Neil Young: Lucky Thirteen

This is a reminder of the bad old days when record labels would issue compilation albums with just a handful of unreleased songs, so that the fans would have to pay album price for a single's worth of value. And we did. This example has an extra bitter taste because it seems to have been issued by Geffen in an attempt to claw some more money from the five years or so that Neil Young was signed to them, a relationship which all parties later saw as a mistake.

I think it is alleged that the version of Sample and Hold on this album is an alternate take from that which appeared on Trans, but if it is the differences are almost indistinguishable without close listening. Of the 'new' songs, Depression Blues is a so-so nostalgia song from the Old Ways period. The most interesting songs are the live recordings of Neil with the Shocking Pinks, which show a quite different side of that band from the pure pastiche they did on Everybody's Rockin'. Don't Take Your Love Away From Me, in particular, with its horn section, connects forward to the Blue Notes band of four or five years later, which I really like. Then, towards the end, there are a couple of live Blue Notes recordings, including Ain't it the Truth, which is not currently available elsewhere.

At the time, these were the first glimpses of the long (20 years) awaited Neil Young Archives. There is a lot of astounding unreleased material in those archives: just wait until you hear Ordinary People from 1988. Last month the first instalment of the Archives releases finally appeared. For me it's an anti-climax (I've had a bootleg CD of that show for years and years).

MusicBrainz entry for this album