FILTER REISSUES
Under the counterculture
Tape rolls on the next instalments in Young’s Official Bootleg Series; includes the legendar y recording at The Bottom Line.
By David Fricke.
Neil Young
Royce Hall 1971
★★★★
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion 1971
★★★★
Citizen Kane Jr. Blues 1974
★★★★
SHAKEY PICTURES/REPRISE. DL/LP
T HIS IS WHY God made bootlegs. Late on the evening of May 16, 1974 – more like 2.30 the next morning – Neil Young took the stage at The Bottom Line, a new showcase club in lower Manhattan, as an unexpected special guest after late-show sets by Ry Cooder and Leon Redbone. Over the next hour, Young performed mostly as-yetunreleased material including four songs from his next album, On The Beach, one of them the surrealist epic Ambulance Blues; Pardon My Heart, destined for 1975’s Zuma; Long May You Run, introduced as a tune, “I wrote for my car”; and a song Young called Citizen Kane Jr. Blues – actually the legendary dirge Pushed It Over The End, played that summer with CSNY but forever left outside the studio door.
Someone had the presence of mind to roll tape, but not at the soundboard. The recording on Citizen Kane Jr. Blues – part of Young’s Official Bootleg Series after decades of circulating like samizdat among the faithful – has the challenged audio of a cassette machine hidden inside a coat or under a napkin. It also has the precious, authentic thrill of one-night-only magic: Young so charged by the room, the moment, and his latest writing that he had to grab a guitar and mike. He’s ragged in places, and the songs are heavy on the melancholy. “Here’s another bummer for you,” Young cracks ahead of Ambulance Blues. Two years after the Number 1 whiplash of Harvest, he’s well into “the ditch”, and the field recording puts you there. There has been nothing like this show on Young’s long shelf of archival releases – until now.
For as long as there have been bootlegs, there have been artists trying to stump the brigands. Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series, a deluxe box set line launched in 1991, is up to 16 volumes. The Grateful Dead instituted a tapers’ section at their shows, allowing fans to share the music for free, while Frank Zappa – an obsessive documentarian who was up to more than 60 albums when he died in 1994 and now has a posthumous discography of equal size – put out two box sets in the early ’90s, Beat The Boots! I and II, in which he simply repressed actual bootlegs with the original artwork and fidelity.
“Young is so charged by the room, the moment, that he had to grab a guitar and mike.”
Young’s Official Bootleg Series is a fascinating hybrid of reclamation – taking back from the black market what is rightfully his – and curatorial choice. Carnegie Hall 1970, issued last autumn, was not the widely-bootlegged second of Young’s two solo, acoustic shows at that venue on December 4, 1970, but the never-circulated first, formally recorded – as if for a live album – by Joni Mitchell’s engineer Henry Lewy. Royce Hall was also caught by Lewy two months later, on January 30, 1971, in Los Angeles at a students-only date on the UCLA campus (admission $2.50). But the difference in setlists ref lects Young’s astonishing rate of change at that point and his almost manic impatience with even the recent past. Nearly half of the songs on Carnegie Hall 1970 – including three Buffalo Springfield tunes; The Loner, Helpless and a good chunk of that year’s After The Goldrush – are gone by Royce Hall, replaced by a sizeable preview of Harvest, still a year from release.
If you feel an attack of déjà vu coming on, it’s no pun and no wonder. Young has released two other shows from that January ’71 solo tour: 2007’s Live At Massey Hall 1971 (Toronto) and last year’s Young
Shakespeare (Stratford, Connecticut). But there is a confidence and intensity at UCLA that explains why that concert was an under-thecounter favourite: Young’s robust strumming and sharp, youthful singing, like an old soul in an impossibly alpine register, in the Springfield opener On The Way Home; the surprisingly hard bass-string staccato underpinning Heart Of Gold, as if Young was planning to take the song to Crazy Horse. And Young knew how good he was at UCLA, using that night’s performance of The Needle And The Damage Done on Harvest and saving the piano ballad Love In Mind for 1973’s Time Fades Away.