📜 Info 📜
Any project in the works for two decades is bound to generate its fair share of myths and so it is with Neil Young’s Archives, a series of a multi-disc box sets chronicling Young’s history. Originally envisioned in the late ’80s as a Decade II, the project quickly mutated into a monster covering every little corner of Neil’s career. With its escalation came delays, so many that it sometimes seemed that the project never really existed; it was just a shared fantasy between Neil and his faithful. During that long, long wait, fans held tight to the idea that Archives was a clearinghouse of rarities similar to Bob Dylan’s The Bootleg Series, a treasure trove of unreleased songs and epochal live performances that would trump whatever bootleggers had to offer. While rare and unheard music is certainly a key part of Archives, particularly on the first disc covering the pre-history of 1963-1965, viewing this project as merely a CD box set is wildly misleading. Neil Young has designed Archives as nothing less than an immersive multimedia autobiography, an interactive experience where the music, text, video, and pictures feed off each other, creating a virtual journey through Neil’s past.
Because this is a biography, Archives, Vol. 1 winds up relying very heavily on previously released recordings, containing almost all of Neil Young, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, and Harvest, key Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young cuts, and the previously released archival live albums Live at the Fillmore East 1970 and Live at Massey Hall 1971. Such a large chunk of familiar material is bound to disappoint any listener expecting Archives to be a rarities-only set, forgetting that its origin was as a sequel to Decade, the triple-LP set that mixed up hits with unreleased tunes. Archives follows a similar blueprint, excavating many rare gems — some, like “Bad Fog of Loneliness” quite familiar to bootleggers; some, like an extraordinary “Dance Dance Dance” cut with Graham Nash, not — and placing them neatly alongside his well-known jewels, so the end effect isn’t a rush of discovery but ongoing quiet revelation, an impression underpinned by the set’s leisurely pace.
📜 Tracks[Info] 📜
DISC 7: LIVE AT MASSEY HALL (TORONTO 1971):
1. On the Way Home
2. Tell Me Why
3. Old Man
4. Journey Through the Past
5. Helpless
6. Love In Mind
7. Man Needs a Maid/Heart of Gold, A (Suite)
8. Cowgirl In the Sand
9. Don'T Let It Bring You Down
10. There'S a World
11. Bad Fog of Loneliness
12. Needle and the Damage Done, The
13. Ohio
14. See the Sky About To Rain
15. Down By the River
16. Dance Dance Dance
17. I Am a Child
