Album reviews of Neil Young’s newest soon-to-be released “Cellar Door” can be churned out ad nauseam. How many can we read?
Henry Hauser’s review at Consequence of Sound, an on-line music publication, tells the story of what happened in 1970, starting with a failed CSN&Y recording session at Young’s home in Hawaii.
Instead, band members went their separate ways and put out their own solo albums that made Billboard’s top 15. Young’s released “After the Gold Rush,” but, Hauser writes – not surprisingly – not everyone got behind it.
“Langdon Winner dismissed it as unlistenable, likening Young’s voice to ‘pre-adolescent whining.’ Not to be outdone by his erstwhile bandmates, the competitive Canadian continued writing new material and scheduled back-to-back concerts at Carnegie Hall.”
“Hoping to shake off the cobwebs following a five-month layoff, Young played a series of warmup gigs at The Cellar Door, an intimate D.C. music club. Live at the Cellar Door, the most recent installment in Young’s Archive Performance Series, captures these six solo sets.”
Of the music, Hauser gets sappy, using words like poignant, purposeful, ardent, penetrating, enthralling, dreamy, superb, wistful. There may be a record number of adjectives used in this review.
“The introspective ‘Tell Me Why’ finds the singer grappling with unsolvable quagmires in a wounded, elegiac timber (‘Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself?’).”
BH adds: The 1970 solo tour occurred between November 30 and December 5. It included eight shows on five dates, six of which were at the Cellar Door in Washington, DC and the final two were at Carnegie Hall, New York.
The setlist grid can be found here on Sugar Mountain:
Forty three years after those shows a new album from the Archives Performance Series, Live at the Cellar Door, is being released on December 10th. The performance was culled from the six Cellar Door shows. An intimate venue, The Cellar Door was located on M Street NW at 34th in Georgetown. With this in mind it becomes quite clear why Neil is revisting Carnegie Hall playing solo for the first time since those two solo dates in 1970. The question remains….will he revisit the same setlists?
"I caught you knockin' at my cellar door
I love you, baby, can I have some more
Ooh, ooh, the damage done." -- Neil Young
Pitchfork is announcing that Neil Young will release a new live album of six performances from 1970 at the Cellar Door in Washington D.C.
The collection is scheduled to be released on Nov. 26.
According to Pitchfork, the recordings of the performances came a few months after the release of After the Gold Rushfrom November 30 to December 2, 1970,.
Live at the Cellar Door will be out through Reprise on CD, vinyl, and digital formats.
The album features Young performing acoustic and piano renditions of songs from After the Gold Rush, as well as three versions of Buffalo Springfield songs, a solo piano take of 1969’s “Cinnamon Girl”, early takes of songs that would appear on later studio albums, and other classics.
Live At The Cellar Door:
Tell Me Why, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, After the Gold Rush, Expecting to Fly, Bad Fog of Loneliness, Old Man, Birds, Don’t Let It Bring You Down,See The Sky About to Rain,Cinnamon Girl,I Am a Child, Down by the River, Flying on the Ground Is Wrong.
“Greendale, on its surface, is the story of a family torn apart by a murder in a small town. It\\\'s a fable thinly veiling a more cautionary tale about tabloid exposure and the public\\\'s appetite for lurid details. ” by Michael D. Clarke, Houston Chronicle, 7 Aug 03.
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.