Saturday Live

Neil Young's ongoing release programme shows no signs of letting up- he's recently appeared live again and still records new albums with Crazy Horse and whoever else is around. The recent brand new/ re- release of Chrome Dreams is either his 44th album or the first official release of an album that he shelved in 1977 (but was widely bootlegged). Or both. He recycled some of the songs and some of the recordings afterwards, some of them dating back to 1974 (like Star of Bethlehem) and some recorded for Zuma (Sedan Delivery) but then turning up on Rust Never Sleeps (albeit in faster and rawer form, a response to punk). Too Far Gone didn't see the light of day on an official release until Freedom in 1989. Chrome Dreams does sound like a 'great lost' Neil Young album, some songs played acoustically next to an audible campfire and some with an amped up Crazy Horse. The album starts with Pocahontas and Will To Love, then Star Of Bethlehem, Like A Hurricane, Homegrown, Captain Kennedy, Sedan Delivery, Powderfinger and Look Out For My Love. The asking price of £44 for three sides of vinyl is a step too far for me though. 

There's never a bad time to hear Like A Hurricane. It was recorded at Neil's Broken Arrow ranch with Crazy Horse in the autumn/ winter of 1976, eight minutes of guitars, thudding drums and Neil's lovelorn vocals. When Chrome Dreams was shelved Like A Hurricane appeared on American Stars And Bars in 1977 and has been played hundreds of times live ever since, including at Sheffield Don Valley Arena in June 2001 when I saw him. 

Like A Hurricane

According to the internet Neil's most played songs are (in order from the top) Heart Of Gold, After The Goldrush, Old Man, Needle And The Damage Done and Cinnamon Girl. There are many Neil Young live albums worth hearing. In March 1970 Neil and Crazy Horse played two nights at Fillmore East, the last tour with guitarist Danny Whitten, who died in 1972. This is the full on sixteen minute version of Cowgirl In The Sand from the Live At The Fillmore East album (officially released in 2006).

Cowgirl In The Sand (Live At the Fillmore East)

In 1971 Neil toured on his own, just acoustic guitar and harmonica, road testing many of the songs which would make it onto run of classic albums in the early/ mid 70s. Ohio was written in the immediate aftermath of the Kent Sate University shootings, Neil's anger and sadness backed on the studio version by David Crosby's howling backing vocals. The full album Live At Massey Hall came out in 2007, recorded decades earlier in Toronto, Canada on January 1971. Ohio came out as a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young 7" single in June 1970, just weeks after the shootings. 'Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming', Neil sings, 'We're finally on our own...'

Ohio (Live At Massey Hall)

Jumping forward two decades a revitalised Neil and Crazy Horse toured the world, playing the classics with songs from the pair of then recent albums Freedom and Ragged Glory. This performance at Buffalo, New York, captures them on fire, cranked up and dealing with the detritus of the Reagan and Bush administrations, the Gulf War, the turn of the decade and their rediscovery by a new generation of bands and fans. 

Half An Hour Of David Crosby

David Crosby died on Thursday aged eighty one. Given the sometimes chaotic nature of his life it could be seen as a miracle he made it to eighty one. That he did so still railing against the world, former bandmates, Donald Trump, slights and injustices, seems all the more admirable- he never gave into old age or mellowed, he carried on being the same wilful and difficult man he was when The Byrds fired him back in 1967 for being wilful and difficult. His talent as a songwriter, singer, player and arranger of harmonies meant that he was usually worth listening to although I'll happily admit there are sections of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young back catalogue I've avoided and will probably continue to. But when he was good, he was so very good. 

I started listening to The Byrds as a late teenager, aged eighteen in 1988. The Byrds were in the air (lol) back then, their Rickenbacker jangle, fringes, beads and sunglasses and acid/ folk rock chiming with the guitar bands of the day, the Creation bands and The Stone Roses. I started with a cassette, a compilation with all their songs in a random order and then picked up Fifth Dimension and Younger Than Yesterday on vinyl second hand. Crosby's songs were rarely the most obvious, rarely the ones with the shimmering twelve string chords and the perfect 60s verse/ chorus structure. His songs were sometimes in odd tunings or had strange time signatures, dreamlike songs, trippy and hallucinatory. 

In photos he often looked like The Byrd out of step, the round face contrasting with the other four's chiselled cheekbones and perfect hair, the only wearing a cape when the others were all in Levi's jackets or three button suit jackets.  His parents had tried to get some discipline into him as a young teenager when he was developing a strong anti- authoritarian streak and this seems to have followed him his whole life, a man who followed his own course, often to the detriment of his health and friendships. His 1971 solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name, was made with an all star backing cast (Neil Young, Graham Nash, Joni Mitchell, some of Jefferson Airplane, Santana, the Grateful Dead) and by rights should be a  disaster but is one of those albums that exists on its own terms and in its own world a nine- song, beautifully weird, psychedelic folk masterpiece. 

David Crosby, one of a kind. R.I.P.

Half An Hour Of David Crosby

• Everybody's Been Burned
• I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better
• Long Time Gone
• Music Is Love
• Wild Mountain Thyme
• Ohio
• Orleans
• Guinnevere
• Wooden Ships
• Tamalpais High (At About 3)

Everybody's Been Burned is from The Byrds 1967 album Younger Than Yesterday, a slow burning, mysterious, jazz influenced written a couple of years before he joined the band. The opening lines were borrowed by Tim Burgess for The Charlatan's 1990 single The Only One I Know, The Byrds very much in the ether at the time. I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better is from1965, the B-side to their second single All I Really Want To Do (a Dylan cover) and was written by Gene Clark. It's the best 60s Rickenbacker, guitar jangle pop song bar none. Wild Mountain Thyme was on 1966's Fifth Dimension, one of the folk standards they played. 

Long Time Gone, Wooden Ships and Guinnevere are all from the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album in 1969, all Crosby songs. Guinnevere was about three women in Crosby's life, one unnamed, one Joni Mitchell and the third his girlfriend Christine Hinton who was killed in a car crash in 1969. Crosby identified her body, after which according to Nash, Crosby was never the same. Wooden Ships imagines the survivors of a nuclear apocalypse meeting and asking 'who won?'

Music Is Love, Orleans and Tamalpais High (At About 3) are all from If I Could Only Remember My Name. Orleans is a reworking of a traditional French song from the 15th century sung in round. Tamalpais is a mountain in California, mentioned by Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder in their works. 

Ohio was a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young single written by Neil Young following the Kent State University shootings in May 1970 where four students were killed by the US National Guard at an anti- Vietnam War protest. Crosby's backing vocals stand out as he cries out 'Four!' and 'How many more?' as the song fades out. According to Young, Crosby was in tears after recording them. 'Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming/ We're finally on our own', is as good an opening line as any protest song has. 

Tales And Waiting Rooms

David Holmes put in another shift at NTS radio last week, two more hours of song selection in God's Waiting Room. This show doesn't have a tracklist to date and is full of minimal, woozy, small hours music- folk/ psyche- folk vibes, minimal synth, atmospheric ambient stuff. Very nice indeed. It's at Mixcloud here. 

Five years ago David put together a compilation for the Late Night Tales series, a nineteen song headtrip/ meditation on life and death and all in between, taking in music from Barry Woolnough, Alain Maclain, BP Fallon, The Children Of Sunshine, Hugo Nicolson, plenty of his own music and this 1971 song from David Crosby (from his debut solo album If I Only Could Remember My Name). There's an otherworldly feel to this song and to the whole compilation. Much of the music from the NTS show would fit perfectly on the Late Night Tales compilation. 

Orleans

Keep Saying No To Her

On Sunday night Drew posted Wasn't Born To Follow by The Byrds on Twitter, a gorgeous piece of cosmic country from 1968 (and appearing on the Easy Rider soundtrack a year later). The Byrds and yesterday's postees The Charlatans are always connected for me, partly because of Tim Burgess pinching some of David Crosby's lyrics from Everybody's Been Burned for The Only One I Know and partly because they're linked in my past. I remember getting into The Byrds via a cheap compilation aged 18 or 19 and The Charlatans would come along not much later. I pulled out my vinyl copy of Younger Than Yesterday for a listen, an 80s re- issue of their 1967 album, folk rock songs tinged with acid guitars, psychedelia and jazz. The Byrds seem very time- locked to me rather than timeless- not that that's a bad thing- the harmonies, the 60s phrases in the lyrics, the Rickenbacker, the brisk drumming. On Younger Than Yesterday the road into country they took in '68 is signposted with a pair of Chris Hillman songs, Time Between and The Girl With No Name, two of the album's highlights. The album's closing song, Why, took me right back to being in my late teens and sitting in the sun in the summer.

Why

Why is a David Crosby and Jim McGuinn co- write, led by Crosby's Ravi Shankar inspired raga guitar, and some lovely lead acid guitar lines ringing out courtesy of McGuinn with just enough distortion on the Rickenbacker, a Motown pace backbeat, and on top those distinctive harmonic vocals and very mid- 60s lyrics about an unnamed hippy girl, 'Keep saying no to her/ Since she was a baby/ Keep saying no to her/ Not even maybe/ why?'. The gently stoned finger pointing reaches its peak in the third verse, Crosby asking The Man, 'You say it's a dead old world/ Cold and unforgiving/ I don't know where you live/ But you're not living/ Why?'