The sticker on the front of this says I bought it from Polar Bear on Ecclesall Road. Naughty, naughty, they shouldn't have been selling bootlegs. I was only too happy to buy, mind you. It must have been at the start of this decade, but somehow it didn't make it onto the records of my purchases that I was keeping by that time. Nor can I remember listening to it to any degree…
Which was an oversight, because it's pretty interesting to a Neil obsessive like me. It was recorded at the eighth annual Bridge School Benefit in October 1994, a few months after Sleeps With Angels came out. Neil always performs his new songs with special care and attention to detail, and here he plays them all on acoustic guitar with Crazy Horse backing (apart from four songs done solo acoustic and Piece of Crap done with Pearl Jam — in the tradition of bootleg typos, this is listed as Piece of Crab on the back of the CD). The acoustic playing gives a different emphasis to the title track from Sleeps With Angels and Change Your Mind, which is a typical Crazy Horse electric storm on CD, is by turns plodding and mesmerising. The softness of the playing, and especially of the beautiful backing vocals, brings out a pathos and tenderness in the lyric that you don't get with the electric version.
OK, I know you don't care about these details; but I find them diverting.
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