In Barcelona, with Tim — the last day of our holiday — and during the record shop reconnaissance that also found me Trouble in Mind, I came across a Neil Young & Crazy Horse bootleg CD called Hard Luck Stories, allegedly recorded in San Francisco in May 1997. I paid 1,990 Pesetas for it, however much that is…
When I got it back home and opened up the case, the CD inside was a Neil Young bootleg, but from 1993, and it's the second of a two-CD set. On the plus side, it happens to be from the Finsbury Park show on my 28th birthday. On the minus side, the recording quality is terrible, I already have a tape of the whole show, and this CD only has the last 35 minutes of it.
That was a good day. My hopes were up as I'd picked up a birthday message from Melanie on my answering machine. James were great, and Neil's performance seemed like a celebration of his own career. And Otis's. And Bob's. The guitar break after "—the wind began to howl" made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, though neither of the recordings I have captures the feeling from being there.
Another plus is that the second half of the CD has five unreleased songs, mostly from the late '80s. Actually two of them — Boxcar and Ordinary People finally made it out on Chrome Dreams II last year. Having owned that album for three and a half months, I finally got to listen to all the songs last weekend, realising that I need to cram in my 'prep' for the Hammersmith shows that start tomorrow. Increasingly it's clear that I risk being stripped of my Neil Young stripes for my chronically lax behaviour. Of the series of six Hammersmith Odeon shows Neil is playing in the next eleven days, I am attending only two. Guy and Paul, meanwhile, are attending every one of them (at £70+ a time) and nipped across to Paris on Valentine's Day to see him there as well. I can't compete.
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I wondered how Last.fm could have licensed two tracks for playing on-demand from this bootleg album, given that the 'record label' that produced it didn't own the rights in the first place. On listening to them, it's clear that the tracks are not the versions on this CD: Down by the River is taken from the recently released 1970 live album, and All Along the Watchtower is Neil's performance with Booker T & the MGs from the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration
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Final note, out of curiosity: I can find several references to disc 2 of this bootleg out there on the web, but none to disc 1. Were all copies packaged, like mine, as a single CD inside a misleading cover?
MusicBrainz entry for this album
Wikipedia entry for this album
Rate Your Music entry for this album
Listen to two of the tracks not from this album at Last.fm
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