It must be nice to be Associate Editor Andy Greene at Rolling Stone who gets to write about Neil Young a lot, seeing the legendary musician is so prolific on many fronts.
Since we feature so much of Greene’s writing, here he is.
Sometimes writing is a thankless job, so thanks Andy, for your good work bringing Zumans and Rusties so much Neil Young news. We like it.
Greene writes about “Live at the Cellar Door” without a gazillion adjectives.
“After 44 years in the vault, the recordings are finally coming out on December 10th on CD gram vinyl. The set mixes Buffalo Springfield classics like ‘Flying on the Ground Is Wrong’ and ‘I Am a Child’ with new songs like “After the Goldrush” and ‘Tell My Why.’ Young plays ‘Cinnamon Girl’ on piano for one of the very few times in his long career. The shows also featured the live debuts of ‘Old Man’ and ‘See the Sky About to Rain.
These performances by Neil are epic in their intimacy, his connection with the audience, and the quality of Young’s voice. It feels like the sky about to rain. Listen to “Flying on the Ground is Wrong” and it feels like you are in the room.
You can listen to the new release at the Rolling Stone link below:
Album reviews of Neil Young’s newest soon-to-be released “Cellar Door” can be churned out ad nauseam. How many can we read?
Henry Hauser’s review at Consequence of Sound, an on-line music publication, tells the story of what happened in 1970, starting with a failed CSN&Y recording session at Young’s home in Hawaii.
Instead, band members went their separate ways and put out their own solo albums that made Billboard’s top 15. Young’s released “After the Gold Rush,” but, Hauser writes – not surprisingly – not everyone got behind it.
“Langdon Winner dismissed it as unlistenable, likening Young’s voice to ‘pre-adolescent whining.’ Not to be outdone by his erstwhile bandmates, the competitive Canadian continued writing new material and scheduled back-to-back concerts at Carnegie Hall.”
“Hoping to shake off the cobwebs following a five-month layoff, Young played a series of warmup gigs at The Cellar Door, an intimate D.C. music club. Live at the Cellar Door, the most recent installment in Young’s Archive Performance Series, captures these six solo sets.”
Of the music, Hauser gets sappy, using words like poignant, purposeful, ardent, penetrating, enthralling, dreamy, superb, wistful. There may be a record number of adjectives used in this review.
“The introspective ‘Tell Me Why’ finds the singer grappling with unsolvable quagmires in a wounded, elegiac timber (‘Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself?’).”
The UK’s UNCUT has done it again in its ongoing love affair with Neil Young.
John Mulvey’s blog talks about the new release ‘Live at the Cellar Door” and its timing, just as the magazine was putting out its Uncut Ultimate Music guide dedicated to Young.
“Just as we thought we’d put together a comprehensive survey of all his recorded work, another Archives Performance Series release crept onto the schedules,” Mulvey writes.
Also:” One of the great pleasures of ‘Live At The Cellar Door’ is the way it illustrates how malleable Young’s songs can be. ‘Cinnamon Girl’, for instance, is hardly diminished by that lunging riff being replaced by a quasi-baroque flurry of notes. Listen out, especially, for a powerful moment when Young sings ‘Loves to dance/Loves to…’ and allows himself to be overwhelmed as his playing suddenly shifts from tenderness to a new bluesy intensity. ‘That’s the first time I ever did that one on the piano,’ he notes at the death, and I’m not sure he’s done it again many times since.”
The Neil Young Ultimate Music Guide goes on sale towards the end of this week. The 148-page guide, through interviews from the NME, Melody Maker and Uncut archives, reveals that, among many things, Young has been consistent in his contrary single-mindedness. The new reviews of every one of his albums provide a similarly weird and gripping narrative, finding significant echoes and hidden treasures on even his most misunderstood and neglected ‘80s records.
BH adds: The 1970 solo tour occurred between November 30 and December 5. It included eight shows on five dates, six of which were at the Cellar Door in Washington, DC and the final two were at Carnegie Hall, New York.
The setlist grid can be found here on Sugar Mountain:
Forty three years after those shows a new album from the Archives Performance Series, Live at the Cellar Door, is being released on December 10th. The performance was culled from the six Cellar Door shows. An intimate venue, The Cellar Door was located on M Street NW at 34th in Georgetown. With this in mind it becomes quite clear why Neil is revisting Carnegie Hall playing solo for the first time since those two solo dates in 1970. The question remains….will he revisit the same setlists?
"I caught you knockin' at my cellar door
I love you, baby, can I have some more
Ooh, ooh, the damage done." -- Neil Young
“Like Bob Dylan, with whom he is most comparable, Young periodically falls in and out of favor with public taste, but at no point in the past has that stunted his ambition. ” by Mark Guarino, Chicago Daily Herald, 29 Aug 2003.
Neil Young on Tour
Sugar Mountain setlists
Tom Hambleton provides BNB with setlists, thankfully. His website is the most comprehensive searchable archives on the Internets about anything Neil Young related setlists. Goto Sugar Mountain.
It must be nice to be Associate Editor Andy Greene at Rolling Stone who gets to write about Neil Young a lot, seeing the legendary musician is so prolific on many fronts.
memphish on 
Albert Stromann on 
liza on 
Baz on 
