Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Powder Finger (Parts 1 & 2)

What a fantastic photo for the cover of Part 2 of this double-CD set. There were quite a few like this from this tour, I think. Apparently something about Neil's hair treatment in 1986/7 made it flare about more than usual. For this comes from the same Fall 1986 tour that gave us Prisoners of Rock'n'Roll, featured a couple of months ago. There was always a risk when I bought one of these bootlegs that I'd be getting something I already had but with a different cover (no chance to go home and check, because usually I'd buy bootlegs at record fairs that were only in town for one day). Happily that's not the case here: Pete Long's authoritative Ghosts on the Road record of Neil Young shows (Guy told me recently that a second updated edition is due soon) confirms that these CDs are from Minneapolis on 17 October 1986, while Prisoners is a month later.

By and large everything I said about Prisoners applies to Powder Finger as well. As I said about Crazy Horse, always the same, never the same. In this case, or on this listening, it's Down by the River that catches fire. Of course, I've got tens of recordings of Down by the River already (including one extra, which I got for Christmas last week on the new album that I was rude about recently). But I'm glad to have this one as well.

And a couple of things on the set list of this show that Prisoners doesn't have: live versions of Touch the Night and of Eldorado, in the latter case with different lyrics from the studio version that appeared three years later. Something odd happens at the beginning of Part 2, because Sample and Hold has no lead vocal and Computer Age has just three words sung in the first four minutes: "Cars and trucks". I assume this is a recording fault, but it has a quite interesting effect, showing the brutal rock arrangement of these songs stripped of the main focus of attention.