Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Winterlong

The bootlegs section here gets quite a lot of hits, though I suspect many visitors to the pages leave disappointed by the lack of merchandise for sale or downloads. Sorry, guys.

This double-CD set says it's from the Music Hall, Cincinatti on 10 February 1970, though more reliable sources suggest that the Cincinatti show was actually on 25 February. As is so often the case with bootlegs, the photos on the cover are from several years later (looks about 1976 to me), by which time Danny Whitten had died and been replaced by Poncho Sampedro, and Jack Nitzsche was no longer part of the band. Pedantry, pedantry, I know — but that's what collecting bootlegs is about…

… That and finding the unusual arrangements, the rare songs in the setlist, extended solos or amusing between-song banter. Generally speaking the new official Fillmore 1970 release (recorded ten days later than this one) is now a more sensible place to start as a document of this tour. However, this gig offers the trainspotter advantages of a performance of It Might Have Been, which resurfaced on the International Harvesters tours in 1984 but has yet to be released, and a 19-minute version of Down by the River with some raggedly glorious soloing. It's also a full record of the acoustic and electric sets, so you get eight songs of Neil solo and eight with Crazy Horse. The acoustic set has a rare version of Broken Arrow performed solo without any of the production trickery that was plastered over the studio version. I'd be lying if I said it was any good, though.

I can't remember quite when and where I got this, but it must have been after 1989, so I suspect it was a record fair at the Leadmill in Sheffield. The price label says £30. Sheesh.

MusicBrainz entry for disc 1
disc 2