Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Neil Young - Homegrown



Neil Young – Homegrown

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)





Side A:

1.  Homegrown

2.  Little Wing

3.  The Old Homestead

4.  Love is a Rose

5.  Love Art Blues



Side B:

6.  Star of Bethlehem

7.  Give Me Strength

8.  Deep Forbidden Lake

9.  Pardon My Heart

10.  White Line





Happy Valentine’s Day!  What better way to celebrate this day of romance than with an album all about the loss of love and its effects thereafter!  This is a reconstruction of the unreleased Neil Young album Homegrown, the subdued and acoustic album primarily about Young’s separation from his wife Carrie Snodgress.  Originally meant to be released in 1975 as the proper follow-up to On The Beach, it was shelved in favor of the more electric and immediate Tonight’s The Night, never to see the light of day.  Since most of the recordings reported to have been featured on Homegrown are not available to listeners, this reconstruction attempts to compile all available songs that were at least recorded during the Homegrown sessions in order to present an approximate facsimile of what Homegrown could have sounded like; luckily there is just enough to make a ten-song album.  All songs have been volume-adjusted for continuity and album cohesion.



Neil Young has always been a man on the edge, a troubadour who embraced his inner-turmoil.  This was a characteristic that informed his music and ensured a long-lasting artistic integrity.  Presented with mainstream success that outshined his previous musical outlets with several hits from his 1972 album Harvest, Neil Young choose to intentionally follow-up the album’s commercial acoustics with more abrasive and difficult material to challenge his newly horizoned audience.  The subsequent albums were called “The Ditch Trilogy”, formed by 1973’s Time Fades Away, 1974’s On The Beach and 1975’s Tonight’s The Night.  All three projects shared the theme of loss and how Young dealt with it emotionally, as Young lost three of his closest confidants in the course of making the albums.  But “The Ditch Trilogy” is a misnomer, as it should have been the Ditch Tetralogy: the fourth and final recorded project during Young’s turbulent 1972-1975 era remained in his vault, as it not only was too personal, but the sound of the album was too reminiscent of Harvest, the album he strove to shy away from.  Regardless, it is the quintessential Ditch album, the final word of that era, although it was never actually heard. 



After being fired from Crazy Horse years earlier, Young had given guitarist Danny Whitten a second chance with a rhythm guitar spot in his backing band The Stray Gators for the upcoming Harvest Tour.  Unable to perform competently due to his rampant alcoholism and heroin addiction, Young fired Whitten a second time.  Within 24 hours, Whitten was dead, overdosed on alcohol and Valium.  The effect on Young was immense, as he felt he was responsible for Whitten’s death.  The initial outcome was Time Fades Away, recorded live on the subsequent tour, mere months after Whitten’s death.  The sloppy sound of anguish and denial—an artist in mourning with an inebriated backing band—Young has since regretted the album, possibly due to the sound quality of the album, recorded live by very early digital technology.  Time Fades Away exists solely as a document of this troubled time in Young’s career, which was only strengthened by an additional subtext of the tour: Young was growing apart from his wife Carrie Snodgress, the muse of his Harvest.  The freedoms of a rock star’s wife did not seem to gel with the pressures of a grieving and overbooked rock star, and the two became distant.



A brief interlude from the turmoil occurred as a hopeful writing and recording session with a reunited Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in mid-1973, resulting in the genesis of the Human Highway project (which was also reconstructed on this author’s blog).  Unfortunately, a second casualty temporarily ceased the project, as Neil Young and CSNY’s long-time roadie Bruce Berry overdosed on heroin, a habit that was introduced to him by none other than Danny Whitten.  Leaving Crosby, Stills and Nash to their own battling egos, Young recorded possibly the rawest and most anguished recording of the 1970s, Tonight’s The Night, between August and September.  A painful ode to both Whitten and Berry, the album was perhaps too raw and Young sat on the completed recording for the remainder of the year while road-testing the material, toying with the mixing and sequence, finding the best way to release the album.  This cathartic tour for a soon-to-be-released record became a stereotype for rock band excess, and as Snodgress later recollected, was the beginning of the end of her marriage with Young. 



With a more-or-less completed album in his back pocket and a slew of even newer songs, Young returned to the studio in February 1974 and recorded the third of his Ditch Trilogy, On The Beach.  While more refined than the previous Ditch albums, anguish still loomed over the songs while still soaked by the drug excess of the previous year’s tour.  With Young both emotionally and physically absent, the lonely and hungry eye of the rock star’s wife looked in other directions; surely he had taken other lovers while on the road, why couldn’t Carrie?  As the album was being released, Young's realization that Snodgress had been cheating on him unleashed a flurry of new songs about their disintegrating relationship and the break-up of their family.  Young was given a surprise opportunity to road-test his new material with a re-reunited CSN&Y, on a much-hyped national tour through the rest of 1974 that the band later called “The Doom Tour”.  During rehearsals for the tour, Young recorded one of his new laments, “Pardon My Heart”, as well as an acoustic backstage duet with The Band’s Robbie Robertson on another of his new compositions “White Line”. 



The miserable CSNY tour ended that fall, and in November Young went into Quadrafonic Sound Studios in Nashville to capture the heartbroken ballads he had written about Snodgress, including “Star of Bethlehem” and “Frozen Man”.  Temporarily returning home to his ranch, Young found Carrie with her lover and he kicked her out; it was officially over.  After this heart-crushing break from the recording sessions, Young returned to Quadrafonic in December, tracking a number of bleak yet razor-sharp songs of romantic despair that seemed to balance between western-tinged, full-band renditions and solo acoustic performances, some also tracked at his home studio Broken Arrow.  Songs recorded during these sessions include: “Separate Ways”, “Love is a Rose”, “Love Art Blues”, “Homefires”, “The Old Homestead”, “Deep Forbidden Lake”, “Homegrown”, “We Don’t Smoke It”, “Vacancy”, “Try” and “Give Me Strength.”  In January 1975, final recordings for this new project, now called Homegrown, were tracked in LA at The Village Recorder, including “Little Wing”, “Kansas”, “Mexico” and “Florida.”  The exact tracklist of Homegrown was never published but it is believed to include any number of the aforementioned 17 songs from the Quadrafonic, Broken Arrow and Village Recorder sessions, as well as “Pardon My Heart” and “White Line” recorded during The Doom Tour. 



While Young was uncertain about releasing Homegrown because of its brutal honesty (he even claimed he couldn’t sit through the entire album), the label was excited for Young’s return to a more delicate sound after his recent abrasive albums.  In typical Neil Young fashion, that was never to be.  In the oft-repeated story, Young previewed Homegrown to a party of friends; after the album finished, the rough cut of Tonight’s The Night—still unreleased from 1973's work—played afterwards.  More impressed by the later work, The Band bassist Rick Danko suggested to release Tonight’s The Night instead of Homegrown.  And that is exactly what Young did that June of 1975 and Homegrown as it’s completed album has never been heard outside a select few.  



Only a handful of the various songs from the Homegrown sessions have been released over the years, wetting fan’s appetites for what was purported to be Neil Young’s strongest and most emotionally vulnerable album.  Many have tried to reconstruct Homegrown, but the truth is that not only do we not know the official tracklist, but less than half of the material is even available to us officially or even unofficially!  Young himself only recently performed some of the material live for the first time, in recent decades.  In an effort to retain the best possible soundquality and historical accuracy, my reconstruction of Homegrown will focus only on recordings dating from the mid 1970s, as well as only studio or soundboard recordings.  With this criteria, that reduces the number of available songs to ten, which luckily is enough to make a complete album.  While not precisely the mythical Homegrown, this could be viewed as an approximation culled from the Homegrown sessions, what the album might have sounded like.



The album begins with the title track, “Homegrown”.  For the actual unreleased album, the recording would have been more downbeat and probably Western; since that recording is unavailable, we’ll use the Crazy Horse re-recording dating from November 1975, from the album American Stars n Bars.  Next is the delicate “Little Wing” and majestic “The Old Homestead”, both taken from Hawks and Doves.  Somber “Love is a Rose” from Decade follows, with Side A concluding with “Love Art Blues”; while the unheard Homegrown album version was probably a solo acoustic recording, here we will use the slick full-band Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young live recording from CSNY 1974.  Side B opens with “Star of Bethlehem” from American Stars n Bars.  The studio “Give Me Strength” allegedly sounded much like the eerie “Will To Love”; since unavailable, we will use a live recording from 1976, taken from the GF Rust Chrome Dreams bootleg.  Following is the exquisite “Pardon My Heart” from Zuma and “Deep Forbidden Lake” from Decades.  The Homegrown album version of “White Line” would have been an acoustic duo with Robbie Robertson; since unavailable, we will end the album as it began, with the Crazy Horse re-recording from November 1975, taken from the GF Rush Chrome Dreams bootleg.  



Sources Used:

Neil Young - American Stars n Bars (2003 Reprise CD remaster)

Neil Young – Chrome Dreams (bootleg, 2008 Godfather Records)

Neil Young – Decade (original CD pressing)

Neil Young – Hawks and Doves (2003 Reprise Recerds CD remaster)

Neil Young – Zuma (1993 CD remaster)

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – CSNY 1974 (2014 CD box set)





flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

36 comments:

  1. Looks like I have my Valentine's day date! Thanks for this, looking forward to the next one!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks very much : been waiting to see what you did with this one. Very nice, considering how many songs are not available. Young was supposed to have released the lp as part of his Archive series, but to date nothing has come of it. Yours will be a very nice substitute. Thank you again, and as always, you never fail to impress. Please keep up your great work !

    ReplyDelete
  3. Excellent, and thank you very much!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wow! Nicely done! Thank you for the history and for the reconstruction.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Have listened to this 3 times now; I love the way you put it together, it has a very nice flow to it.
    Very nice job, indeed !

    ReplyDelete
  6. I have a challenge for you. Attempt this one at some future point:

    http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-sun-moon-herbs-mw0000659208

    ReplyDelete
  7. Looking forward to hearing this one as I have a live CD version of this.

    Tracks were,

    Homegrown
    Little Wing
    Bad News
    Star of Bethlehem
    Love Art Blues
    Homefires
    Try
    Pardon My Heart
    White Line
    Give Me Strength
    Kanas and Mexico
    Separate Ways

    ReplyDelete
  8. For the first time I'm having difficulty downloading this one. When I click on the orange "Download Now" button, it just opens up a window for some product called "Sports Addict" -- any advice?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Close whatever window that pops up, and then try the orange button again. Should work the second time.

      Zippyshare kinda sucks, but we're low on options.

      Delete
    2. Always works the second time around, just ignore the pop-ups

      Delete
    3. What I do is: hover over the download button, note down the URL, type URL into browser.

      Delete
  9. There are no words.. you are a golden god.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Hey Sonic, I was wondering since you had a small break at the end of last year did you work on more albums to release monthly this year. Or is that just how your schedule freed up and you will eventually go back to every other month. Either way I can't tell you how much I appreciate your attention to detail and love your renditions to albums that never were. Do you think you will ever tackle the full pink floyd the wall album since many people are trying to add back tracks that were scrapped for some reason or another. Love your work and keep up the terrific work.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not really. I had (and still have) about a years worth of reconstructions (including upgraded ones) that were either finished or like 90% finished. It wasn't a matter of running out, but a matter of having the time and motivation to sit down and write up these essays that seem to get longer and longer each time.

      Also, not to get too personal, but I had a sudden death in the family approx 15 months ago and in hindsight that's about when I lost motivation to keep this blog updated monthly.

      Unsure about The Wall. I'll look into it.

      Delete
    2. and about The Wall, I did it a while ago: http://the-reconstructor.blogspot.com.br/2016/12/bricks-in-wall-and-pros-and-cons-of.html

      Delete
    3. Personally I would rather have a single disc version than a 3 disc version of The Wall. (working on my version now, have it down to 50mins 30secs) Some great songs on there and the filler stuff between just gets in the way of them. Just my opinion naturally.

      (Sonic, sorry for your loss.)

      Delete
    4. And here is my single disc version.
      https://whatif-misc.blogspot.com/2017/12/pink-floyd-wall-1979.html

      Delete
  11. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  12. I'm sorry to hear that you had that occur. That's a rough patch that I can relate to, not to get personal. You really have been an inspiration for me and my love of music to find even more obscure albums myself. Your blog is probably the only place of solace I find when I'm down myself. It really keeps me motivated to keep learning. You dah man. Keep strong this fan needs you.

    ReplyDelete
  13. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Hey Sonic! Just wanted to say thank you so so much for the reconstruction, and to say thank you for this blog and all the hard work you've put into it! Cannot wait for the next reconstruction! Thank you so much for all of these reconstructions and I'm very sorry for your loss.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Thank you, Sonic. I toughed out the (several) Zippyshare diversions and have downloaded this and the latest Pink Floyd upgrade. Great blog, great ideas, great execution. Thanks again.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Another brilliant creation. Thank you :)

    ReplyDelete
  17. Hey there - as always, another great piece of work. I thought this may be a bit insubstantial (in a Smiley Smile kind of way) given that so many of the proposed tracks aren't available in any form and yet for me, you've created something better than Chrome Dreams. Love it, and as always, look forward to the next one, whatever it may be.

    ReplyDelete
  18. I've started my own website similar to this one, called "Albums That Should Exist."

    https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/

    I have a lot of material there already, including my version of Neil's Homegrown. Here's my songlist:

    01. Homegrown (Neil Young)
    02. Winterlong (Neil Young)
    03. Love Is a Rose (Neil Young)
    04. Separate Ways (Neil Young)
    05. Try (Neil Young)
    06. Mediterranean (Neil Young)
    07. Little Wing (Neil Young)
    08. The Old Homestead (Neil Young)
    09. Deep Forbidden Lake (Neil Young)
    10. Love Art Blues (Neil Young)
    11. White Line (Neil Young)
    12. Mexico (Neil Young)
    13. Kansas (Neil Young)
    14. Homefires (Neil Young)

    My goal there isn't to make as close as to what Neil would have put out, but instead to collect all the good songs from that time that didn't get on any official albums around that time.

    https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/04/neil-young-homegrown-1975.html

    ReplyDelete
  19. what was the name of carrie's new love? anybody interview him? i'd like to add his comments to my notes of this cd

    ReplyDelete
  20. Listening to the official version now, yours has a major advantage in not including Florida!

    ReplyDelete
  21. Now the NY has his official edition coming out,we can compare. I suspect I'll prefer YOURs as you do superior work! Better than the majors. Rock on!

    ReplyDelete
  22. Well,I've compared them. Yours makes the official release seem like like a piece of crap. This is coming from a lifelong,major NY fan. I like the albums no one else does. I liked Landing On Water. That's right. I still like it. But this...I'll be playing YOUR version,Sonic!

    ReplyDelete
  23. The FLAC link seems to have been removed from the download site ... Can this be re-upped? I would love to hear it and compare it to Neil's version ... Thanks for the original upload and, hopefully, the new download!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I will be updating this very very soon.

      Delete
    2. Have you seen a new link to Homegrown yet? Would love to download it. Cheers Chris

      Delete
  24. Any interest in tackling some more Neil albums?

    ReplyDelete
  25. Would love to listen to this. Can you please let me know were I can find the download link? Thanks.

    ReplyDelete