Dallas Taylor, once the drummer for Crosby, Still, Nash & Young has died at age 66.
He had a rough life, his mother giving him opium as a young boy. He struggled with addiction and overcame his demons, and becoming a counselor he saved many lives.
Taylor liked to say that he made his first million — and his last million — by the time he was 21, writes Steve Chawkins of the Los Angeles Times.
According to the Times: The rock drummer was a key sideman for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He played at Woodstock, appeared on seven top-selling albums and bought three Ferraris. He also stabbed himself in the stomach with a butcher knife and drank so heavily that he required a liver transplant in 1990, five years after becoming sober.
He had been in failing health for some time, his wife, Patti McGovern-Taylor, said.
Listen to this fun interview (below) with Collins by the Wall Street Journal.
She says,” Please always pay for your music, do us all a favor.”
Her routine: 7 a.m. meditation, good talk with a friend, breakfast, rehearse on the piano, work on writing a book, exercise. Her food plan includes no carbs, no sugar, no grains, three meals a day.
<a href="http://www.bad-news-beat more helpful hints.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Neil-cartoon-with-pono.jpg”>The Pono naysayers are speaking out, since it recently went on sale for $400 to the public.
According to New York Post, and other sources, product engineers for Neil Young’s newly released Pono digital music player have privately admitted they aren’t convinced that the high-resolution audio files it plays have any significant technical advantage over CD-quality files, sources told The Post.
“It has been clear throughout that Neil Young himself is all about the hi-res,” one source close to the situation said. “There’s no doubt in his mind that it sounds better.”
But for some of Pono’s other tech-savvy execs, selling files with more musical data than what’s available on a CD is mainly “a business decision,” the source said.
“Their take is that the serious audiophile has convinced himself he has to have it,” the source added. “They’re saying, ‘We don’t necessarily believe it, but nobody’s going to buy it if we don’t do it.’”
“I think Neil is barking up the wrong tree,” says Lukasz Fikus, a digital audio designer whose high-priced Lampizator components have earned a following among hard-core enthusiasts.
The benefits of hi-res files may be detectable on high-dollar stereo systems, but “the difference is so miniscule that it’s not even worth talking about,” according to Fikus.
The sound quality on Led Zeppelin’s second album is notoriously poor, Fikus notes. A hi-res version of it won’t change that, he says, although a recent remastering by Jimmy Page helped.
“There are many, many factors that contribute to the final pleasure (of digital music),” Fikus adds. “The density of the media file is only one of those factors — and probably not the first priority, but almost the last.”
At Gizmodo, Marlo Agullar, writes that “recalcitrant rocker isn’t wrong for wanting to reclaim audio quality in the digital age, but in the service of that goal he’s peddling junk science, and supporting expensive gear and music files you don’t need. ”
Though Young and Pono have failed to produce double-blind studies on the benefits of high-rate audio or their music player, inquiring minds have taken the time to do it. In a 2007paper published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, Brad Meyer and David Moran outline the results of a study in which they presented a large sample of “serious” listeners with a double blind test comparing 44.1 kHz audio from “the best high resolution discs we could find.” The goal was not to show which was better, but simply to find out if people could even tell the difference.
“None of these variables have shown any correlation with the results, or any difference between the answers and coin-flip results,” they write in their conclusion. Later they note, “Further claims that careful 16/44.1 encoding audibly degrades high-resolution signals must be supported by properly controlled double-blind tests.”
Neil Young’s high-definition audio startup Pono just started selling its Pono player, but he told an interviewer (with a great accent) at CES in Las Vegas that he sees Pono getting out of the hardware business sooner rather than later.
Pono is “A Movement,” Young says.
“I know when I listen to it, it makes me feel great.”
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Journeyman bassist Tim Drummond, 74, who performed with Neil Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash and Bob Dylan among many more rock legends, died January 10th.
Drummond’s death comes just three months after Rick Rosas, who played bass alongside Neil Young for nearly 25 years and was known as “Rick the Bass Player,” passed away at the age of 65 following a battle with cancer.
Rolling Stone’s Daniel Kreps writes that Drummond served as primary bassist on Young’s 1972 masterpiece Harvest and contributed to every studio LP the singer-songwriter released from 1974’s On the Beach to 1980’s Hawks & Doves.
Drummond was also a member of Young’s short-lived backup bands the Shocking Pinks, the Stray Gators and the International Harvesters. After reuniting with the Harvest crew for 1992’s Harvest Moon, Drummond’s two-decade-long tenure with Young ended with the rocker’s 1993 MTV Unplugged performance.
He also joined Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on the road during the band’s infamous 1974 “doom tour” and performed on CSN’s 1977 single “Just a Song Before I Go.” Rolling Stone spoke to Drummond about his experiences on the 1974 CSNY trek, including the night he and Stills hung out with Dylan after a Minneapolis concert.
“Whenever you see a rose, stop by and smell it” by Rassy
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.