This bootleg is called "World Tour" after the gigs where it was recorded. But the world tour had only one venue: the Boarding House in San Francisco (apparently only 300 seats), where Neil played two sets a night for five nights.
There are two reasons these gigs were special. The main one is that they took place in May '78 (the back of this CD says 24 May, but experience says don't trust the info on bootleg covers; after all the photo on the cover looks like it's from the 1987 European tour) and included the first public performance of songs that would appear on Comes a Time and Rust Never Sleeps, plus one each from Reactor and Freedom, months before the first of these albums was released (Comes a Time came out in September '78).
So when Neil sings "My, My, Hey, Hey, Rock'n'roll is here to stay, It's better to burn out than to fade away", the audience has never heard these words before. It sounds like they liked them.
Nine of the fourteen songs on the CD were unreleased at the time of performance. In most cases the performances of these songs are already 'mature', and they don't sound dramatically different from the released versions (allowing for the fact that Neil is playing solo at guitar and piano throughout). But there is one dramatic difference — the second special thing about these gigs — in the acoustic version of Shots, which not only has acoustic guitar instead of the distortion-overload of the Reactor version, but also has an extra bridge lyric. I don't think Shots has been played live much, if at all, since 1978.
The main thing I hope for in any Neil Young gig is a sizeable dose of new unreleased songs. I have no time for the nostalgia mob who shout for Sugar Mountain or Heart of Gold.
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