Category: Music

Show Review: Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Chicago, IL (11/15/76)

Neil Young
1976-11-15
Auditorium Theater, Chicago, Illinois, USA
w/ Crazy Horse

Early Show

Disc 1 (32:01)
01. The Old Laughing Lady>Guilty Train
02. Human Highway
03. After The Gold Rush
04. Pocahontas
05. Too Far Gone
06. The Needle And The Damage Done
07. A Man Needs A Maid
08. Sugar Mountain

Disc 2 (57:01)
09. Country Home
10. Don’t Cry No Tears
11. Bite The Bullet
12. Down By The River
13. Lotta Love
14. Like A Hurricane
15. Drive Back
16. Cinnamon Girl
17. Cortez The Killer(cut)

Late Show

01 Heart of Gold
02 The Old Laughing Lady
03 Journey Through the Past
04 Too Far Gone
05 Give Me Strength
06 The Needle and the Damage Done
07 A Man Needs a Maid
08 Tell Me Why
09 Sugar Mountain

10 Country Home
11 Don’t Cry No Tears
12 Peace of Mind
13 Lotta Love
14 Like a Hurricane
15 After the Gold Rush
16 Are You Ready for the Country?
17 Down by the River
18 Inca Queen
19 Opera Star
20 Eldorado

Tour: 1976 US Tour with Crazy Horse
Band: Crazy Horse, Line Up 3
Neil Young – vocals, guitar, keyboards, banjo, harmonica
Frank Sampedro – guitar, keyboards, vocals
Billy Talbot – bass, vocals
Ralph Molina – drums, vocals

Sources:

Source 1
Early Show Only

Lineage: Audience Master > Unknown generation > DAT > CDR > EAC > xACT 1.5b3 > flac(8)

Source 2
Late Show Only

SBD Recording
Artwork: Front, Back, Front 2

Source 3
Late Show Only

The “Joel Bernstein” 1976 soundboard collection I put up recently was very popular,
so here’s another 1976 soundboard.
I haven’t been at Dime too long, so I don’t know if it was put up recently.
If you missed it before, it’s definitely a keeper.
The sound is really superb.
I beleive this emerged among collectors as a commercial bootleg,
so I don’t know the lineage, but it sounds like it could be straight from the master or very low-generation.
Supposedly several songs were performed after these, but they were not recorded.
This recording was taken from the “Chicago Hurricane” bootleg. There’s a little sound dropout at 2:39 on Disc 1, Track 6, but it’s after the song has ended. This was on my original.

The Midnight Cafe notes:

Out of the four main artists that I used to post about every week, Neil Young is the one I know the least about. Truth be told, I’ve always been more of a Jack of All Trades and an Ace of None than one of those folks who know every last detail of an artist’s career. But I am pretty well versed in Dylan and the Dead and Van Morrison. I love me some Neil Young, but I have to admit I’ve not listened to every record, and I’m pretty hazy about most of his tours.

I mean, I know there was Buffalo Springfield and his tenure with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and of course Crazy Horse. I also know he’s played with lots of different bands with names like The Ducks and the Restless and Promise of the Real, but I’d be hard-pressed to give you dates on any of those or who was in them. But I’ve definitely listened to recordings of all those guys.

The point I’m belaboring to make is that I don’t know how to put this particular show into any type of context. I believe 1976 is a well-regarded year in Neil Young lore. He did a big tour of Japan and Europe with Crazy Horse in the spring, and a tour with them of the US in the Fall. In the summer, he toured with Stephen Stills, with whom he released an album called Long May You Run, but it ended badly.

This show comes from the middle of his American tour with Crazy Horse. He often did two shows a day on this tour. Each performance began with Neil performing solo on acoustic guitar and sometimes piano, and then Crazy Horse came out for a full electric set.

There is a soundboard recording of the late show, which apparently came from Joel Bernstein, a photographer and producer who hung out with Neil around this time. I don’t know all the details of that. Only audience recordings exist of the early show. I tried listening to the early show, but I couldn’t do it. It isn’t a terribly bad recording; I’ve certainly heard worse, but I just wasn’t in the mood. This is partially because I mislabeled it as a soundboard and was really annoyed when it was definitely not that. But the late show is a true soundboard, and it sounds terrific.

Listening to the acoustic set, I realize I don’t know what to say about it. Neil is in fine form, and he plays the songs well, but they sound more or less as they do on the records. For the most part, he’s not doing anything different with them, and he’s not blowing me away with raw emotion. Don’t get me wrong, they are great. I love these songs, and he performs them well; I just don’t know that there is more to say about them.

It opens with a nice version of “Heart of Gold.” My copy has some digital static a couple of times right at the beginning. “The Old Laughing Lady” is really good with a lovely harmonica bit in the middle. At the very end, Neil starts singing what the setlist calls “Guilty Train,” but I can’t find any information about it. It is just a snippet, really, but all the lyrics websites only list the lyrics, “Guilty train
Don’t whistle my way again,” which is repeated. Does anyone know anything about this song? If it even is a song.

“Journey Through the Past” is a lot of fun with this barroom-esque piano work. Neil switches to the piano or an organ during “A Man Needs a Maid,” and he also blows his harmonica, which gives it a really beautiful, haunting quality. The band comes out on “Country Home,” and they rock. About two minutes into the song, Neil seems to get confused, and he repeats the line “Leave myself behind” a few times. For a moment, the band seems like they don’t know what to do, and then they just jump into a great little jam.

“Lotta Love” is very pretty, but at the end it gets really soft for some reason. “Like a Hurricane” starts off kind of weird. Neil does this intro where he plays really fast and just kind of noodles for a minute, and then it kicks off into the actual song. It is loud and ragged and glorious. In the intro to “Are You Ready For the Country,” Neil says it is their first time playing the song. As it was written in 1972, that seems unlikely. Was he just talking about him performing it with Crazy Horse, or was this really the first time he’d played it live? Is there a Neil Young Base out there with listings of all his live performances? Whatever the case, it is a rollicking version.

“Down by the River” is one of my favorite Neil Young songs. It has an excellent groove, and it is a great launching pad for some classic Neil Young jamming. He does not disappoint this night. One of my favorite parts of the song is after the big jam; he comes back to the first verse singing, “Be on my side. I’ll be on your side,” and he just nails that moment here. From the big rowdiness of that song, he transitions to the subtle beauty of “Inca Queen” with this lovely synth keyboard and some very fine guitar picking. “Opera Star” and “El Dorado” finish us out, and they are rocking.

It is a very fine show overall. Well worth grabbing.

I’m a funny man. When talking about a GarciaLive release, I noted that in order to write more of these music reviews, I was just going to give them one good listen (instead of the three I initially was trying to do) and then just jot down my thoughts. These aren’t intended to be in-depth, full-on reviews, but just thoughts on a show. I listened to this show on my way to and from work, and I made notes whenever a song was good or interesting. The plan was to come home that night and write a review. That was Monday. By the time I got home, I was too tired to talk about anything. Then Tuesday came and Wednesday, and to be honest, I just kept forgetting to write. Here it is Thursday, and I’m finally getting this thing out. I could have listened to the show a couple of more times!

Maybe next time.

Jerry Garcia Band: GarciaLive, Volume One – Passaic, NJ (03/01/80)

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Since I’m attempting to review all of the Grateful Dead’s Dick’s Picks series, I thought it would be fun to review some of the Jerry Garcia solo releases as well. Ultimately, I’d like to do reviews of officially released live albums from all my favorite artists (plus some unofficially released ones). I’m still trying to figure out how best to do that. I originally thought I needed to give each performance a good listen three different times to properly review them, but that is taking too long. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t listen to music like I used to. It is mostly done in the car, and I don’t spend that much time in the car to be able to listen to a show three times before I review it. Not if I’m going to do more than one review a month anyhow.

These reviews won’t necessarily be proper ones then. More like impressions. I’ll just tell you what songs I enjoyed, and maybe a few that I didn’t.

I more or less randomly picked up After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80, a few weeks back, intending it to be the first Garcia review. I listened to it a couple of times – it is a great record – but then my sister came in from South Korea for a visit. I made her a playlist of songs I figured she’d enjoy because I knew I’d be driving her around a bit. To make things easier to play, I removed the Garcia album (and all other music) from my phone and added all her songs. When she left, I couldn’t remember which Garcia album I had been listening to. I wanted to give it one more listen before I wrote a review. I knew it was from a performance in 1980, saw that this GarciaLive disc was from that year, and I added it to my phone. Pretty quickly, I realized I had the wrong disc, but I just went for it.

Which is just another example of why I won’t be listening to these albums multiple times before I write my own thoughts.

I don’t know why the Garcia releases changed their name from Pure Jerry to GarciaLive (or why they are sometimes called something completely different). The first volume of the GarciaLive came after a four-year gap between official releases, one of the longest gaps since they started releasing them regularly.

Jerry Garcia’s main band, of course, was the Grateful Dead, but nearly from the beginning, he was doing side projects with lots of different people, under a variety of names. This more or less coalesced into the Jerry Garcia Band by the mid-1970s, though the band members regularly changed. 1980 is a really interesting period as it has Johnny d’Fonseca, who only lasted a few months on drums, and Ozzie Ahlers, who didn’t last much longer on keyboards.

One of the things I love about the Jerry Band shows is that they regularly played smaller venues than the Grateful Dead. While Jerry’s solo audiences did grow over time, they were routinely still smaller than what the Dead were playing to. In 1980, the Grateful Dead were playing coliseums and civic centers with capacities in the tens of thousands, while the Jerry Garcia Band was still gigging in small concert halls. On tour, he often played places with capacities of a couple of thousand, but in the San Francisco Bay area, he still often performed in places like The Stone or the Keystone in Berkeley that could only fit a few hundred. How amazing would it have been to see Jerry Garcia in a place like that?

I also love that the Jerry Band allowed Garcia to play lots of songs he wouldn’t necessarily be able to perform with the Dead. While they usually would play one or two Dead tunes in a set, and sometimes something from one of Garcia’s solo albums, they mostly did cover songs. They’d play old Motown tunes, reggae, jazz, early rock and roll, and so much more. Bassist John Kahn’s wife once noted that it was Kahn who often brought Garcia songs to play.

Which finally brings us to this show. This was the closing performance of a multi-week tour for the Jerry Garcia Band on the East Coast. It opens with an excellent version of the Grateful Dead classic “Sugaree.” Garcia takes a nice solo early on, then Ahlers gets his turn with some synth-heavy keys, and it closes out with another boisterous solo by Garcia.

That’s another thing I love about the Jerry Band – it is very much Garcia’s band. While Jerry was the biggest star of the Grateful Dead, the band was truly a cohesive whole. They played together. They listened to each other and had an uncanny ability to intertwine their individual notes into something singular. Garcia often soloed, but the band wasn’t just backing him up or playing behind him; they were making music together. From everything I’ve read, Garcia treated everyone in the JGB kindly – he paid them well and listened to their ideas – but there is no doubt this was his band. His name was on the marquee, and the audience was there to listen to him play. For the most part, the band is there to back him up. But Garcia also gives them time to shine. The keyboards often get a solo part, and sometimes even John Kahn will get a solo.

For the first few songs on the early show, Garcia’s guitar has a strange tone. I’m not a musician, I don’t have the technical knowledge to explain it, but it sounds a little high at times to me and screechy. By the time they are playing Bob Dylan’s “A Simple Twist of Fate,” it has gotten better, warmer somehow. The performance of that song is very emotional. You feel the sadness of the song in Garcia’s playing. He absolutely nails the final solo.

Ozzie Ahlers has a beautiful solo at the beginning of Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting Here In Limbo,” and then the band really pulls together with a wonderful bit of cohesive jamming in the middle. When I was listening to After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80, I fell in love with that performance of “That’s What Love Will Make You Do.” It is a brilliant version. This one isn’t nearly as good, but it’s still pretty damn great. Kahn’s basslines really stand out. The keyboards get a little crazy with it. The cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” is super fun with some good funky riffs.

Robert Hunter was the opening act for this show. He opened most shows on this tour. Apparently, Rachel Sweet was scheduled to be the opening act for this tour. She did perform a couple of shows, but then disappeared, and Hunter replaced her. I wasn’t able to find any information on why she left. The Hunter set is not included in this release, but he did come out and play with Jerry on two songs, “Tiger Rose” and “Promontory Rider.” I love Robert Hunter. He wrote some of my favorite lyrics. But he is not a great singer or guitar player. I have some unofficially released recordings of his solo shows, and they aren’t great. I mean, they aren’t bad, and it is cool to hear him perform the songs that he wrote. Those shows are mostly him by himself on a guitar, and they do not blow my mind. But these two songs with the Jerry Band backing him are terrific.

It all concludes with a scorching cover of Peter Rowan’s “Midnight Moonlight’ and a soulful rendition of The Beatles’ “Dear Prudence.”

If I’m being honest, I think After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80 has the edge over this release. It has more fire in it. Maybe the band was just tired after a long tour. I don’t know. But this is a very good show. I’ve not spent a lot of time with the Jerry Garcia Band in the early 1980s, but these two releases are definitely going to change that.

Here’s the track listing

Jerry Garcia Band
Capitol Theatre
Passaic, NJ
03/01/90



Disc 1
Early show:

  1. “Sugaree” (Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter) – 14:33
  2. “Catfish John” (Bob McDill, Allen Reynolds) – 9:56
  3. “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)” (Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Eddie Holland) – 9:05
  4. “Simple Twist of Fate” (Bob Dylan) – 16:16

Disc 2
Early show continued:

  1. “Sitting in Limbo” (Jimmy Cliff, Guillermo Bright-Plummer) – 12:40
  2. “That’s All Right” (Arthur Crudup) – 8:09
  3. “Deal” (Garcia, Hunter) – 8:22

Late show:

  1. “Mission in the Rain” (Garcia, Hunter) – 12:50
  2. “That’s What Love Will Make You Do” (Henderson Thigpen, James Banks, Eddy Marion) – 8:56

Disc 3
Late show continued:

“Dear Prudence” (John Lennon, Paul McCartney) – 10:22
“Russian Lullaby” (Irving Berlin) – 15:39
“The Harder They Come” (Jimmy Cliff) – 11:47
“Tiger Rose” (Robert Hunter) – 4:10
“Promontory Rider” (Robert Hunter) – 6:10
“Midnight Moonlight” (Peter Rowan) – 8:39

My Life in Music: The Smashing Pumpkins, Tulsa 1994

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The Smashing Pumpkins were hugely important to me as I was coming of age. MTV put “Cherub Rock” the first single from their newest album at the time, Siamese Dream, on heavy rotation. That got me to buy the album, and soon after I purchased their debut album, Gish. I loved them both. They contained some of the first music that I took really seriously. I listened to them over and over. I studied the different parts of the songs. I can remember taking my two stereo speakers, placing them around my head, and then listening to the music while lying on my floor with the lights out – the music swirling around my ears.

When I learned the Pumpkins were coming to Tulsa, I was so excited. I’d never been to a rock concert before. It is possible my parents took me to something when I was younger. My mother went to a lot of concerts in the 1960s, including pop bands like Herman’s Hermits and even The Doors. She used to catch Neil Diamond every time he came to town, but adulthood, responsibilities, and three kids kept her away from music for the most part while I was growing up.  I don’t think my dad was ever much for live music.

I think the only concerts I’d really been to were gospel groups. I remember seeing a group called Acapella in the very venue I’d be seeing The Smashing Pumpkins. That was part of the Soul Winning Workshop the Churches of Christ put on every year. We didn’t believe in instrumental music with our worship songs, so a cappella music was where it was at.

Anyway, the Pumpkins were playing at the Expo Square in Tulsa, which is one of those pavilion-type arenas with a big open area in the middle and stands circling around it.  The type of place you could hold a soccer match or a hockey event, but being Oklahoma, I think it was often used for rodeos and cow competitions. For my concert, the stage was set up on one side with the rest of the floor open to the audience. We had tickets in the stands. Front row, not too terribly far from the stage.

I was with my friend Dustin and someone else. Probably his friend Kris. I was so excited. 

For some reason on the floor, up near the stage, they had set these big concrete barriers. The type of thing you see on the highway when they are doing construction. They were just randomly set out for the first fifteen feet or so beyond the state. At the time I figured they were there to keep people from stage diving or moshing (do people still do that at concerts?). That seemed terribly stupid, as people were still going to do that, and now they were likely going to hurt themselves bashing into concrete. 

Security seemed awfully tight as well. There were a lot of guards standing around. I remember several fans up in the stands periodically trying to jump down to the floor. They’d run toward the stage, inevitably being caught by security and sent back up.  I remember one kid kept jumping down near us, getting caught each time. At about his fourth attempt, he was escorted out of the venue. 

A band called Red Red Meat opened for them. I’d never heard of them. I remember liking them, which was probably more of a product of having never been to a rock concert before and being overwhelmed by the entire scene. Still, I do remember wishing they’d hurry up and let the Pumpkins play.

When they did finish their set, they played The Wizard of Oz without sound on a big screen behind the stage. I thought that was cool for some reason. I thought everything was cool. This was all so new to me. I was just terribly excited to be there.

The band finally came on, and they rocked. I don’t remember much about the actual music except that it was awesome, and I could feel D’Arcy’s bass thumping inside my chest.  I don’t remember what songs they played. It felt like they played every song I knew, which would have been every song off of Gish and Siamese Dream.

But it is all fuzzy except for how wonderful it all was. I remember Billy Corgan being in good spirits. And then came the encore. I knew about encores from movies and TV shows, but I really thought they were something special. I didn’t realize every band always comes back. So I stood there clapping and shouting, hoping with all of my heart they would come play another song.  

It took them a while, but they did come back. I remember Corgan apologizing that it took them so long but that there was some old episode of Star Trek playing on the TV in the dressing rooms, and they got caught up in it. They played another song or two and then were gone for good. I stood there for a little bit hoping they’d come back again, but the lights came up and the crowd dispersed. 

The show was over, but that feeling lasted forever.

More Music, Please

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this blog. I know you all are probably tired of me whining about how I no longer get very many visitors, so I’ll spare you that this time. I will say that Google recently announced it is completely changing the way they do search. Gone will be the days when you searched for something and you got a series of links to websites that would likely provide you the information you were looking for.  Now it is all going to be AI chatbots, which is both dystopian and depressing. It will also kill the biggest way visitors come to the site.

But I’m not going to complain. What I am going to do is talk more about music. There is a realization that I spent over a decade providing music on this site, and that is all. Then out of the blue, I switched things up and started talking about music. Then I killed the music completely.

I’m sure many of you were like, WTF? Who cares about movies? I want music! Now, I will still not be providing music downloads on this site in any public way. But I would like to talk about it. I figure I’ll write some reviews of officially released live albums. I’ve been thinking about doing a series on the Grateful Dead’s Dick’s Picks releases for a while now, so that seems like a good place to start. And maybe I’ll review some unofficially released music.  That sounds fun.

I do realize that I’ve gotten pretty good at reviewing movies, but I’ve not done a lot of music reviews. Certainly not in a long while. I haven’t worked that muscle in a long time. It has gotten flabby. Movies are easy. You can talk about story and plot. You can dive into a movie’s themes and talk about what the camera is doing. Or how scary, or funny it is. I know a little technical information about movies, and can impart that information. But I’m not a musician. I know nothing about the technical parts of a song.

There isn’t a plot to a song either. Not usually anyhow, and I’m not really a lyrics guy anyway. I dig on the melody and what the instruments are doing and pay little attention to the words. Music is about how it makes me feel, and that is hard to describe. It is very difficult to write down in something resembling a review.

This will be doubly hard when talking about live albums and bootlegs. Those songs won’t be new. They will have appeared on studio albums and played in concerts many times. So I’ll have to concentrate on the music.  That will be a challenge.

But a fun one, I think.  

Anyway, I hope you enjoy.