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Latter-Day Remembrances, Compilations, Anthologies, and Boxed Sets
Although Neil Young was all by accounts frustrated very early on by his arrangement with Buffalo Springfield during the band’s brief run in the mid-sixties—he was, after all, both the first member of the band to leave and the guy who did so the most often—he has revisited that band’s catalog numerous times in the decades since.
Young has in fact gone back to the Buffalo Springfield time and time again, both in song (“Buffalo Springfield Again” from his 2000 album Silver and Gold) and with a rather staggering number of hits collections, anthologies, and compilations—many of which have come in the form of multiple-disc boxed sets.
The earliest attempts by the band’s label Atco Records to repackage Buffalo Springfield’s hits suffer from many of the same problems that record company repackages so often do.
In fairness to the folks at Atco/Atlantic, though, and particularly to founder Ahmet Ertegun, there have been few record labels, then or now, that look after the recorded legacy of their artists with the sort of loving care as that great label did back then and continues to do so now. But there are fewer artists still who have meticulously, even somewhat jealously, shepherded their artistic legacy the way that Young has.
Not surprisingly, Young has gone to great lengths to right whatever wrongs the earlier, primarily record label–driven Buffalo Springfield anthologies and hit collections might have posed—most notably on 2001’s Buffalo Springfield box set and on the first volume of the Archives series. What follows is a brief overview of these compilations.
Buffalo Springfield Retrospective (1969)
Atco Records
Peak Billboard Chart Position: #42
As greatest hits collections go, this is actually a pretty decent one, and serves as a more than adequate introduction for anyone in search of a brief, but mostly complete snapshot of Buffalo Springfield’s short but historic career.
Nothing fancy here, just a quick overview that hits on just about all of Buffalo Springfield’s high points musically—from Stills’s folk-rock protest classic “For What It’s Worth,” through Neil Young’s near hits like “Mr. Soul,” “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing,” “On the Way Home,” and “I Am a Child,” and on to his later, more artistically ambitious songs with the group like “Expecting to Fly” and “Broken Arrow.”
As a quick introduction to Buffalo Springfield—and particularly one that was probably more the product of the marketing department at the record company than the artists themselves—you really could do a whole lot worse than Retrospective.
Buffalo Springfield (Two-Record Set Anthology) (1973)
Atco Records
Peak Billboard Chart Position: Unknown
Basically an expanded double album version of the Retrospective hits collection, this two-record “anthology” set mostly reprises the former package, while going somewhat deeper into album cuts like “A Child’s Claim to Fame” and “Pay The Price.”
I may be somewhat in the minority here amongst the band’s fans, but as a brief overview of Buffalo Springfield’s career (that also makes for a hell of a great mix tape, by the way), I actually prefer the briefer but tighter and more compactly packaged Retrospective.
Neil Young Decade (1977)
Reprise Records
Peak Billboard Chart Position: #43
Originally released as a three-album retrospective of Young’s career up to the point of its original 1977 release, Decade was also the catalyst for the massive Archives project that would so preoccupy him over the next several decades.
Japanese pressing of the 45 for “Sugar Mountain.”
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
To many Neil Young fanatics and purists, Decade is often regarded as a disappointment due to the fact that it doesn’t contain anywhere near the number of rarities many had expected to find. But as a career retrospective (up to that point anyway), they just don’t get much better than this. The rarities, though few in number, include some real doozies.
Sandwiched in between the obvious Buffalo Springfield (“Mr. Soul, “Broken Arrow,” “Expecting to Fly,” etc.), CSN&Y (“Helpless,” “Ohio”), and Neil Young solo tracks (“Cowgirl in the Sand,” “Down by the River,” “Heart of Gold,” “Southern Man,” etc.) that you’d expect to find on a collection like this, are rarities like “Down to the Wire” (rumored to have been part of a lost Buffalo Springfield album called Stampede). Decade also includes a pair of tracks from Young’s mythical, never-released “sequel” to Harvest called Homegrown (“Star of Bethlehem,” “Deep Forbidden Lake”).
Although it was considered somewhat flawed by the Neil-phytes at the time of its release, Decade holds up quite well as the sort of career retrospective for fans who have neither the patience, the time, nor the geekish sort of scholarly wherewithal to delve into the massive listening or viewing experience that came later on with Neil Young’s Archives.
Crosby, Stills, and Nash (Boxed Set) (1991)
Atlantic Records
Peak Billboard Chart Position: #109
Although this four-disc boxed set contains only a handful of contributions from Neil Young, it is otherwise a very good representation of the collected works to that point of the group that—outside of Buffalo Springfield and Crazy Horse anyway—played the most important role in the artistic and commercial development of Young’s own career.
As the story goes, Young originally gave his blessing to the project, essentially telling the rest of the group they could freely pick whatever songs of his they wished to use. From there, the story gets somewhat murkier as (depending on which version you choose to believe) the plug on his participation was rather abruptly—but also quite typically for Young—pulled by either Elliot Roberts or Young himself.
What is probably most likely is that while Young was beginning his own process of combing the vaults and compiling material for his own Archives project, he wanted to save his best work for the massive retrospective series he was then only just beginning to put on the drawing board. So, in typical Neil Young fashion, he then dispatched Roberts to handle the dirty work of delivering the bad news to CS&N (a task that is known to have ended up pissing off Graham Nash most notably).
So although a few CSN&Y songs made the final cut, only a very small handful of them (“Helpless,” “Ohio”) are actual Neil Young compositions, and unlike the other members, none of Young’s solo work is represented at all. From a purely marketing standpoint, the other obvious sticking point is that this retrospective boxed set is billed as being the collected work to that point of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, where you have to figure that a CSN&Y box might have helped move a few thousand extra units.
Buffalo Springfield Box Set (2001)
Atco/Elektra/Rhino Records
Peak Billboard Chart Position: #194
Now this is more like it … or is it?
You’d think that for a band that only released three albums during its very short but influential career, this kind of extensive trip through the vaults of unreleased recordings is not exactly something that is all that warranted.
But Stills and Young did exactly that in 2001, filling this lavishly packaged box with loads of unreleased remixes, band demos, and otherwise rare recordings that pretty much put the final exclamation point on Buffalo Springfield’s recorded output in the form of a more properly complete anthology document.
Much like Young’s own Archives series, this one is largely a gift for the hardcore fans—because few others would honestly have the sort of dedication to sit through all of it.
But for those who do, Box Set is one hell of a history lesson, and there are some real gems to be found here as well (such as alternate mixes of Neil Young songs like “On the Way Home” and original demos for stuff like “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong”).
On a more historical note, Box Set also served as the launch point for the 1999 CSN&Y reunion album Looking Forward.
As the story goes, when Stills and Young were working in the studio together on this project, Stills played some of the tracks that CSN were working on at the time, and Young was impressed enough to sign on, freely offering up songs he was working on for his own Silver and Gold album project to the band.
Young was said to be likewise impressed that his on-again, off-again bandmates in CSN&Y had divorced themselves from their relationship with longtime label Atlantic Records, and were planning on releasing their new album themselves.
Single release of “Southern Man,” as taken from the three-LP anthology Decade.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 (2009)
Reprise Records
Peak Billboard Chart Position: #102
As if you couldn’t already go diving deeply enough into the vaults of unreleased material by Buffalo Springfield and by Neil Young himself, this massive first volume of Young’s long-planned Archives series provides all the satisfaction any self-respecting fan could possibly ever want or need … well, up through the year 1972 anyway (future volumes of the series are already in the works).
Spread out over eight CDs or ten DVD or Blu-ray discs (depending on your preference), there is much to like about this set, but also much to criticize.
In the negative column, you have the fact that much of the material has already been previously released—including the complete Neil Young concert performances from Massey Hall (acoustic) and the Fillmore East (with Crazy Horse), both of which were issued as stand-alone releases quite some time prior to the arrival of the full Archives. On the other hand, the remastered sound quality is nothing short of stunning, and there are plenty of gems here that have never before seen the light of day (at least officially speaking), including rare tracks from Young’s early days in Canada with the Squires and with Comrie Smith.
As for the Buffalo Springfield material included on the set, not a lot of new ground is covered, and what you get is pretty much what you would expect (“Broken Arrow,” “Expecting to Fly,” “Burned,” “Mr. Soul,” etc.). But there are also rarer tracks like “Kahuna Sunset,” “Sell Out,” and previously unreleased demos for songs like “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing.”
One of the most interesting tracks on Archives is an unreleased version of a song called “Down, Down, Down,” where you can hear embryonic fragments for some of the ideas that would show up on later Neil Young songs like “Broken Arrow” and “Country Girl” being developed for the first time. Ideas for the latter track can also be heard in the Young solo track “Whiskey Boot Hill” on the Archives album.
For the stricter Buffalo Springfield purists out there, Box Set is probably the better bet. But for anyone who loves the music of Neil Young, there’s little doubt that you could easily get lost for days on end with the Archives set.