlist #1

Here's a selection of tracks from the first 12 records featured on The Turnaround (a few of the videos may not work on all devices). 

1. Words (Between The Lines of Age) by Neil Young (Harvest)

If this doesn't play, just search YouTube for 'Neil Young In A Barn'!

2. Westering by Hiss Golden Messenger (Poor Moon)

3. New Morning by Bob Dylan (New Morning)

4. Kingpin by Wilco (Being There)

5. I'm Waiting For The Man by The Velvet Underground & Nico

6. Little Red Rooster by The Rolling Stones (Get Stoned)

7. Everydays by Buffalo Springfield (Buffalo Springfield Again)

8. Done Somebody Wrong by The Allman Brothers Band (At Fillmore East)

9. Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars by Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim

10. Say You'll Be Min by Kitty, Daisy & Lewis (Going Up The Country single)

11. Travelling Man by Bert Jansch (L.A. Turnaround)

12. Rock and Roll by The Velvet Underground (Loaded)

Buffalo Springfield Again by Buffalo Springfield

Back covers can often allow the band to display their influences and they don't come much more explicit that this. On their second album, released in 1967, Buffalo Springfield listed "friends, enemies and people we don't know from Adam for their influence and inspiration". 

 

Jimmy McDonough's Shakey credits the hand-lettered illustration to Henry Diltz, a musician (he was a founding member of the Modern Folk Quartet) and photographer. He was the official photographer for Woodstock and the Monterey Pop festivals and also co-founded Morrison Hotel Galleries, specialising in fine art music photography. The album itself only credits Eve Babitz for the cover illustration (who also designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt and The Byrds) and album design to Loring Eutemey (who designed many of Atlantic's covers for the likes of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane).

In a band with strong personalities and individual songwriters (Neil Young, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay), the back cover is careful to list out specific roles, reflecting growing tension within the band and that they were often working separately. It probably also reflects music company desire, post-Beatlemania, to promote the separate personalities of each group member in order to broaden their appeal.

The credits also make apparent the lack of a consistent bass player. The original bass player, Bruce Palmer, was often absent due to drug charges and ultimately deported back to Canada. As Neil Young's hand-written liner notes for Decade, his 1977 compilation album recall: "Mr Soul: recorded by the original Springfield at Atlantic's New York studios after a gig at "Ondine's". Shortly after this Bruce Palmer, bassist, was busted and deported to Canada. Eventually we got him back to U.S. but made many records without him. Broke [Stephen] Stills' heart and mine too that he wasn't on all our records".

The credits for Young's "Mr Soul" note that it is "[r]espectfully dedicated to the ladies of The Whiskey A Go Go and the woman of Hollywood". There has been much debate over the meaning of the song, but this seems to acknowledge that somewhere in there are Young’s frustrations at the price of fame and the hollow female attention that it can engender...maybe.

Poor Moon by Hiss Golden Messenger

I'm not sure where I first heard about Hiss Golden Messenger's Bad Debt, an EP of acoustic songs recorded at M C Taylor's kitchen table. For me, a captivating cross between Robert Johnson and Neil Young. It was either through The Guardian's New Band of the Day or perhaps via Uncut, who have been constant champions of their output.

That EP led me to their full-length, Poor Moon, on which a number of the tracks from Bad Debt were re-recorded with a full band. As well as the fantastic music, which lost none of its magic in a different setting, the grassroots ethos behind the production of the music itself is inspiring. To begin with Poor Moon was not released on CD and only via limited hand-numbered run of 500 lovingly-produced LPs (I got 165). Put out by Paradise of Bachelors with photography by Abigail Martin and drawings by Alex Jako, front and back covers are real works of devotion to the art of the record.

"The imagery was drawn by my friend Alex Jako, who lives in Todmorden, England. She did an incredible job, I think. It was all laid out by our friend Brendan Greaves. I wanted to evoke a feel similar to some of the Nonesuch Explorer LP covers." (M C Taylor, interview with Uprooted Music Review)

Apparently a new album is also in the works.

Harvest by Neil Young

Harvest was the first album that got me thinking about this blog. In the context of Young's diverse discography it has almost moved into the territory of ‘guilty pleasure’, tainted by a ‘middle-of-the-road’ tag that has been fostered by Young himself. It's reputation cannot fail to be impacted by the darker shadow cast by what came next.

His hand-written liner notes for “Heart of Gold” on his 1977 compilation Decade famously remarked, "This song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I met more interesting people there." "Heart of Gold", one of the two singles from Harvest, is perhaps his only genuine 'hit'. As the Pitchfork review for the Harvest reissue notes, this meant that “To embrace Young as an artist after Harvest would mean accepting his many flaws, which have made his career unusually rich and varied as well as maddeningly inconsistent.”

But the back cover puts lie to the perception that Harvest is just a slick mellow album. It captures the creation of some of the ragged, more spontaneous sounding tracks of the band playing live…in a barn (naturally).

An extract from the excellent Neil Young biography 'Shakey' by Jimmy McDonough captures the circumstances of the back cover shot:

"Young's back problems would draw out the completion of the Harvest album. In March [1972], Young went to London with Jack Nitzsche to record a pair of songs live with the London Symphony  - "A Man Needs a Maid" and "There's a World." In April, Young returned to Nashville to cut "Harvest." September would bring the first recordings done on [Young's] ranch, with "Words," "Are You Ready for the Country?" and "Alabama" cut by backing up a remote-recording truck to a dilapidated old barn on the property, where Nitzsche would join Young's Nashville outlaws [session musicians dubbed the the Stray Gators] for these sessions, playing piano and, for the first time in his life, slide guitar....

...Much to Nitzsche's embarrassment, he was soon sitting amid bales of hay accompanying Young on a Kay guitar he barely knew how to play. Bernstein would capture the barn vibe in a photo Young used for the back cover of Harvest: all the Stray Gators, hands at their instruments, staring apprehensively at Young bent over his guitar, his long mane of hair totally obscuring his face, indifferent to their attention..."

For more images by Joel Bernstein go to: www.joelbernstein.com