Originally posted on my Substack where you can find images, videos and more goodies.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
The Forum
Inglewood, CA
1978-10-23
Sugar Mountain
I Am A Child
Comes A Time
Already One
After The Gold Rush
My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)
When You Dance I Can Really Love
The Loner
Welfare Mothers
Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown?
The Needle And The Damage Done
Lotta Love
Sedan Delivery
Powderfinger
Cortez The Killer
Cinnamon Girl
Like A Hurricane
Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)
Tonight’s The Night
From the ‘Rust Never Sleeps’ Tour, one day after the Movie and official release was filmed and recorded in San Francisco, Ca.
Neil Young – guitar, piano, vocals
Frank Sampedro – guitar, keyboards, vocals
Billy Talbot – bass, vocals
Ralph Molina – drums, vocals
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Source:
SBD > ? > CDR > EAC > WAV > TLH > Flac
The Midnight Cafe’s Notes:
I feel like I’m a broken record when I repeat that I have trouble reviewing Neil’s acoustic sets. The thing is, I like them. I like these songs, and Neil plays them well. But they rarely sound all that different to me. Is one version of “I Am A Child” better than another? Probably. If you lined them all up, you could probably pick out some really good versions, but a random listen usually turns up a good one that sounds pretty much like most of the rest of them.
The sound is good, but there is a lot of crowd noise. It isn’t like an audience recording where you can hear some dumbo behind the taper just chatting away, but there is a lot of random clapping and cheering during the acoustic set. It makes me wonder if something was going on onstage or elsewhere. Was Neil or someone else doing something worth cheering for? Or maybe they just really love certain lines in the songs. It is a bit distracting, but not a big deal, really.
I do love when Neil plays piano during the solo sets. He does a very nice version of “After the Gold Rush” here.
“My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” is good. Neil gets really into this song with some nice guitar work, and then he keeps repeating “Hey, hey, my my…” several times at the end.
The electric set starts with “When You Dance You Can Really Love,” and it is a good one. It has this wonderful little solo. “Welfare Mothers” finds the whole band getting into a rowdy little groove
I love the Crazy Horse sound. When they are good (and they are often very good), they are so loud, raucous, rowdy, and wild. They sound like they could go off the rails at any moment, but they manage to keep the train just on the tracks.
“Needle and the Damage Done” is just Neil again on acoustic guitar, which seems weird. Before the song, you can hear someone – an announcer, maybe; I can’t tell – saying something about getting off the towers. I’m guessing some audience members were climbing on something, causing safety issues. I’m guessing again that this caused Neil to just play by himself for a minute until whatever was going on got cleared up.
“Cortez the Killer” is one of my favorite Neil songs. He’s got a few songs like this where his band will find this groove and then just play it and play it while Neil is laying down big guitar riffs until they transcend space and time. They absolutely nail it here, with the riffs growing bigger and bigger until they just explode. Neil uses a strange kind of clipped vocal that sounds slightly Jamaican for some reason.
“Cinnamon Girl” is loud and ragged and surprisingly short. We get the completed couplet with “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black” which always rocks. Before the encore of “Tonight’s the Night,” someone- I’m guessing a local DJ comes out and sputters some nonsense about Rust Never Sleeping and how “Tonight is the night,” while also seemingly berating them for not buying that album enough. The song is played pretty darn good, though.
Overall, this is a darn good concert. Turn it up and play it loud.
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