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Get Off of That Couch, Turn Off That MTV

Neil Young’s Live Recordings

When a musician has been making music as long as Neil Young has, it isn’t at all surprising that this same artist would have a veritable ton of officially released live recordings—with even more of them available on bootlegs.

What is surprising in Neil Young’s case, however, is just how many of these recordings are now long out-of-print collector’s items.

This applies in particular to Young’s filmed performances, including a number of very good concerts released during the eighties and nineties on VHS tape that, for whatever reason, have yet to make the transition to DVD. If you go to sites like Amazon or eBay, many of these are surprisingly easy to find. But in a lot of cases they will also cost you a small fortune.

Year of the Horse—Jim Jarmusch’s mid-nineties film documentary on Crazy Horse—for example, commands prices in the seventy to eighty-dollar range (and for a VHS tape, no less). Others, such as the surprisingly good 1983 Trans tour document Live in Berlin, can often be had at bargain basement prices of around fifteen dollars for a DVD copy.

With such a wide variety of live recordings—coming from nearly every phase of Young’s long career—to choose from, it also shouldn’t surprise anyone that the actual performance quality varies widely from disc to disc. For every classic like a Live Rust or a Weld, you’ll also find slightly more tepid-sounding outings like Red Rocks Live (or, for that matter, Year of the Horse, collector’s prices notwithstanding).

In recent years, Young’s raiding of the vaults for the Archives project has also resulted in the release of some rare concerts long sought after by fans, as part of the Archives Performance Series. These recordings include a legendary 1970 show with Crazy Horse at New York’s Fillmore East and the acoustic 1971 performance from Massey Hall that David Briggs once said he wanted to put out instead of Harvest.

What follows is a rundown of Young’s officially released live albums. Although they were both recorded in a live setting, we have omitted the albums Time Fades Away and Rust Never Sleeps from this list, both because they are considered more part of his catalog of original music and because both are covered at considerable length elsewhere in this book.

CSN&Y 4-Way Street (1971/CD)

Neil Young’s first official live release was this double album set recorded with CSN&Y on the 1970 tour behind Déjà Vu.

Although this album often gets shit on both by critics and by certain segments of Young’s hardcore fan base, it is still noteworthy mainly for the two extended jams with Stephen Stills on the songs “Carry On” and “Southern Man.”

It is also the first appearance on an album for the latter, which would later become one of the key tracks from Young’s third solo album, the classic After the Gold Rush. The live version is also radically different from the one found on Gold Rush, as it serves as a vehicle for some fiery-sounding, if occasionally a bit all over the place, guitar interplay between Stills and Young.

Although I may be in the minority among Neil Young fans on this, I actually prefer the live version found here to the studio recording for this very reason.

Live Rust/Rust Never Sleeps (1979/CD/DVD)

Neil Young’s first official live album with Crazy Horse is today widely recognized as a classic by fans, and rightly so. Recorded during a tour that audiences, the musicians involved, and members of the road crew will tell you is remembered as much for its sheer, ear-splitting volume as anything else, there are still plenty of memorable moments to be found on Live Rust.

The way that “Cortez the Killer” shifts into a reggae groove toward the end is certainly one of these, as are the blistering solos heard on “Hurricane” and “Hey, Hey, My, My.” Many of the songs from Rust Never Sleeps that show up on this double-disc are also the exact same takes used on the original Rust album, but without any of the overdubs and studio tinkering—so you actually get the more direct, as-it-happened sort of experience here.

As the first officially released live document from Neil Young and Crazy Horse—recorded as it was during one of Neil’s most legendary tours—Live Rust more than lives up to its status as a classic.

Neil Young in Berlin (1983/VHS/DVD)

Young’s European tour behind the infamous album Trans was originally conceived to be the mother of all rock concerts. After he had seen one of the Rolling Stones’ stadium extravaganzas during their 1981 Tattoo You tour, he decided he wanted to up the ante for his own upcoming shows, and hired Woodstock veteran Chip Monck to stage a similarly humongous production for his European trek.

But by most accounts, the tour instead turned into something of a disaster. Bassist Bruce Palmer, Young’s former bandmate in Buffalo Springfield, was fired (and later rehired) due to his excessive drinking; the audiences were mostly indifferent to the vocoders and synths of the new material from Trans; and the exotic staging was both impractical and a huge factor in the tour losing buckets of money (by the time the Trans tour made it back to the U.S., the production was scaled down considerably).

Still, watching this now hard-to-find DVD today, you’d never know that the Trans shows were considered such a bust at the time.

Although much of the audience does sit there on their hands, all stony-faced during songs like “Computer Age” and “Transformer Man” (a few crowd close-ups on this DVD reveal some mouths wide open in apparent shock at what they were witnessing), they also come alive again when Young and Nils Lofgren crank up the guitars during a positively blistering version of “Sample and Hold.”

For all of the talk over the years about how Young sprang his shocking new musical direction on an audience just wanting to hear the older hits, the set list here is also a lot more varied than you might expect. You get everything from folkie Neil (“Old Man,” “The Needle and the Damage Done”) to the full-on rockers (“Cinnamon Girl,” “Hey, Hey, My My”).

What makes Live in Berlin such a keeper more than anything else, though, is seeing Young and Lofgren all decked out in ridiculous eighties rock star hair and gear. The result makes them look like something straight out of an eighties Jefferson Starship video.

Lofgren in particular, draped as he is in nearly as many scarves as Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, plays this role to the hilt, too—striking nearly every clichéd rock guitar pose he can steal from the playbook of his hero Keith Richards.

For Young’s part, his wrap-around sunglasses and skinny tie are cut straight from the era of early eighties new wave. At one particularly hilarious point in the video, his tie becomes tangled up in his guitar during the otherwise incendiary solo on “Like a Hurricane,” until he finally just tosses it over his shoulder like one of those Aerosmith scarves. This DVD is also noteworthy for containing the only released version of the rare track “Berlin.”

Live from a Rusted Out Garage (1986/VHS/DVD)

Originally filmed by Larry “L.A.” Johnson as a TV special broadcast on the premium cable channel Showtime, this hard-to-find video of a 1986 show at San Francisco’s Cow Palace has been called the best document of a Crazy Horse show ever captured on film, and it’s really hard to disagree. If nothing else, it is certainly among the goofiest.

Filmed at the same site as the infamous Rust Never Sleeps show from 1978, this performance brings back many of the same props from that concert film—the oversized microphones and amps and the goofy guys running around in white doctor’s coats for starters—as well as some leftovers from the Trans tour (Dan Clear is back as your intermission emcee).

New additions include giant mechanical cockroaches and a stage redesigned to resemble a garage, where the “third best garage band in the world” (Crazy Horse) are trying to conduct band practice. The late comedian Sam Kinnison makes a particularly memorable guest appearance as the stereotypical neighbor pissed off by all of the noise. Needless to say, hilarity ensues.

In the midst of Kinnison’s screaming and all of the other chaos occurring onstage, Young and Crazy Horse knock out a killer set, including some great guitar shredding by Young on songs like “Down by the River,” “Like a Hurricane,” and “Opera Star.”

There are also some funny bits with Clear during the intermission as he encounters Kinnison and legendary concert promoter Bill Graham backstage, and shamelessly hawks T-shirts and other tour merchandise. One perhaps unintentional bit finds Young berating the other guys in Crazy Horse for sounding lousy—an ironic twist on the reality of much of this tour imitating art in a dramatically scripted scene for this video.

Although Young was by most accounts disappointed with Crazy Horse’s performances for much of this tour, and both Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot were said to be fairly miserable as well, the band sounds great here. Reports to the contrary, everyone also seems to be smiling as the garage door comes down at the end. If you can find it, this really is a great Neil Young and Crazy Horse show, and the video quality is excellent.

Freedom/Rock at the Beach (1989/VHS/DVD)

First released as a VHS video to coincide with his 1989 “comeback” album Freedom, this concert features Young performing songs like “Crime in the City” from that album mixed in with classics like “Heart of Gold” and rarely played chestnuts like “For the Turnstiles.” The VHS has been out of print for years, and sadly it has never been revived as a DVD release (if you are listening, this one is part of our wish list, Neil).

However, if you search for it on sites like Amazon, there is an apparent bootleg DVD from the Freedom era that may or may not be from the same source called Rock at the Beach available relatively cheaply.

The bad news here is that the video quality is said to be quite poor (although the same reader reviews all rated the sound as either very good or excellent). The good news is that this DVD, recorded live at the Jones Beach Theatre, Long Island, New York, features a version of “Down by the River” where Neil rips it up with none other than Bruce Springsteen.

I admit that I haven’t actually seen this film myself. But between the guest shot by the Boss and the fact that the show I saw in Seattle during the Freedom period was the best Neil Young show I’ve ever witnessed (and indeed, one of the best rock concerts I’ve ever seen period), I’ve been more than tempted to risk ordering it.

Weld and Arc-Weld (1991/CD/VHS)

The biggest rub on Weld (which documents the Neil Young and Crazy Horse juggernaut in support of 1990’s Ragged Glory album) over the years is that it duplicates so much of the same material already heard on Live Rust. This argument to me has always seemed to be more a case of perfectionist nitpickery amongst the hardcores than anything else. True, “Cortez,” “Powderfinger,” “Hurricane,” and the rest are all here. But so are the two great Neil Young guitar showcases from Ragged Glory, “Love to Burn” and “Love and Only Love.” Old Black gets a workout and then some with each of these in the blistering versions heard on Weld.

Weld is also an even louder recording than Live Rust was, as if that were even possible. The often notoriously sloppy-sounding Crazy Horse also seem to have been captured on one of their “on nights” here. Weld also marks the first appearance of the anthem “Rockin’ in the Free World” on a live Neil Young album, and Young does a pretty blazing cover of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” here as well.

If you like feedback, and if you can find it, the three-disc version that includes Arc is also worth seeking out. The Arc disc consists entirely of feedback recorded at the shows, and may just be the best practical joke a major rock artist has played on his public since Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. My promotional copy of “Arc: The Single” remains one of the most prized possessions in my Neil Young collection to this day.

Equally hard to find are original VHS copies of the Shakey Pictures film document of the tour shot by Larry “L.A.” Johnson, but bootleg DVD versions do exist and are worth seeking out. Besides capturing a particularly loud and over-the-top set from Young and the Horse, the numerous shots of various freaks in the crowd getting their groove on are particularly funny to watch today. The video also features the original David Briggs mixes of the concert (which are far superior to those found on the album).

Unplugged (1993/CD/VHS)

For the first half of this performance made for MTV’s then wildly popular series of stripped-down “Unplugged” concert telecasts, Young offers up a fairly standard acoustic performance that is reflective of the early nineties Harvest Moon period when it was recorded.

As solo Neil Young concerts go, this one is certainly decent enough, covering most of the hits you’d want to hear in such a setting (“Pocahontas,” “The Needle and the Damage Done,” and a very bluesy, lower-key take on “Mr. Soul” being among them) as well as the expected new songs from Neil’s then current Harvest Moon album.

Although the first half of Unplugged lacks any of the sort of surprises or risk taking (save for a really nice turn at the pipe organ on a gorgeous-sounding reworking of the song “Like a Hurricane”), heard on some of the other, more noteworthy entries in the series (Nirvana’s Unplugged session for MTV springs most immediately to mind), Young does offer up a few of them for the second act.

Joined by a small band including longtime cronies Ben Keith, Tim Drummond, Spooner Oldham and Nils Lofgren at about the halfway point, Neil turns in an acoustic reworking of the Trans track “Transformer Man” that is really quite stunning. The quieter, more subtle arrangement heard here reveals that there was a beautiful song there all along, lying in wait underneath all of the synthesized vocoder effects heard on the original. Backing vocals by Lofgren, Nicolette Larson, and Young’s sister Astrid are particularly effective here, just as they are on a letter-perfect version of “Harvest Moon” (which even finds guitar tech Larry Cragg getting into the act by pushing a broom across the floor in perfect time).

For the most part, Unplugged is definitely a keeper, although for a really great Neil Young acoustic show, you’ll do much better with Massey Hall or, if Harvest Moon is your thing, the Dreamin’ Man Live CD.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Complex Sessions (1994/VHS)

When I first spotted this on Amazon, I just about fell out of my chair. As rarities go, the Complex Sessions video E.P. would have to be considered among the rarest of the rare.

Filmed by Jonathan Demme (who would go on to direct Young’s concert films Heart of Gold and Trunk Show), Complex Sessions features live-in-the-studio performances by Neil Young and Crazy Horse of four songs from the criminally underrated Sleeps with Angels album: “My Heart,” “Prime of Life,” “Change Your Mind,” and perhaps to lighten things up a bit, “Piece of Crap.”

The keeper here is, of course, “Change Your Mind,” Young’s haunting eulogy for Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain that also features one of his greatest consciousness-expanding, psychedelic rock guitar excursions down the rabbit hole ever. The performance of “Change Your Mind” captured here is nothing short of spellbinding.

Even though it was on VHS, when I saw this on Amazon (at $7.50 no less), I ordered it immediately. Guess I’m gonna have to dust the mothballs off the old VCR.

Year of the Horse (1997/CD/VHS/DVD)

I’m not really sure why Jim Jarmusch’s 1997 concert documentary on Neil Young and Crazy Horse is commanding the crazy prices it is on Amazon and elsewhere.

The concert footage from the film for the most part captures the Horse at just about their sloppiest ever (although the rare electric version of “Pocahontas” seen here is kind of cool), and it has probably been years since I pulled out the CD to give it a fresh spin.

The rest of the film is kind of a mishmash that digs up older footage of Young and Crazy Horse from long since aborted projects like “Muddy Track,” as well as some funny bits (like when Young responds to a guy yelling “they all sound the same” from the crowd with the classic quip “it’s all the same song”).

The rarity of this film today makes it somewhat of a novelty, but I’d probably rank it right next to Road Rock as being among Young’s least memorable live documents. One additional note here is that he provided the soundtrack to Jarmusch’s film Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp, at right around the same time as this documentary.

Silver and Gold (1999/DVD)

Originally released on VHS as a complement to the Silver and Gold album, this is another acoustic performance that concentrates mainly on songs from that album like “Daddy Went Walkin’” and “Buffalo Springfield Again,” as well as material from the forgettable CSN&Y reunion album Looking Forward, along with a generous smattering of other songs from Neil Young’s catalog.

Although the real highlights here are few in number, they do include a rare performance of the song “Philadelphia” (Young’s contribution to the soundtrack from the Jonathan Demme film of the same name), as well as a beautiful version of “Long May You Run” played on the pump organ. Overall, this is another very decent, if not quite essential acoustic Neil Young concert document.

Road Rock/Red Rocks Live (2000/CD/DVD)

If you like your Neil Young set lists heavy on slightly obscure or otherwise rarely played songs, this document of his 2000 concert tour may be exactly what you’re looking for. The obscurities, mixed in with tracks from Young’s then current Silver and Gold album, are in abundance here, including such rarely played gems as “Bad Fog of Loneliness,” “Words (Between the Lines of Age),” “World on a String,” “Walk On,” and “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.”

Despite the cool set list, however, the performances captured here contain very few fireworks. The one possible exception is a version of “Cowgirl in the Sand” where Young briefly soars in an exhilarating display of guitar pyro, that also seems to end prematurely, just as Old Black is beginning to reach its uppermost levels of flight velocity.

Part of the problem here may be with the band. For this tour, Young assembled an all-star lineup of pros ranging from Booker T. and the MGs bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn and veteran session drummer Jim Keltner, to longtime musical partners in crime like Ben Keith and Spooner Oldham.

But despite their heavy credentials, this group of seasoned vets never really seems to gel as a cohesive unit and often plays tentatively and just a bit too safe. With a band like Crazy Horse—sloppy as they can be—what you hear is often what you get, warts and all. Yet, for every missed note or botched part, there is also an undeniable soulfulness there, and the unpredictable spontaneity can often result in magic.

There is precious little of either to be found on Road Rock and Red Rocks Live. All too often, this feels like just another gig for these guys, with everybody simply playing their parts.

Heart of Gold (2006/DVD)

In terms of overall quality, Jonathan Demme’s 2006 film documentary of Neil Young’s shows at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium may be the single best document of a Neil Young concert to date. If nothing else, it is certainly the warmest.

Beautifully shot, much of Heart of Gold finds Young and a “band” that sometimes numbers as many as forty musicians and singers, bathed in gorgeous pastel shades that only serve to enhance the overall quiet ambience of this film. Heart of Gold is a concert experience that conveys a sense of comfortable, fuzzy warmth that is only matched by the music itself.

The songs, mostly from Young’s then most recent Harvest sequel, 2005’s sadly overlooked Prairie Wind, are also some of the most personal of his career. Appropriately, they are often accompanied by stories ranging from how Young came to acquire Hank Williams’s guitar to the pride of a father witnessing the blossoming of his daughter into a fully grown woman. There is also an underlying acknowledgment of Young’s own mortality in this performance, as the artist had just recently lost his father, Scott Young, to Alzheimer’s disease, and survived his own narrow brush with death, in the form of a 2005 brain aneurysm.

Despite the fact that it often seems there are nearly as many musicians on the stage as there are people in the audience, there is also a sense of reverence (perhaps owing to the legendary concert venue where the film was shot) and quiet understatement to the performances here.

Heart of Gold is the most elegantly sublime of all Neil Young’s many concert performances documented on film.

CSNY Déjà Vu Live (2008/CD/DVD)

In sharp contrast to the warm and fuzzy feelings generated by Prairie Wind and Heart of Gold, Young’s next project would go to the opposite extreme. Living with War, released in 2006, is his loudest, most cranked up-sounding record since 1995’s Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam.

It is also his most pissed off.

Like a number of other artists of this period (the most notorious being the rather unlikely Dixie Chicks), Young chose to voice his own objections to President George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq through his music. In Young’s case, this objection came in the form of Living with War, a cranked up to eleven collection of songs that Young himself described at the time as his “folk-metal-protest” record.

While his decision to tour the record with CSN&Y (Crazy Horse would have seemed the likelier choice) was a somewhat curious one, the results as documented on the Déjà Vu Live CD and concert film are often surprisingly explosive.

Although the Freedom of Speech tour captured on Déjà Vu Live was billed as another CSN&Y reunion, the concert itself is more of a case of the other guys serving almost as Neil Young’s backing band. Almost all of the songs here come from the Living with War album, along with a sampling of songs from the other guys in CSN with similarly political themes like Graham Nash’s “Military Madness” and Stephen Stills’s sixties protest anthem “For What It’s Worth.”

For a bunch of guys most often labeled as old, laid-back hippies, Crosby, Stills, and Nash also really rise to the challenge of the material. For the most part, the performances seen and heard here really do rock.

But what makes Déjà Vu Live such a fascinating concert film is the stuff that happens in between sets and mostly offstage, once the concert is over. With much of the country polarized across political lines at the time, you see people in the audience who came to hear the hits like “Suite Judy Blue Eyes” and “Helpless” booing the band and extending middle-finger salutes during the more heavily anti-Bush songs.

One guy is even seen leaving the concert saying he’ll never listen to a CSN&Y record again because of the band’s vociferous objections to Bush and to the Iraq war.

Apparently, this guy had never heard of songs like “Ohio.”

Sugar Mountain—Live at Canterbury House (Recorded in 1968, Released in 2008/CD/DVD-A)

The first entry in the Archives Performance Series is this acoustic concert recorded in 1968 at the rather unlikely location of a church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In between projects at the time—Buffalo Springfield had just split up, and Young’s first solo album was still a few months away—Young was also said to be quite unsure of himself as a performer when this show took place.

Right up until the time of the concert (which to everyone’s surprise had sold out), Young was reportedly so nervous about performing and about how he would be received, he had to be gingerly talked into going out there by manager Elliot Roberts. Once he was finally relaxed enough to perform, the concert that then unfolded (and is subsequently documented here) was one that in many ways provided the blueprint for all of his solo shows in the many years of his long career to follow.

In between songs, Young delivers the folksy, homespun sort of raps that pepper his acoustic concerts to this day. One of the most off the wall heard here concerns “Classical Gas,” the instrumental hit made famous by Mason Williams.

It’s also a revelation to hear a song like “Broken Arrow”—which on record is a sprawling and ambitious epic psychedelic suite in the Sgt. Pepper or Pet Sounds vein—stripped down to its raw core, revealing that a strikingly beautiful song, minus all of the studio gimmickry, was right there all along.

Among the other highlights on Canterbury House are “Sugar Mountain” (the very same version that first appeared on the anthology album Decade and as the original B-side to the “Cinnamon Girl” single), and early versions of songs like “I’ve Been Waiting for You” and “Winterlong.”

As a period piece capturing a future legend who was still very much in the process of discovering his own voice at the time, Live at Canterbury House 1968 is an essential listen for hardcore fans and a fascinating snapshot in time for the rest of us.

Live at the Fillmore East (Recorded in 1970, Released in 2006/CD/DVD-A)

With the release of this legendary performance from Bill Graham’s equally legendary New York City music venue the Fillmore East, the hunger amongst Neil Young’s biggest fans for a full concert from the Crazy Horse period featuring the brilliant late guitarist Danny Whitten was finally satisfied … sort of.

While there has been some grumbling among these same fans over what songs actually did (or didn’t) make the final cut (“What? No Cinnamon Girl?”), as well as some complaints over the somewhat short length of this CD, there is really very little to bitch about on Live at the Fillmore East.

Fans who have long salivated to hear the wonderful guitar interplay between Young and Whitten in a live concert setting should be more than satisfied with the goods delivered here—particularly on the lengthy guitar showcases “Cowgirl in the Sand” (which convincingly tops the studio version from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere) and “Down by the River.” Together, it is these two songs that make up the centerpiece of Live at the Fillmore East.

It’s also really cool to finally hear Whitten’s “(Come On Baby Let’s Go) Downtown” in its proper context (the live version here is also the same one heard on Tonight’s the Night). An early version of the oddball track “Wonderin’” that eventually showed up decades later on Neil Young’s goofball eighties rockabilly album Everybody’s Rockin’ probably comes the closest thing to being the lone clunker here.

For those who can afford the high-end equipment needed to support it, the high-resolution mixes heard on the DVD are also a real treat. Crank this baby up, and the next-door neighbors will swear you’ve got a live band playing in your living room.

Live at Massey Hall 1971 (Recorded in 1971, Released in 2007/CD/DVD-A)

Live at Massey Hall 1971 is yet another of those legendary Neil Young concert performances long rumored to exist locked up in a vault somewhere, without ever seeing the light of day until now.

Its release in 2007, so many years after the fact, comes only by way of Neil’s tireless trolling of his own unreleased catalog for the Archives project. Albums like this one serve as a reminder of why we as fans can only thank both God and Neil Young that the artist has so meticulously (and obsessively) recorded and cataloged nearly everything he has ever done the way that he has. That said, a big part of the fun in watching the Archives project finally come together after years and decades of waiting, has been the slow but steady recent trickle of legendary performances such as this one.

First off, it needs to be said that this is easily the best of all Neil Young’s many recorded and officially released live acoustic performances.

What makes this one so special, though, is that it is for all intents and purposes the precursor to Young’s career-making album Harvest. Here, he is heard trying out his then brand new, never-before-heard music—songs that he later become famous for like “Old Man” and “The Needle and the Damage Done”—for the very first time.

The songs are also not always heard the same way as they would come to be known when released in their final, finished form. Two of Harvest’s most famous songs, “Heart of Gold” and “A Man Needs a Maid,” for example, are presented here as a single piece—in the form of a medley called “A Man Needs a Maid/Heart of Gold Suite.”

The performances heard on this and several other songs that eventually became parts of Harvest are so powerful they led producer David Briggs to lobby Young long and hard for releasing this concert as his new album, rather than the studio recordings that came out instead. Even after Harvest became the monster hit and commercial breakthrough it was, it has been said that Briggs continued to feel—strongly—that they had gone the wrong way.

In addition to the Harvest material, Live at Massey Hall also features stripped-down versions of Young’s two guitar showcases from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” as well as acoustic takes on singles like “Ohio” and “On the Way Home.”

If you had to choose just one solo Neil Young acoustic concert to add to your own collection, this would be the one to own.

Dreamin’ Man Live ’92 (Recorded in 1992, Released in 2009/CD)

Dreamin’ Man Live ’92 is a collection of live performances of the songs that eventually made up the final track listing for the classic 1992 album Harvest Moon.

Since the performances are all taken from shows recorded before the album actually came out, this is not so much a fully realized concert album as it is a document of the artist trying out his then new material on a live audience (much as he had once done for Harvest at Massey Hall).

For those already familiar with Harvest Moon, one of the first things you’ll notice about Dreamin’ Man Live ’92 is the difference in the sequencing. The only songs that maintain their positions on Harvest Moon here are the title track (#4) and “Old King” (#8).

The songs also feature much smaller arrangements. Stripped of any studio sheen—not to mention the backing of Ben Keith and the rest of the Stray Gators—all that’s left are Young’s voice, guitar, and the occasional piano and harmonica. This is definitely bare-bones Neil Young.

In the case of “Harvest Moon,” what this means is that you may find yourself missing those breezy-sounding cymbal brushes, lush backing vocals, and especially that lonesome pedal steel that lend so much to the song’s lyrical imagery of a gorgeous summer night under wide-open, starlit skies. To his credit, Young still manages to nail the electric guitar part on his acoustic, though.

The backing vocals are likewise missed on songs like “Unknown Legend,” and especially on “War of Man.” However, in the case of the latter, the lack of any backing choir vocals only serves to better bring out the lonesome cry of Young’s guitar and voice. What once sounded so lush on Harvest Moon seems far better suited to a more desolate-sounding album like On the Beach here. Played alone at the piano, “Such a Woman” takes on an almost hymnlike quality. “Natural Beauty” is likewise another track that sounds more powerful in a stripped-down arrangement for solo voice and guitar.

Although Dreamin’ Man Live ’92 will never be mistaken as a replacement for the original Harvest Moon, these early, embryonic versions of its songs make for a very worthy companion piece to that classic album.

Neil Young Trunk Show (2010 Theatrical Release/DVD/Blu-ray Release TBD)

As the second installment of a rumored trilogy of Neil Young concert films by award-winning director Jonathan Demme, Trunk Show is about as far removed from the warm intimacy of its predecessor Heart of Gold as—well, as a big rock show in a hockey arena is from a smaller performance in a theatre or club.

Compared to the mellow, folksy vibe of Heart of Gold, Trunk Show is all big arena rock bombast. The camera angles veer wildly from crowd shots (on what are presumably handhelds), to crystal-clear high-definition images of all the action occurring onstage. Recorded during a stop at Philadelphia’s Tower Theatre during Young’s Chrome Dreams II tour, Trunk Show features performances of songs from that album like “Spirit Road” and a searing fifteen-minute-plus version of “No Hidden Path” that, even at his sixty-two years of age, is just as ear-splitting and intense as anything the artist has recorded.

In addition to fan favorites “Like a Hurricane” and “Cinnamon Girl,” Trunk Show also features live performances of rarely played songs like On the Beach’s “Ambulance Blues” (yes!) and even the old Squires surf instrumental “The Sultan.” He is backed in the film by a band including longtime cronies Ben Keith, Ralph Molina, and Rick “the Bass Player” Rosas.

A DVD/Blu-ray is planned, but no release date has yet been set.