Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Prisoners of Rock'n'Roll

A bootleg from the 1986 North American 'Live in a Rusted-Out Garage' tour, where Neil Young billed Crazy Horse as 'the third best garage band in the world' (I think he said the Stones were best, but didn't disclose who was second). This is a triple album on tie-dye coloured vinyl. It's a professional quality recording, and I also have a bootleg video of what is probably the same gig — presumably it was broadcast in the US. In fact, the back cover of the record says it was licensed from Reprise Records, so maybe this is a legitimate bootleg?

The gig is at Cow Palace, San Francisco, the same venue where the Live Rust album and Rust Never Sleeps film were recorded. Like Rust Never Sleeps, it's one of Neil's grand concept stagings, with lots of theatre between and within the songs. The road-eyes from Rust Never Sleeps are still there, but there's a garage door, and everything is still super-size: an enormous telephone on which Neil's mom rings to enquire about the strange incense smell, big cockroaches scuttling across the stage (and the bug men come to de-infest them at one point). Richard saw this tour in Denver, and I'm very jealous because, when it finally came to Europe the following year all the theatre props had been dropped, presumably to save on freight.

There are three official Neil Young & Crazy Horse live albums, with overlapping tracklisting, so who needs another one, which also has Cortez the Killer and Like a Hurricane, right? Well, you could argue that the live versions here of mid-eighties songs like Violent Side are better than the horrible mid-eighties production on the studio versions. But that's a detail that can't disguise the fact that, no, no one needs it, and I don't play it often (partly because I heard that coloured vinyl wears faster than normal black vinyl — is that true?), but it still, literally, makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up at some points. There's something about Crazy Horse: always the same; never the same.

MusicBrainz entry for Disc 1 of CD version of this album
Disc 2