NEIL YOUNG : BLUE NOTES

 

Disc One (74:56)

  1. Intro
  2. Ten Men Working
  3. Hello Lonely Woman
  4. I'm Goin'
  5. Married Man
  6. Coupe de Ville
  7. Ordinary People
  8. The Days that Used to Be
  9. After the Gold Rush
  10. Crime in the City
  11. Bad News
  12. Life in the City

Disc Two (73:19)

  1. Intro
  2. Twilight
  3. Ain't It the Truth
  4. Hey Hey
  5. This Note's for You
  6. Welcome to the Big Room
  7. Tonight's the Night
  8. Sixty to Zero
  9. Soul of a Woman
  10. On the Way Home
    11.

Label : Crystal Cat Records

Venue : Jones Beach Music Centre, Wantaugh, New York, USA

Date : August 27th, 1988

Quality : Audience recording (A+)

Review (Old Grey Cat) : "Live music is better." It's a refrain heard fairly often on the Neil Young discussion group known as the Rust List. Why? Live, music often makes an even greater visceral impact than from a CD, LP or cassette-it's an immediate connection. You feed off the performer, he feeds off you and ... you're there, wherever there is, not stoned but STONED, and not from drink or drugs but from the music itself. In the hands of the master, it's a powerful tool. And guess what? In a live setting, few artists achieve what Neil achieves. Whether he's cranking out a greatest hits set or spinning his way through lengthy, unfamiliar songs, he commands the stage, pacing back and forth with his guitar a virtual machine gun loaded with killer chords.A tad hyperbolic? No. The two-CD Blue Notes is proof positive. Consisting of a fairly typical set from his summer '88 tour supporting This Note's for You, it contains a performance that is damn near transcendent. Kicking off with the groove of "Ten Men Working," Neil and the ten-piece Blue Notes deliver a set that, to put it bluntly, is other-worldly. Neil is in terrific form both vocally and on guitar, ripping out patented, emotion-filled solos seemingly without effort. Highlights, as you might imagine, abound. In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to leave any one song out-they're all that good.Be that as it may, I will single out a few. First up: "Ordinary People." A few years back, the excellent British music magazine Mojo named it as Neil's greatest unreleased song. At a sprawling 12 minutes, it catalogues evil done in the name of and for (and to) "Ordinary People" and includes several pyrotechnic solos courtesy of Neil. It's beyond amazing that this tour de force hasn't been officially released-it's bewildering. Same goes for the arrangement of "Days That Used to Be," which is presented in a stripped-down acoustic form. The song packs even greater emotional weight than the electric version found on Ragged Glory - which ain't half bad itself. Here, however, it becomes more of a dialogue between Neil and the audience, a summing up of what was and what might be: "People say don't rock the boat. . . ideas that seemed so right/have gotten hard to say." It reminds me somewhat of Bruce Springsteen's acoustic version of "Born to Run," in that the power moves from the music and melody to the words and vocal delivery-it's not a feat most performers can pull off. Neil does but, then, he's Neil. Two other highlights of this boot are actually the same song: a shortened, electrified "Crime in the City" and its 17-minute parent, the acoustic "Sixty to Zero," which is one of three bonus songs. Both are striking, notches above the version found on Freedom (though, as has been said elsewhere, that version is great) and the electrified take equals the frantic rendition found on Weld. The main difference for both versions presented here are the addition of even more lyrics. Like a Picasso painting, the ../images presented aren't necessarily connected except for the fact that they share the same canvas-but the end result, the overall impact, is one of pure artistry.As an audience recording, the sound here isn't perfect-audience chatter can be heard on the acoustic cuts. Yet, even with that drawback, this stands as a far better presentation of Neil's work with the Blue Notes than its official counterpart, the flat-sounding This Note's For You. Hopefully, when Neil's long-delayed Archives are released, one of the gems included will be the never-released live follow-up to that album, This Note's For You, Too. Until then, however, this will have to do.