It's April, so let's have the long lost rawk'n'roll
2009-04-05 by Hal BerstramNeil Young and the Stray Gators – Last Dance
Seeing the Double K’s post of Saint Etienne’s cover of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” rang a bell with me as the Babe Rainbow and I were listening to a bit of Neil Young last week when on holiday in Wales.
No particular Welsh Connection to the Man Neil, it’s just good driving rock’n’roll. Specifically the album we were listening to was “Time Fades Away”, the never-reissued live album from 1973 recorded with the “Stray Gators” – not his regular Crazy Horse backing group, and not his regular set-list.
Coming off the back of a multi-billion selling LP (Harvest), Young went on tour in the US with a much harder-rocking sound and a completely new set of songs. Audiences, as usual, wanted to hear the old hits, and were rather pissed off. According to later reports by his road manager, Neil told them “don’t worry, if you stick around until the end of the set I’ll play you something you know.”
At the end of the set he started playing…. the first song from the set again. Punk rock, to be sure.
I must tell my other Neil Young anecdote here in case I don’t get the chance again… in 1983 Neil Young was told by his record company (Geffen) “we don’t like this synthesiser shit you’ve been doing, you must make a rock’n’roll record.” So he goes and makes a rockabilly record (“Everybody’s
Rockin’”, by “Neil Young and the Shocking Pinks”).
When interviewed later about this insanity, Young said, ‘what the record company meant to say was “you gotta make a HARD ROCK record.” But they didn’t say that. They said, “you gotta make a ROCK’N’ROLL record”. And this is
what rock’n’roll means to me’.
Genius.
Anyway, Neil, you certainly are a genius – which is why you must have your own reasons for not re-releasing your best live album of all time on CD. (One theory is that the master tapes were from a very early digital mixing system and somehow got fried).
But please spare a thought for the next generation who ain’t gonna know second hand vinyl if it pretends to be a UFO frisbee in the street. I don’t know if this is on legal download anywhere but I ain’t seen it. And this track deserves to be heard.
Download MP3 (0:00min / 0MB)
- discogs page
- for this criminally unavailable masterpiece - you might get lucky...
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