I have no idea where or when I got this. I remember being intrigued when I saw it because it said it was recorded with Crazy Horse in 1984, and I was unaware that Neil had played with them at all between Re.ac.tor in 1981 and the Rusted Out Garage Tour in 1986. But here was Crazy Horse playing a couple of songs that would eventually turn up on Landing on Water, plus several others I didn't know.
The latter included Stand By Me, which I assumed was the old Ben E. King classic, but turns out to be an original, with Crazy Horse's Billy Talbot on lead vocals. It may even have been written by him for all I know (bootleg albums are not good at providing publishing credits). Alternatively it could be left over from Neil's project to record a whole album of songs with the same titles as other songs (Goin' Back and Comes a Time being other vestiges of that conceit).Anyway, it's not a great song. Neither are the others that remain unreleased — evidently for a reason.
I imagined that this show at Santa Cruz's Catalyst Club was part of a Crazy Horse tour that I'd just missed somehow, but we visited Santa Cruz on our Californian Bridge School/Rustfest jaunt last October, and do you think we dropped in on the Catalyst Club? Of course we did! And it's tiny. Not as tiny as the Old Princeton Landing, I grant you, but not a lot bigger. So clearly this is one of the 'backyard' venues that Neil uses for his beneath-the-radar shows, where he wants to test out new material in front of an audience. The audience deal here was to act as guinea pigs for five new songs in return for the old favourites that make up most of the last three sides of the album.
For those sides (all coloured vinyl, natch: red for disc 1 and green for disc 2), it's pretty much business as usual for Neil and the Horse, albeit with an odd mix that has Neil's vocal very high, and much harsher definition for Poncho's guitar and Ralph's bass drum.
The one new song that isn't crammed in to the beginning of the set is the title track, Touch the Night which always sounded like a Crazy Horse standard, even when played by other musicians on Landing on Water. Critics greeted that version, a trifle lazily, as a "Like a Hurricane for the '80s", and on this showing that was justified because the Horse give it exactly the same arrangement (with Poncho on keyboard) as Hurricane. The trouble is that it's not quite a good as its predecessor (two years later, when Crazy Horse convened again for a large scale tour, they'd dropped Touch the Night and reverted to Like a Hurricane).
Nevertheless, the value of this bootleg is in the Horse's version of Touch the Night and in the songs hitherto unavailable elsewhere (as I write, Amazon.com has a listing for the unreleased Toast album as forthcoming, though as it was recorded 16 years after this bootleg, it's unlikely to included any of these songs). They are of "collectors only" quality, but then I'm a collector.
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