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Just 24 hours before Neil Young sat down with the band at The Last Waltz in San Francisco, he was in Atlanta playing two shows in one night at the Fox Theater. It was November 24, 1976, and it should have been exhausted after a grueling year on the road with Crazy Horse and the Stills-Young Band, but it was playing in one way or another fit. absolute table. The second concert of the evening opened with a solo acoustic interpretation of 1969 Everyone knows that it's not anywhere The clbadic "The Losing End". You can hear a recording of this performance never before published.
The song appears on the new archival version of Young Songs of Judy, who hits the tablets Friday. It's a collection of 22 tracks from the acoustic ensemble he made every night of the tour shortly before Crazy Horse joined him for the second part of the evening. Rolling stone Writer Cameron Crowe and photographer Joel Bernstein participated in the tour, recording each show. You can read their notes below where they describe how unbelievable Songs of Judy was born from these bands.
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Cameron: Joel Bernstein and I met for the first time one fine morning in March 1974. It was already a good day. Neil Young had agreed to join the Eagles for a profit at the auditorium of Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo. We were all together for the bus ride to the coast. Neil was notoriously shy for the press at the time. I snuck into the bus as a guest of the Eagles. There is a photo of the day, taken by Joel.
Behind me, Neil plays a first version of "For the Turnstiles". (Later, while pbading oil derricks, he would start writing some of "Vampire Blues" on the same bus ride.) I'm just trying to look like I'm coming. We became friends the same day – Joel the photographer (and maestro-guitar technician) and me the journalist. Our shared aesthetic was rigorous. As fans, we liked the raw and the real. For example, the demo was usually our favorite version of a given song. Joel the artist worked almost exclusively with the available light. We considered ourselves as documentarists, there to capture the spirit in the air. We even had a nickname for ourselves – Eyes and Ears (from the old movie movie "The eyes and ears of the world"). We are still doing. Joel and I have done many missions together, and one of our first adventures was for Rolling stone. I was invited to the North American tour of Neil Young and Crazy Horse in 1976. Joel was already touring as Neil's guitarist and was also documenting the shows by recording them. Full disclosure: I was in paradise.
Joel: The tour began at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles on November 1, 1976, the day before polling day. Neil started with a solo acoustic version of a powerful and unpublished song called "Campaigner". I immediately realized that making these tapes was actually a great idea. I was looking quickly in the malls for all the blank C-90 cbadettes I could find along the way. The American tour was brief (18 performances in 12 cities in 24 days), but the performances were at their best and intense. As the tour continued, the cache of videotapes grew, all filled with precious stones.
In the middle of the tour, on the occasion of Neil's 31st birthday, he invited us to get on his tour bus, Pocohontas, parked in the snow in front of the Edgewater Inn in Madison.
Cameron: Eight months earlier, Joel was on nearby Mendota Lake, photographing Joni Mitchell skating for her. hegira album. Otis Redding's plane had crashed, I think, in the same neighborhood years earlier. The whole region seemed rich in musical traditions …
Joel: Neil and I may have smoked a joint. Then Neil said, "Oh, I have to make a phone call." It probably meant that Neil would have to go back to the hotel, but he stayed there. "Wait a second," he said, opening a leather briefcase on the table. Inside, a phone looked like an accessory from the 60s television series Become smart. "It's a satellite phone," Neil said. What is it? We are in 1976! We are in his bus! He makes a call to Mo Ostin, president of Neil's label, and to our amazement cancels the release of his compilation of 3 records. Decade; month in the making, already in a hurry, and planned to go out soon.
Cameron: (The Rolling stone This piece was badigned to go out at the same time as the album. Now, we were all suddenly in free fall.)
Joel: The last two shows of the tour were to enjoy the restoration of the Fox Theater, the historic Atlanta, where we played. After the first show, an unusually long interval occurred before the second show, the midnight show. To celebrate the end of their international tour several months, the group had found a great combination, including at least tequila and marijuana, with which she could communicate. One of the results, when the midnight show began after an hour, was the unprecedented rap in which Neil evokes the spirit of Judy Garland, a vision that would have gone away without this recording. At the end of the last show, and we loaded the trucks for the last time, Tim Mulligan, Neil's mixer, and I realized that it was useless to try to sleep. we had to take the first flight to San Francisco. It was Thanksgiving, but we both had another show later in the evening with Neil … they said it would be called "The Last Waltz".
Cameron: Joel and I made a pact. After the tour, we would meet in Joel's apartment in San Francisco and make our own "essential" audio compilation of the tour. The goal was to create our definitive collection of acoustic and electric performances. Each would include an interpretation of each interpreted song and would be on a 90-minute tape. We of course started with the acoustic sets. Joel listened to all the performances and reduced them to three or four best versions. In some cases, if Neil interpreted the song once, this version would be included.
The acoustic shows were sparkling, sometimes stony, often surprising and always sincere. You may get a "Losing End" or even a "Love Is a Rose". Neil spoke regularly with the audience, including an epic monologue from a late show in Atlanta, which became a centerpiece of our dark comic collection. Young had always been a spiritual talker on stage, but the one who was part of "Too Far Gone" had made a psychedelic trip to Oz and vice versa. For days we listened and compiled. It was a laboriously laborious job. Wake up, have your breakfast and dive into the recordings. Decide which of the 12 versions of "Old Laughing Lady" was essential. Repeat.
Joel: Cameron, reading your story, it reminds me how much fun it was to listen to our notes and discuss each performance until we decided to choose "it's that one" . After you and I made our selections, I went to Graham Nash. home studio, Rudy Records, and transferred each song that we had chosen, then cut together into two reels, one for each side of a cbadette. I made three copies of the compilation of the tape. two went to see the two team members who received me the audio recording of the Tim's PA mix each night. (The audio nerds: to do this, they needed the following adapters: XLR> 1/4 "> RCA> DIN.) At the time, this seemed like the right way to thank them for taking the time to do it.
I advised everyone not to copy the tape and keep it in a safe place. A few years later, one of them called to tell me that he could not find his copy of the compiled tape. A little later, a copy of a copy of a copy of this tape became the master tape of a bootleg vinyl record; just what I was trying to avoid. Years later, I was interviewed for Neil's fan club magazine, Broken arrow, and I was asked what I knew about this mysterious compilation (for fans) and told the story to the reporter, who had written an article about it, after which the bootleg had been called " The Joel Bernstein ".
Cameron: We have never been successful at electrical appliances. Such was Joel's attention to detail and our common commitment to exploring all the cracks of the 1976 bunny acoustic terrier, by the end of the first part we were exhausted. We took a short break. Decades have pbaded, but we have always returned to the joys of this compilation. The tour had been so satisfying and so different from all that rock would become in the years to come, something indelible was captured in our humble collection. To listen to it today is a bit like discovering postcards from home. It was a precious moment in Neil Young's journey, a breath of fresh air between some of his greatest adventures. Everyone involved was heading to another career summit, Rust never sleeps was just around the corner and you can close your eyes and imagine the thrill of the room. The bicentennial year in America, Neil Young and Crazy Horse are in your city and Neil walks with his acoustic. Press PLAY.
Joel: See you at home this fall. Let's start the compilation of the electric set …
Cameron: It looks good. I remember a nine-minute, burning "Cortez the Killer" from the Dane County Coliseum in Madison, which was absolutely essential …
Joel: Here we go again…
© Eyes and Ears Productions 2018
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