Music Arcades: Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Live at the Fillmore East

Can't seem to get away from Neil Young these past few weeks. This first instalment of the 'Performance Series', titled Volume 2, within the Neil Young Archives, touches on a nerve close to the spinal cord of Music Arcades.

To explain why that is, here are some reasons for me not to buy this album. I already have a lot of Neil Young albums (!) Specifically, I already have three albums of bootleg live recordings from Neil's tour with Crazy Horse in early 1970, including Winterlong, and another that is taken from the same Fillmore shows where this album was recorded. Then there is the issue of the Neil Young Archives themselves, which I have been waiting for since 1987 (! again) The choice of this performance for the first release in the series seemed strange to me. I guess it was led by marketing considerations, and they'd surely have looked to Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series for lessons. But the first volumes of that series contained a stack of unreleased songs, whereas there are none here. Finally, there was a more-than-sneaking suspicion that this album would be re-released later in a more all-encompassing version, so I might have to buy it all over again.

I've said it before — so have many others — and I'll say it again: there are so many recordings these days, legal and illegal, of Neil Young shows specifically and of rock music generally, that picking out a tiny fraction of them to hoard seems anachronistic and even a little perverse. Music is no longer made out of discrete particles; it is an ever-flowing stream again. Buying CDs is like scooping a cup out of the stream and putting it on a shelf — why not just leave it in the stream where it belongs and where your enjoyment is more rooted in the moment, more sensitive to context?

I have a little nostalgia for recorded-music-as-tangible-product, but not much. Certainly not enough for the pain of losing it to outweigh the gain of valuable floorspace and wallspace from getting all this stuff somewhere out of sight. (And when I can get it out of sight, will I sell it or store it? If, by then, collections have retained enough value to be worth selling, then I won't sell. If they lose all their value as collectors items, I shall probably store the 30% that have sentimental value, and ditch the rest.)

Meanwhile, as of two months ago, that mythical all-encompassing version has been announced. Long-term Neil Young Archive-watchers know that announcements come and go every few years but have yet to bear any fruit. This one does look credible, however, with Neil going publicly on record about it, and defending the decision to make the Archive a blu-ray release, which means that it won't play on normal CD players.

Guy summarised fans' initial responses to this on the Rust list:

There are broadly three camps:
I'll buy all the kit I need to see/hear/explore the archives
I can't afford to buy loads of new kit and an expensive archives box
I understand nothing about new technology…

I'm probably in the first camp, with the proviso that I'll wait a year or two until the price has come down and the glitches have been fixed (at the moment I'm feeling slightly smug about waiting to get an iPhone until the price came below £100 and 3G was added). When I get the blu-ray gear, I'll need to justify it in terms of "It's not for me, it's for The Boy" (expected any day now, by the way).

As for the album itself, it's a document of a different time in terms of live music logistics. The records (in Ghosts on the Road) suggest Neil played an early and a late show on 6 and 7 March, including both an acoustic and an electric set. Miles Davis was playing there at the same time, giving rise to his At Fillmore East, March 7 1970 album. And on top of that, according to the notes for this album, The Steve Miller Band opened the show. How?! And don't tell me: tickets for the whole evening were $0.75.