Neil Young will launch an official bootleg series this fall with his debut performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1970.
The solo acoustic show took place on December 4, 1970, three months after he issued his third album, “After The Gold Rush.”
“Listening to existing bootlegs, it seems that all the bootleggers got the second Carnegie Hall show,” Young writes on the Neil Young Archives. “There was one at 8:00 pm and one at midnight [about 27 hours later]. No one got that first one — the first time I walked onstage at Carnegie Hall, blowing my own 25-year-old mind.
“We have both show masters. That earliest show, the one no one made a bootleg of (that we can find), is the best one by a lot. Listening to it now, I hear things in my voice I’ve never heard before, singing those songs before they were recorded. After they are recorded, I seem to follow the recorded arrangement, but these takes are before those recordings.”
“This one — Carnegie Hall, December 4th, 1970, is very special to me,” he continues. “Change happens fast. As I have gone through these early bootlegs, Carnegie Hall, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion [2/1/70], Royce Hall [1/30/71] and others, they show a change, something you can hear — an evolution. My first time playing harmonica — Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, is heard as well as what the harmonica replaced — heard on earlier shows.
"That was interesting to me because I don’t remember exactly when I started playing harp until I heard that. At Carnegie Hall, I hear myself doing a new song, one about my ranch I had just moved to — ‘Old Man.’ Time flies.”
No release date has been announced for the launch of the series, which Young first revealed earlier this year.
“The big difference with many in the Official Bootleg series will be that the music is coming from our original master tapes,” the singer shared in May. “We have ripped off all of the original art from the bootlegs, continuing the tradition. No expense will be spared. The only thing different will be the radically better sound from our masters.”
Last month, Young detailed a number of archival releases are on schedule to surface before year’s end, including a pair of live projects with Crazy Horse and the release of the second volume of his box set series, which is expected to pick up where 2009’s “Vol. 1 1963–1972” left off. See also:
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