Nice article about this dark album. And not yet re-released. We’re waiting for The Archives or PONO. For the Neil-Fans out there, a re-release of “TFA” is a long awaited wish.
40 Years Ago: Neil Young Releases ‘Time Fades Away’ (1973)
TIMES FADES AWAY from test pressing
There are so many albums in Neil Young‘s catalog that most fans wouldn’t miss a stray out-of-print entry or two. But that isn’t the case with his infamous “lost” 1973 live release, ‘Time Fades Away.’
Mostly recorded on a disastrous tour that found Young and his band slowly falling apart over 62 shows in early 1973, ‘Time Fades Away’ should have come at a moment of triumph, since it arrived in the wake of his hugely successful ‘Harvest’ LP. Platinum sales often bring their own set of problems, however, and for Young, mainstream stardom proved a burden that started chafing almost immediately. “I felt like a product, and I had this band of all-star musicians that couldn’t even look at each other,” Young reflected in a 1987 interview. “It was a total joke.”
Of course, Young being Young, he didn’t exactly make the tour easy on himself, chiefly by opting to perform previously unreleased material for crowds expecting to hear the hits. Going on to call ‘Time Fades Away’ “my least favorite record” and “the worst record I ever made” in the same 1987 interview, Young explained, “As a documentary of what was happening to me, it was a great record. I was onstage and I was playing all these songs that nobody had heard before, recording them, and I didn’t have the right band. It was just an uncomfortable tour. It was supposed to be this big deal — I just had ‘Harvest’ out, and they booked me into 90 cities.”
At this point, it’s hard to say who the “right band” would have been for Young, whose mental state grew progressively darker during the tour. All the same, the bloom was probably off the rose from the moment that former Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, who’d been slated to join Young’s band the Stray Gators for this series of dates, ended up being sent home to sober up — and soon died of a heroin overdose. The bad vibes grew to the point that drummer Kenny Buttrey quit partway through, replaced by the Jefferson Airplane‘s Johnny Barbata [1], and eventually, Young developed a throat infection that made things even worse…
Mojo magazine out of the UK invites you to have a little fun by sharing with them your top Neil Young album picks.
The magazine writes: “This month we’re delving back into the 45-year-strong back catalogue of a Canadian singer-songwriter whose music has oscillated from acoustic balladry to countrified rock, electronic experimentation to gnarly rockabilly, film soundtracks to anti-war polemic.”
Polemic? Had to look that one up:
“a strong written or spoken attack against someone else’s opinions, beliefs, practices, etc.”
It goes on” “Which Neil Young albums are the best? And why? What about 1969′s hard-rocking Crazy Horse debut Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere or the following year’s solo work After The Gold Rush? Then there’s mega-hit Harvest and the mid-’70s Ditch Trilogy. Don’t forget his late ’70s run of albums – American Stars ‘n Bars, Comes A Time, Rust Never Sleeps – and his ’80s sonic adventures. What about the raging Ragged Glory and Sleeps With Angels or more recent releases such as Fork In The Road and Psychedelic Pill?”
finally there is a fickle date for the PONO release. It is still subject to reality. And also what one understands what PONO would really give to the ears for, e.g. the “girls with the white earphones.”
No one still answers the question why these high sampling rates, that the end-user cannot hear, is good for the end-user. For mastering ok. For the girls and boys in white earphones it is still difficult why they should change their habit for songs which take 6 more times to download and to store and have no other quality than they have been remastered. Which is independent of the end sampling rate.
Why isn’t it explained to people that Neil Young is beyond physical limits when it goes about marketing, although he should know better as a musician.
It’s about mastering, not just high sampling rates. Yep, you get the studio sound, the re-mastered one. And that is new. And good. No need for Pono-stuff, though 🙂
Baron
Published: 2013/09/05
Neil Young’s PONO Digital Music Service to Launch Early Next Year
Neil Young’s highly anticipated digital music service PONO will finally be available in early 2014. According to Young, PONO will improve the quality and compression of MP3s. The legendary singer-songwriter posted a statement on the service’s Facebook page on Tuesday that reads:
To everyone who loves music
I’m very happy to bring you some good news. All of us at Team PONO have been focused on getting everything right for our early 2014 launch of Pono.
The simplest way to describe what we’ve accomplished is that we’ve liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality – as it was in the studio. So it has
primal power.
Hearing PONO for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theater on a sun-filled day. It takes you a second to adjust. Then you enter a bright reality, of wonderfully
rendered detail.
This music moves you. So you can feel. That’s why so many musicians are behind PonoMusic – this is important work that honors their art. This is the way they wanted you to hear their music.
PONO starts at the source: artist-approved studio masters we’ve been given special access to. Then we work with our brilliant partners at Meridian to unlock the richness of the artist’s music to you. There is nothing like hearing this music – and we are working hard to make that experience available to all music lovers, soon.
Our mission is also to make PONO just as accessible as any music you buy and listen to today. So we’ll be launching both the PONO portable player – an updated version of the one I showed on David Letterman’s program – and an online library, with all your favorite music available in PonoMusic quality. Everything you need to feel music anew.
Stay tuned for more updates. And be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitterand NSA for the latest information. We hope you’ll try PONO when it comes your way, and that it brings you the soul of music.
The website “Drowned in Sound” takes a look back 40 years at the making of the infamous “Tonight’s The Night” album.
Andrew Wallace Chamings writes: “Forty years ago this week, Neil Young entered a makeshift studio on Santa Monica Boulevard in a state of deep depression and alcoholism and, in that single session, recorded the majority of the darkest album of his (or possibly anyone’s) career.
“Coping with the recent deaths of roadie Bruce Berry and Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, Neil had seen heroin kill his closest friends, and he wanted to sing about it. That gloriously messy collection of songs about death would eventually be released as Tonight’s The Night two years later. Neil’s own father Scott once described the album as ‘a man on a binge at a wake,’ but that doesn’t quite do it justice.”
The album is a favorite to many die-hard Young fans who soak up the raw emotion of a man “real as the day is long.”
Chamings aptly observes: “But of course, desperation can not only be expressed through ethereal arpeggios and precisely arranged fifty-piece orchestras, it’s often released through singing what’s on your mind, in any key you want, and bending guitar strings until they break.”
Drummer Ralph Molina explained the band’s preparation; “We’d just get to a point where you get a glow, just a glow. When you do blow and drink, that’s when you get that glow. No one said ‘Let’s go play,’ we all just knew it was time. We never talked about what anyone was playing, who’s playing what part or any of that kinda shit. It was so fucking emotional.”
Read the well-thought out review and then pull out the album and take another listen, for old time’s sake.
Nice, relaxed read at “Something Else Reviews” about Neil Young conversations, getting old and the song “Old Man.”
“Old Man” peaked at No. 31 in June of 1972
Writer JC Mosquito opines about coming across someone who will “shoot the shit” about Neil. All fans know how great it is to unexpectedly meet someone else who will discuss Neil as a common interest.
He writes: “Of course, sometimes you get seated next to someone who shares no common interests with you whatsoever, which is a whole different problem. But odds are that even this albatross of a human being seated beside yourself probably knows something about Neil Young. And if you can turn the conversation in that direction, odds are that their knowledge is probably centered on the “classic” version of Neil Young as a king of folk-rock Trinitarian god composed of the performer (Neil); his offspring, the #1 album (Harvest); and the intangible yet all pervasive holy spirit of the airwaves, the #1 single (Heart of Gold).
“Now I\'m livin\' out here on the beach, but those seagulls are still out of reach. ” by -- Neil Young
Neil Young on Tour
Sugar Mountain setlists
Tom Hambleton provides BNB with setlists, thankfully. His website is the most comprehensive searchable archives on the Internets about anything Neil Young related setlists. Goto Sugar Mountain.
memphish on 
Albert Stromann on 
liza on 
Baz on 
