Music Arcades: Neil Young: Time Fades Away

Ah, the legendary and quasi-rare Time Fades Away. I say "quasi-rare" because if you type "Time Fades Away" into the search box at the top of your browser, the pop-up search suggestions include "Time Fades Away torrent", "Time Fades Away download", "Time Fades Away mediafire" and so on, so I'm guessing that if anyone really wants to hear this album, they can, without going to extraordinary lengths.

Still, the petition to release TFA on CD claims just shy of 15,000 signatures at the time of writing. Evidently there is demand. Still, albums that have never been released on CD feel a bit like those tribes deep in the rainforests of South America or South East Asia that have yet to come into contact with a white man or an iPhone. It seems inevitable and unavoidable that they will sooner or later, but in the meantime this last remaining vestige of innocence seems important to savour. Particularly if your the happy owner of the original vinyl album.

My copy is in mint condition. That could be because it's only ever had 10-20 plays. Yes, yes, yes, TFA is the first instalment of the much-celebrated ditch trilogy — though I don't think it was celebrated, or even named as such, at the time I got my copy. Every serious Neil Young fan should give it a few listens for the autobiographical elements of Don't be Denied and the contrast between the scabrous sarcasm of L.A. and Last Dance on the one hand and the soft sentimentality of the three solo piano songs on the other. But once they've done that, I think there are 20 other Neil Young albums that they'll want to play more frequently than this one — the other two in the trilogy for starters.

The picture on the cover was apparently taken at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. Neil returned there on 12 December 2008, and Paul and Guy had made the trip across the Atlantic to see him. There was a plan to recreate that cover photo some 35 years on. Roses were bought in expectation. But, as Paul tells me, the plan fell at one critical hurdle: they weren't allowed on stage to take the picture!

There is, I believe, one other Neil Young album yet to appear on CD: Journey Through the Past, an album so unloved that I don't think any petition is even in the offing. I reported previously that Journey had had a CD release, and indeed there is an Amazon listing for it. In fact there's also one for Time Fades Away on CD. However, it seems these were both test pressings only that never made it to full commercial distribution.