A selection of rad bootlegs + other music. Come fly with me.
DANGER BIRD
Someone over on ILM was asking for lengthy, freaky live versions of “Danger Bird,” Neil Young’s doomiest jam ever, originally released on the superclassic 1975 LP, Zuma. And, you know me, any excuse to listen to Neil Young bootlegs… So here you go, almost forty minutes worth of “Danger Bird” – four performances in total, spanning the years 1990-2004. It apparently took Neil & Crazy Horse more than 15 years to learn this song for the stage. The first two are with Crazy Horse, the third is a solo piano version (the only one ever?) and the fourth is back with the Horse again, plus the full Greendale Choir. Fly above the city, like a shadow on the sky, my friends! Fly!
Hemmed and hawed a little bit about including a Tonight’s the Night-era show in our Summer of the Horse trek – are these really Crazy Horse gigs? They’re Santa Monica Flyers gigs! And yet! Take a look at this flyer promoting the fall ‘73 English tour … “Neil Young WITH CRAZY HORSE.” Anyway, we’ve got Billy and Ralph in the band, and with Nils brought back into the barn in recent years, I’m willing to consider this a part of the overall saga.
And it’s not as though we really need an excuse to listen to this stuff, right? It’s fucking great. A while back, Neil suggested that he’d be releasing the Rainbow Theatre show officially – but since the Roxy LP came out last year covering roughly the same period, I think we’ve got a ways to go before that happens. Too bad – it’d be great to hear it in all its multitrack glory. As it stands, this audience tape is not too bad, though. It’s a wild performance overall, with Neil testing the patience of his audience with rambling patter that ranges from the scuzzy to the nonsensical to the puzzlingly sincere. Definitely interesting to hear Neil at this stage, seeing where the boundaries lie between audience and performer.
The music is great, too, obviously, with a full run-through of the original, then-unreleased Tonight’s The Night kicking the evening off. It’s the same songs as Roxy, but the vibe is more aggressive and exploratory, I think. The band knows the material backwards and forwards by now and they’re willing to turn it all inside out – especially on the title track reprise, where things float dangerously close to the edge of chaos. They’re peering into the void! The temptation to call this tour “tequila-soaked” is high, but I don’t know – it might be more of an act. The acoustic section is surprisingly clear-eyed, with focused readings of “Flying On The Ground” and “Human Highway.” The long “Helpless” that follows is one of the greatest versions of the song, too, with a painfully raw vocal and harmonica solos worthy of Dylan in ‘66. (Then again, the lurching “Cowgirl In The Sand” that closes the evening sounds pretty toasted).
Tying it all together is the touching dedication of “Don’t Be Denied” to Danny Whitten. “He was almost here,” Neil says. And for a second, his friends conjure up his ghost. The Horse is spooky on this evening in London, keeping jive alive at the Rainbow.
A couple weeks back I hopped on Zoom for an hour and change with the dude in the middle of the above pic — the mighty Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, who served with Neil Young and Crazy Horse for several decades. A dream come true! Retired out in Hawaii these days, Poncho is as cool as you’d imagine (and as big a Neil fan as the rest of us). Thanks to Rick at WB for making it happen, Jason and Justin at AD for the support, Andrew for transcribing. And thank you, Poncho! Some of these stories will likely be familiar to longtime Horse aficionados, but what the hell — they’re great stories. Set aside some time for this interview … like a live performance of “Cortez The Killer,” it’s an epic.
The Heat Warps has made it to 1970 in its epic trek through the Electric Miles era! These shows are legendary, of course — the idea of seeing Miles’ band and the Whitten-era Crazy Horse on the same night at the same venue is the stuff that dreams are made of, people. Sitting through that non-playing motherfucker Steve Miller’s set? Well, it’d be worth it (Kidding, love you, Midnight Toker!). Anyway, the Miles music here (some of which was officially released as part of Sony’s Bootleg Series) is positively electrifying, a steaming, bubbling cauldron of that good old Bitches Brew. Drink full …
Over on the Archives website, Neil has been putting up videos from the Crazy Horse Catalyst 1990 gig on a weekly basis. Looks like it’ll be an amazing addition to the official canon — that’s the show I called one of the best Crazy Horse shows ever back during our Summer of the Horse journey last year. And Neil agrees! Of course, the Horse and the Catalyst have a deep relationship; the band first played the Santa Cruz club in late 1975 during the Northern California Bar Tour. And in the spring of 1996, Neil and the gang took a break from their long residency at the even-smaller Old Princeton Landing for a two-night Catalyst stand. This show isn’t quite as good as the 1990 tape, but it is still fucking magnificent, with a setlist chock full of tunes you might’ve heard the band play back in ‘75 — great versions of “Country Home,” “Cortez,” “Drive Back,” “Danger Bird” … There’s a moment during a very slow/lumbering “Like A Hurricane” where the entire band gets totally blown away. Neil and Crazy Horse are very much on top of their game here, elemental and raw, Neil’s guitar ringing out over the coastline. Dig in.
Happy 75th birthday to Neil Young! I don’t know about you, but I’m glad to be hanging out on the same planet for a while with Shakey. To celebrate both Neil’s big day and the 45th anniversary of his super classic Zuma LP this week, here’s a live megamix I put together for Aquarium Drunkard — all “Danger Bird” all the time. Forty minutes worth! I could’ve done 140 minutes, but decided to keep it to a manageable length. It’s a fun listen, with a lot of Crazy Horse leviathan rock, plus a very rare solo piano version.
The Zuma saga will finally get another chapter when The Archives, Vol. 2 hits later this month. I’ve been lucky enough to hear the whole thing — and you can read my rave review in the latest Uncut Magazine! I think you can even get it digitally right now … Anyway, the Dume disc on Vol. 2 is absolutely magical, full of that perfect guitar sound and the spirit of the Horse. It’ll send you dancing across the water, I promise …
Infinite Fool has three radical Horse shows for you today. I don’t want to make any wild exaggerations, but 1976 was the best year of all time ever for Neil and these guys. The first two – Fukuoka and Paris – I am very familiar with. The last, a Madison, WI gig, is new to me. I’m sure it is incredible.
Update! The Madison audience tape is pretty rough quality, but the performance is a motherfucker.
Infinite Fool has a whole mess of live Neil for your downloading pleasure, spanning the years 1970 and 2010, including the Danny Whitten-era Cincinnati show (the best), a solo Carnegie Hall set, and a 2010 “Twisted Road” monster. You probably want all of it
Welcome to Fresno! Neil brought Crazy Horse back in 2018 for an all-too-brief run of shows way off-Broadway at a few central California theaters. There was a big change, though. Poncho retired! Thank you for your service, Mr. Sampedro. In his place was The Only Man For The Job, Nils Lofgren, whose association with Neil and the Horse goes all the way back to the Whitten-era of the band. Nils’ main gig has been with Brooooce for the past several decades … pretty funny to imagine how radically different Neil and the Boss are as bandleaders. But Nils is a consummate pro, and he fits right back in. It’s not just a Crazy Horse reunion, it’s a Santa Monica Flyers reunion (minus the late/great Ben Keith, of course) — Nils’ weirdly genius piano part on “World On A String” will take you right back to those tequila-soaked dayze.
This Fresno show is really a pleasure to listen to. During this long journey we’ve been on the past couple of months, Crazy Horse has often sounded nothing short of superhuman. But here, there’s a fragility, a vulnerability, a mortality that really comes through. It’s not a bummer at all, though — if anything the vibe is purely celebratory, from the majestic opener “Big Time” to the absolutely astounding “Cortez.” The mellower moments are lovely, especially the deeply felt “Winterlong,” with its extended outro and passionate vocals, and “Too Far Gone,” which Lofgren turns into an Exile On Main Street-worthy weeper with his slide guitar work. Very nice.
Things are loose, even by Horse standards – the shows were proudly billed as “unrehearsed,” after all. But that gives the set a freewheeling edge. Check out the gleefully malicious “Fuckin’ Up,” which shows that deep in the hearts of these 60- and 70-somethings still lurks a raggedy-ass garage band.
Summer of the Horse, in glorious Rust-O-Vision! I actually don’t spend too much time with Live Rust-era bootlegs, because, you know, Live Rust exists. It’s one of the classic double live experiences (40 years old this month!). I revisited it recently and it still sounds amazing – though heavily overdubbed in comparison to this audience tape, which was recorded a day later.
The Forum show is a cool alternative look at Neil Young and Crazy Horse on what would be their last full-fledged tour for some time. They’re no longer the soulful stoned cowboys of 1976. They’ve been replaced by coked-up demons! If you read reviews of this tour, there’s a common thread: these shows were fucking loud. Those giant Fender amps were props, but make no mistake, the real equipment was turned way up. As a result, this is a harder-edged, more metallic Horse, made all the more crunchy on this tape. It’s less subtle than what came before, but it’s also pretty damn exciting. Just crank “Sedan Delivery” and get into it.
The Rust tour works on pretty much ever level: a career-spanning retrospective, a showcase for new material and a winning (if admittedly kinda half-baked) theatrical concept. In Inglewood, we get pretty much the standard Live Rust setlist, with the notable exception of a lovely “Already One” in the acoustic set and a down-and-dirty “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown” in the electric set (followed in a slightly too-on-the-nose fashion by “The Needle and the Damage Done”). Neil’s guitar work is nothing short of amazing – no one else sounded like this in 1978, especially on stuff like “Like A Hurricane” and “Cortez the Killer.” It isn’t so much soloing as it is sculpting, using that insane volume to fill an arena in an alchemical way. It’s so good we can even forgive Neil his cringe-inducing reggae-mon accent at the end of “Cortez.”
