Neil Young is the debut studio album by Canadian/American musician Neil Young following his departure from Buffalo Springfield in 1968, issued on Reprise Records, catalogue number RS 6317. The album was first released on November 12, 1968, in the so-called 'CSG mix'. It was then partially remixed and re-released in late summer 1969,[3] but at no time has the album ever charted on the Billboard 200.
The album is Young's first solo record after releasing three albums with Buffalo Springfield. After their final breakup, Young hired Joni Mitchell's manager Elliot Roberts to also manage his career. Roberts continued to serve as Young's manager until his passing in 2019. Roberts organized Young's first solo tour of coffeehouses and negotiated a record contract for Young with Reprise Records, a division of Warner.[4]
The album also marks Young's first collaboration with record producer David Briggs. Young met Briggs in Topanga Canyon, then a nexus of music talent, while Briggs was living in Stephen Stills' old house. They met one day when Briggs offered Young a ride, and they quickly became friends. David Briggs would go on to produce the vast majority of Young's albums until his death in 1995.[5]
Songs
According to Young in his memoir Waging Heavy Peace, the songs on the album represent a variety of different themes. Some of the songs had been recently written, while others dated back to his time with Buffalo Springfield:
"The songs were gathered from the past and the future, mostly dreams, nothing concrete; they were mostly created as vehicles for record-making, like "Here We Are in the Years," or personal expression and longing, such as "I’ve Been Waiting for You." Some of them were stream-of-consciousness, like "The Last Trip to Tulsa," with no preconceived thought behind them. They were just songs. There was no big pressure on me at that time to top anything I had already done. That came later. The sky was the limit. I had no idea what was coming my way."[6]
"The Emperor of Wyoming" and "String Quartet from Whiskey Boot Hill" are both instrumentals. Young recorded many such instrumentals during his time with Buffalo Springfield. One such instrumental, "Falcon Lake (Ash on the Floor)" would be reworked into "Here We Are in the Years."[7] "String Quartet from Whiskey Boot Hill" is a string quartet performance of an instrumental Young had previously recorded during his time with the band.[8] He would later incorporate the song into the "Country Girl Suite" on CSNY's Déjà Vu. Young would also revisit the melody of "The Emperor of Wyoming" during his mid-1980s country era, recording the song with lyrics as "Leaving the Top 40 Behind."[9] Musicians on "The Emperor of Wyoming" were Neil Young – guitar; Jim Messina – bass; George Grantham – drums; Also – strings. It was Recorded at Wally Heider Recording Studios, Hollywood, on 23rd August 1968, with production by David Briggs and Neil Young. "String Quartet from Whiskey Boot Hill" was recorded at Sunset Sound, Hollywood, on 17th October 1968 with an unknown string quartet. It was produced by Jack Nitzsche, Ry Cooder, and Neil Young.
"The Loner" was released as a single. The guitar driven rock song employs D modal tuning, which Young learned alongside Stephen Stills, who used it on "Bluebird."[10] Stills would later cover the song on his 1976 album Illegal Stills. The track's guitar sound presages Young's work on his next album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Young acknowledges this in a 1973 radio interview: "On my first album, I like "The Loner." I felt like I was getting into something different there, starting to."[11] At the March 7, 1970 Fillmore concert with CSNY, Young remembers reading one early review of the song that wrote "this snappy little item should send Young rising Phoenix-like from the ashes of the Buffalo Springfield," which pleased Young and boosted his confidence in his solo career. The musicians on the track were Neil Young – guitar, pipe organ, vocal; Jim Messina – bass; and George Grantham – drums. It was recorded at TTG Recording Studios, Los Angeles, on the 28th of September 1968, with production by David Briggs & Neil Young.
"The Old Laughing Lady" is the oldest song on the album, having been written three years prior. Young wrote the song before his time in The Mynah Birds, while playing coffee houses in Michigan, across the border from Ontario. He remembers in Shakey: "I had a series of gigs; maybe Joni and Chuck Mitchell might’ve gotten these gigs in the Detroit/Ann Arbor area: solo acoustic, before the Mynah Birds. Chess Mate coffeehouse, an old folk club in Detroit, Livernois and One-eleventh. Very near there is where the White Tower is. "The Old Laughing Lady;" I was having some coffee and wrote it on napkins. I don’t know what prompted it. It came out on a napkin, no guitar. Hangin’ out in a coffee shop."[9] He explained further to a concert audience: "We had come out of the Chess Mate Club and found out that someone had left with part of our car and we had to wait for a while in this restaurant. We had to wait for almost a day. It was out of sight. Guys propositioning me at four o'clock in the morning. I wrote it out on a napkin in true folk tradition. Sounds very good. And then I went home and put it in D-modal tuning which was very hip. At the time, everything was in D-modal. You know what D-model tuning is? You tune the E strings on each end down to D. Leave the other ones where they are. And play as if nothing ever happened. And you get D-modal. Everything sounds different because it's tuned different."[12] Young first recorded the song while a member of Buffalo Springfield, and a demo of the song appears on the 2000 Buffalo Springfield box set. Young would frequently perform the song as part of his solo acoustic sets in subsequent years, notably during his 1976 tours with Crazy Horse, in which he appended an additional short song, "Guilty Train." In April 1976, Young hired Scottish filmmaker Murray Grigor to film video of Young performing the song while busking outside a Glasgow subway station.[13]
"The Old Laughing Lady" was recorded in Hollywood, the same day and with the same musicians and string quartet as on "I've Loved Her So Long" and "String Quartet from Whiskey Boot Hill" . It was produced by Jack Nitzsche, Ry Cooder & Neil Young. Musicians were Neil Young – vocal; Ry Cooder – guitar; Jack Nitzsche – electric piano; Carol Kaye – bass; Earl Palmer – drums; Choir: Merry Clayton, Brenda Holloway, Patrice Holloway, Gloria Jones, Sherlie Matthews, and Gracia Nitzsche.
"I've Loved Her So Long", in addition to Young on vocals; Ry Cooder on guitar; Jack Nitzsche on electric piano; Jim Messina on bass; and Earl Palmer on drums; had Merry Clayton, Brenda Holloway, Patrice Holloway, Gloria Jones, Sherlie Matthews, and Gracia Nitzsche on backing choir, and the additional instruments of piano, trumpet, trombone, oboe, clarinet, strings and timpani. It was recorded at Sunwest Recording Studios, Hollywood, on the 7th October 1968; and was produced by Jack Nitzsche, Ry Cooder, and Neil Young. The song would be included in setlists during Young's 1969 tour with CSNY, with Graham Nash providing harmony vocals.[9] One such performance appears on the Neil Young Archives website.
"The Last Trip to Tulsa" was recorded at TTG Recording Studios, Los Angeles, on the 1st of October, with production by David Briggs and Neil Young; and is just Young accompanied by own guitar. It is a pot-inspired[14] stream of consciousness narrative that Young intended to be humorous. He explains in a 1995 interview: "I always thought there was a funny side to my music. But see, my sense of humor hadn't really been appreciated at that point in my career, it hadn't even been noticed. I mean, 'Last Trip to Tulsa,' that's my idea of a really funny song and that's just one of 'em."[15] Young thought of Tulsa as representative of the southern United States. "Tulsa really represents to me the United States...that feeling of being in the South. The song is sort of an adventure of me down there. The more you listen to it, depending on how much you've been through or what your experiences have been, you can take the verses...any way you want. But the thing is, when I wrote them, they all had a continuity to the way I thought. So I believe that if they had a continuity the way I put them together that they'll fit with any set of images and work all the way through."[16] In an April 1970 Rolling Stone interview, Young expressed regrets about the song: "After the album came out that's the one I really didn't like, you know, and I still don't, but a lot of people really dug that better than anything else on that whole album. See, it's strange. Just because it doesn't happen to be my favorite part, and I know a lot of people really didn't like it, you know, and I can dig why. Because it sounds overdone."[17] Young would later perform the song live with a full electric band in 1973 and release it as a B-side of the "Time Fades Away" single.
Recording
The bulk of the album's songs were recorded at various Los Angeles studios with David Briggs between August and October 1968. Songs "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" and "Birds" were also attempted during the sessions. Studios included Wally Heider Studios, TTG Studios and Sunset Sound Recorders. The organ on "I've Been Waiting for You" was recorded at a church in Glendale where Young would also later record organ for "Country Girl" on Déjà Vu.[18]
Young recorded much of the album through overdubbing of individual instruments, a process he has largely rejected since, preferring live performances of all instruments at once. In an April 1970 interview with Elliot Blinder for Rolling Stone, he explains the difficulty of such a record-making method, and his satisfaction with the result in the case of "I've Been Waiting for You":
"All those things were played at different days, every instrument. On that cut, isn't it incredible? You see that's how it can work, every once in a while. Because when I put on the lead guitar I was really into it that day, you know, and all the moods I was in at all the times that I put those things on. See, what I do is, in the beginning, we put down acoustic guitar and bass and drums, that's the smallest track that I ever did, one guitar, bass and drums. And then the acoustic guitar had a bad sound and the bass wasn't playin' the right notes and was a little out of tune, so we did both of these over again; so then we have only one original thing that I'd done before and Jimmy Messina, who played the bass on it, played the bass part over, and then he made up a different bass part so we took off the first one completely and played a whole new one. And then we dropped the acoustic guitar, 'cause it didn't fit with the other things that I put on, so then there was nothing left except for the drums. The pipe organ was put on.... Part of these things were done in different cities. The vocal was done at a different studio. It does stick together though. It's very rare. It'd take you a long time to get a whole album of records like that, it's just not easy to do. I was satisfied with what I'd done, as much as I could be. But then when the mastering job came out on it, it blew my mind, because I couldn't hear what I'd done. But now it's been remastered and you can almost hear it. It was badly mixed."[19]
"The Loner" was the first track produced by Briggs.[20] In the Decade liner notes, Young states that the track features "Jim Messina on bass. George Grantham on drums. I overdubbed the rest except the strings." The string arrangement is by David Blumberg.[21] In the biography Shakey, Briggs states that "the unique guitar tone on both "The Loner" and "I've Been Waiting For You" was achieved by "putting Neil’s guitar through an organ Leslie, not even through an amp, just the Leslie into the board"[9]
David Briggs successfully offered beer to help Young relax while recording the vocal for "The Last Trip to Tulsa." Young explains in Waging Heavy Peace: "Soon Briggs discovered that I needed to drink some beer to do vocals. In those days I didn’t sing live; I overdubbed. I was very unsure of my singing, especially after my previous experiences in the studio with Greene and Stone producing Buffalo Springfield. David Briggs suggested an Oly—Olympia beer was my favorite. It loosened me up quite a bit, and I actually sang a song, “Last Trip to Tulsa,” that was about ten minutes long, without overdubs. Once I got loose and in the groove I was fine, although it still sounded like me. Briggs always said my voice was good. It was unique, and that’s what we needed to make it."[22]
"The Old Laughing Lady" and "I've Loved Her So Long" were recorded with Jack Nitzsche and Ry Cooder at Pat Boone's Sunwest Recording Studios on Sunset Boulevard in late October 1968.[23] It took Young and Nitzche a month to complete "The Old Laughing Lady."[24] The track employs a vocal muting technique that makes Young's vocal sound "a million miles away but right there" at the same time.[9] In the Decade liner notes, Young recalls recording the track: "Jack Nitzsche & I did this one together. Gracie Nitzsche and the girls can be heard singing. It was a first take overdub vocal for me. Singing in the studio was starting to get easier. It was at this time that Jack told me everything was temporary."[25]
"Jack taught me a lot: I mean, he'd already worked as an arranger for Spector and had played piano on recording sessions with The Rolling Stones. I met him in a club in Hollywood right when the Springfield first started. We were introduced by Greene and Stone who were our managers then. We just liked each other and always had a great time together. I love listening to all his ideas. Plus I liked 'hanging out' with him because he always got all the new records sent to him every week and he'd sit and listen to them, forming his opinions... He worked as an independent arranger back then. He was a very 'sought-after' guy. When I quit the Springfield, I was living at Jack's house with him, his wife Gracia and his son, 'Little' Jack. 45s would be coming in every week and I remember the day we got the first Jimi Hendrix Experience single - this was way before the first album had been released - and all of us were just awe-struck at how 'raw' the guy sounded. That first album of mine was basically just Jack and me."[26]
Arrangements on "The Old Laughing Lady", "String Quartet from Whiskey Boot Hill" and "I've Loved Her So Long" by Young, Jack Nitzsche and Ry Cooder.
Release history
The first release of the album used the Haeco-CSG encoding system. This technology was intended to make stereo records compatible with mono record players, but had the unfortunate side effect of degrading the sound. Young was unhappy with the first release. "The first mix was awful", he was reported as saying in Cash Box of September 6, 1969. "I was trying to bury my voice, because I didn't like the way it sounded".[3]
The album was therefore partially remixed and re-released without Haeco-CSG processing. Most of the songs from the original album were re-released as-is, only without the Haeco-CSG processing. Only three were remixed, which were replaced on the master tapes: "If I Could Have Her Tonight",[27] "Here We Are in the Years", and "What Did You Do to My Life?".[28] The words "Neil Young" were added to the top of the album cover after what was left of the original stock had been used up, so copies of both mixes exist in the original sleeve. Copies of the original mix on vinyl are now rare and much sought-after by Neil Young fans who believe that the remix diminished the songs, especially "Here We Are in the Years". Young has made both mixes available for streaming on his Archives website.
Neil Young was remastered and released on HDCD-encoded compact discs and digital download on July 14, 2009, as part of the Neil Young Archives Original Release Series. It was released on audiophile vinyl in December 2009, both individually and as part of a box-set of Neil's first four LPs available via his official website. This box set was limited to 1000 copies. The remaster was also released on CD, individually and as Disc 1 of a 4-CD box set Official Release Series Discs 1-4, released in the US in 2009 and Europe in 2012.[29] High resolution digital files of both the CSG and non-CSG albums are available to subscribers on the Neil Young Archives website.
Promotion
Young promoted the album through solo acoustic appearances at coffee houses and folk venues in New York, Ann Arbor, Ottawa and Toronto. In late October 1968, he appeared nightly for a full week supporting Joni Mitchell at The Bitter End in Greenwich Village.[30] In November, he played three dates at the Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In late January and early February 1969, he played a week's worth of shows at Le Hibou Coffee House in Ottawa followed by a week at the Riverboat Coffee House in Toronto.[31] Young would memorialize this time in the lyrics of "Ambulance Blues" on On the Beach. Compilations of his performances at the Canterbury House and the Riverboat would be released as Sugar Mountain – Live at Canterbury House 1968 in 2008 and Live at the Riverboat 1969 in 2009, respectively, as part of his Archives series.
"The Loner" was released as a single, with the non-album track "Sugar Mountain" as the B-side. "Sugar Mountain" was recorded live at the Canterbury House.
Rolling Stone wrote "in many ways, a delightful reprise of that Springfield sound done a new way".[33] In its retrospective review, AllMusic described it as "an uneven, low-key introduction to Young's solo career".[2]
Track listing
All songs written by Neil Young, except "String Quartet From Whiskey Boot Hill," written by Jack Nitzsche.
Decade is a compilation album by Canadian–American musician Neil Young, originally released in 1977 as a triple album and later issued on two compact discs. It contains 35 of Young's songs recorded between 1966 and 1976, among them five tracks that had been unreleased up to that point. It peaked at No. 43 on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart, and was certified platinum by the RIAA in 1986.
Harvest is the fourth studio album by Canadian-American musician Neil Young, released on February 1, 1972, by Reprise Records, catalogue number MS 2032. It featured the London Symphony Orchestra on two tracks and vocals by guests David Crosby, Graham Nash, Linda Ronstadt, Stephen Stills, and James Taylor. It topped the Billboard 200 album chart for two weeks, and spawned two hit singles, "Old Man", which peaked at No. 31 on the US Billboard Hot 100, and "Heart of Gold", which reached No. 1. It was the best-selling album of 1972 in the United States.
Buffalo Springfield Again is the second album by Buffalo Springfield, released on Atco Records in October 1967. The album features some of the group's best-known songs, including "Mr. Soul", "Bluebird", "Expecting to Fly" and "Rock & Roll Woman", all of which were released as singles. In contrast to the band's hastily made debut album, recording for Again took place over a protracted nine-month span and was fraught with dysfunction, with each member eventually producing his own material largely independent of one another.
Tonight's the Night is the sixth studio album by Canadian / American songwriter Neil Young. It was recorded in August–September 1973, mostly on August 26, but its release was delayed until June 1975. It peaked at No. 25 on the Billboard 200. The album is the third and final of the so-called "Ditch Trilogy" of albums that Young released following the major success of 1972's Harvest, whereupon the scope of his success and acclaim became so difficult for Young to handle that he subsequently experienced alienation from his music and career.
After the Gold Rush is the third studio album by the Canadian-American musician Neil Young, released in September 1970 on Reprise Records. It is one of four high-profile solo albums released by the members of folk rock group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in the wake of their chart-topping 1970 album Déjà Vu. Young's album consists mainly of country folk music along with several rock tracks, including "Southern Man". The material was inspired by the unproduced Dean Stockwell-Herb Bermann screenplay After the Gold Rush.
Crazy Horse is an American rock band best known for their association with the musician Neil Young. Since 1969, fifteen studio albums and eight live albums have been billed as being by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. They have also released six studio albums of their own between 1971 and 2009.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is the second studio album by Canadian-American musician Neil Young, released in May 1969 on Reprise Records, catalogue number RS 6349. His first with longtime backing band Crazy Horse, it emerged as a sleeper hit amid Young's contemporaneous success with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, ultimately peaking at number 34 on the US Billboard 200 in August 1970 during a 98-week chart stay. It has been certified platinum by the RIAA.
Time Fades Away is a 1973 live album by Canadian-American musician Neil Young. Consisting of previously unreleased material, it was recorded with the Stray Gators on the support tour following 1972's highly successful album Harvest. Due to Young's dissatisfaction with the tour, it was omitted from his catalogue and not released on compact disc until 2017. The album is the first of the so-called "Ditch Trilogy" of albums that Young recorded following the major success of Harvest, whereupon the scope of his success and acclaim became so apparent that Young subsequently experienced alienation from his music and career.
Rising Sons was an American folk-rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1965. Their initial career was short-lived, but the group found retrospective fame for launching the careers of singer Taj Mahal and guitarist Ry Cooder.
Bernard Alfred "Jack" Nitzsche was an American musician, arranger, songwriter, composer, and record producer. He came to prominence in the early 1960s as the right-hand-man of producer Phil Spector, and went on to work with the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and others. He worked extensively in film scores for the films Performance, The Exorcist and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In 1983, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for co-writing "Up Where We Belong" with Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Crazy Horse is the debut album by Crazy Horse, released in 1971 by Reprise Records. It is the only album by the band to feature Danny Whitten recorded without Neil Young, and it peaked at No. 84 on the Billboard 200 album chart.
Buffalo Springfield is a compilation album released on Atco Records in 1973. It is the fifth album by rock band Buffalo Springfield, and their second compilation. It was assembled by the label well after the band had broken up at a time when Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were quite popular and had not released any new material as a group for over two years, with their 1974 reunion tour eight months away. It features a nine-minute extended version of the song "Bluebird" by Stephen Stills, only available elsewhere on the Warner Special Products LP compilation "Heavy Metal – 24 Electrifying Performances", released in 1974. It has never been issued on compact disc and is currently out of print.
Neil Young Archives Vol. 1: 1963–1972 is the first in a planned series of box sets of archival material by Canadian-American musician Neil Young. It was released on June 2, 2009, in three different formats - a set of 10 Blu-ray discs in order to present high-resolution audio as well as accompanying visual documentation, a set of 10 DVDs, and a more basic 8-CD set. Covering Young's early years with The Squires and Buffalo Springfield, it also includes various demos, outtakes and alternate versions of songs from his albums Neil Young, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, and Harvest, as well as tracks he recorded with Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young during this time. Also included in the set are several live discs, as well as a copy of the long out-of-print film Journey Through the Past, directed by Young in the early 1970s.
Performance is a 1970 soundtrack album to the film Performance by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. It features music from Randy Newman, Merry Clayton, Ry Cooder, Jack Nitzsche, Buffy Sainte-Marie, The Last Poets and Mick Jagger.
She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina is the seventh album by Buffy Sainte-Marie, released in 1971.
"Expecting to Fly" is a song written by Neil Young and performed by Buffalo Springfield. The song appeared on their 1967 album, Buffalo Springfield Again. It would reach #98 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968.
"The Old Laughing Lady" is a song written by Neil Young that was first released on his 1968 debut solo album Neil Young.
What's That Sound? Complete Albums Collection is a box set of albums by the American rock band Buffalo Springfield. Released by Rhino Records in June 2018, the set contains the three original albums officially released by Atco—mono and stereo versions of the first two albums, Buffalo Springfield and Buffalo Springfield Again, and the stereo version of the last album, Last Time Around.
"Country Girl" is a song written by Neil Young that was first released on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's 1970 album Déjà Vu.
Neil Young Archives Volume II: 1972–1976 is a 10-CD box set from American-Canadian folk rock musician Neil Young that was initially released in a limited deluxe box set on November 20, 2020. The release is the second box set in his Neil Young Archives series, following 2009's The Archives Vol. 1 1963–1972, and covers a three-and-a-half-year period from 1972 to 1976. The track list was officially announced on the Neil Young Archives site on September 20, 2020, with the first single, "Come Along and Say You Will", being posted to the site as the Song of the Day on October 14. The set then went up for pre-order on October 16, 2020, as an exclusive release to his online store, with only 3,000 copies being initially made available worldwide. After selling out the following day, Young announced several weeks later that a general retail version, as well as a second pressing of the deluxe box set, is expected to be released to market on March 5, 2021. This was followed by the release of a second single, "Homefires", on October 21, and a third, an alternate version of "Powderfinger", on November 3.
1 2 "Neil Young: Subtle Face". Cash Box. September 6, 1969. Retrieved March 13, 2022. The new mix, which is now available
↑ Young, Neil. 2012. Waging Heavy Peace. Penguin Publishing Group.
↑ Young, Neil. 2012. Waging Heavy Peace. Penguin Publishing Group.
↑ Young, Neil. 2012. Waging Heavy Peace. Penguin Publishing Group.
↑ Einarson, John, and Richie Furay. 1997. There’s Something Happening Here: The Story of Buffalo Springfield: For What It’s Worth. Kingston, Ont., Canada: Quarry Press.
↑ Williamson, N. (2002). Journey Through the Past: The Stories Behind the Classic Songs of Neil Young. Hal Leonard. pp.22, 154. ISBN9780879307417.
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