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

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Human Highway

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Human Highway

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1.  Carry Me

2.  See The Changes

3.  Through My Sails

4.  Prison Song

5.  Homeward Through The Haze

6.  Black Coral

Side B:

7.  First Things First

8.  Human Highway

9.  And So It Goes

10.  Taken At All

11.  Long May You Run

12.  As I Come Of Age

This was requested a while back, and I erroneously thought it couldn’t be done; turns out this was totally doable and a fun Thanksgiving project!  This is a reconstruction of the three-times aborted third album by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.  Human Highway was initially begun in 1973 and scrapped; then a second attempt was made in 1974 after their triumphant tour, but scrapped again; a final attempt to turn the 1976 Stills-Young Band album Long May You Run into a full-blown reunion of the quartet was again unsuccessful.  This reconstruction attempts to piece the most complete recordings from these three sessions into a cohesive and finished album that would have been the follow-up to Déjà Vu.  All the best source material was used, volume adjustments made and crossfading used to make two continuous sides of an LP. 

1970 spelled the end of supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.  Succumbing to the egos of four prominent singer-songwriters in their own right, the quartet disbanded to allow all four members time with their own (ultimately successful) projects; namely the illusive-anyways Neil Young, how had success with his solo albums and with Crazy Horse.  But the legacy and the amazing four-part harmonies of CSNY begged for a reunion, and that is exactly what was intended in 1973.  Regrouping at Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Studios in Hawaii, the quartet worked on new material and about half of an album was rumored to be recorded.  The album was allegedly titled Human Highway, and Graham Nash even organized a band photo-op as a possible album cover.  But the same old egos and preoccupations prevented the album from being finished and the material was left on the wayside.  Nash's contributions from the 1973 Human Highway sessions (“Prison Song”, “And So It Goes” and “Another Sleep Song”) were rerecorded and released on his solo album Wild Tales at the end of the year.

The following year, the music industry's cries for a reunion must have drifted into their ears, as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunited for a summer and fall 1974 tour that showed the band in a harmonious and energetic shape.  Touring to promote the newly-released greatest hits compilation So Far, the three-to-four hour concerts allowed the quartet to showcase a number of new songs that would theoretically constitute the Human Highway album, ready for another studio attempt.  At the conclusion of the tour, the group again assembled into the studio record Human Highway.  But clashing personalities again got in the way of the music, particularly Graham Nash’s refusal to sing a minor note inside a major chord.  Neil Young  infamously walked away from the project unannounced after only less than half of an album was recorded.  All of the Human Highway originals were later rerecorded for the various members’ solo albums: Nash’s “Wind On The Water” and David Crosby’s “Carry Me” and “Homeward Through The Haze” were rerecorded and used on the duo’s 1975 album Wind On The Water; Stephen Stills’ “My Angel’, “First Things First”, “As I Come Of Age” and “Myth of Sisyphus” were rerecorded for his album Stills; the band’s version of Neil Young’s “Though My Sails”, dating back to the 1973 Human Highway sessions, was released on his album Zuma. 

By 1976 Human Highway was closed with no plans for construction, not surviving two recording attempts.  By this time, CSNY had coalesced into two halves: David Crosby and Graham Nash continued their eternal musical and personal friendship by recording their album Whistling Down The Wire, while Stephen Stills and Neil Young continued their partnership stemming back from Buffalo Springfield by recording the album Long May You Run.  Legend has it that it was Neil Young who invited Crosby and Nash to fly to Miami and add their vocals to the album that Stills and Young essentially had in the can at that point, effectively transforming it into an official CSNY reunion and attempt at a third album.  It is noteworthy that both halves were working on originals that had originally been written for the Human Highway project, such as Crosby’s “Time After Time” and Young’s “Long May You Run”.  Crosby & Nash added their backing vocals to a handful of Stills & Young tracks, and the quartet recorded new versions of “Human Highway” and “Taken At All”.  To this day it is unclear why, but those two tracks were left on the cutting-room floor and all of Crosby & Nash’s vocals were wiped from the mastertapes.  Long May You Run was released as simply The Stills-Young Band, destroying any chance at a CSNY 1976 reunion album and the Human Highway was demolished forever.    

My attempt to repave Human Highway is actually quite a difficult one that unfortunately involves very fuzzy logic: what songs to include?  Graham Nash has been quoted that there would have only been ten songs on the actual album, but in adding up all contenders for the album, we have anywhere between 20-30 songs!  Also one must examine the continuity of the three session: as each recording session was abandoned, those possible tracks were shifted elsewhere and thus Human Highway received a complete facelift each time CSNY attempted to record it; by 1976, it probably wouldn’t have even been called Human Highway!  For this reconstruction to be successful, we must ignore this continuity and hobble together tracks from the 1973, 1974 and 1976 sessions as contenders for one excellent Human Highway album, rather than making two—or even three—separate average to ‘pretty good’ Human Highway albums. 

To build my Human Highway, we will have two guideposts: the first being that the bulk of the album is to consist of the songs debuted during the 1974, which were: “As I Come Of Age”, “Human Highway”, “And So It Goes”, “Prison Song”, “Another Sleep Song”, “Carry Me”, “Long May You Run”, “My Angel”, “Pushed It Over The End”, “Traces”, “First Things First”, “Love Art Blues”, “Myth of Sisyphus”, “Time After Time” and “Hawaiian Sunrise” (note we are including Nash’s Wind Tales tracks since they were originally destined to be a part of Human Highway in 1973, even though by the time of the1974 tour they had been released as a solo project).   The second guidepost is that we must exclude the songs that only featured one member of CSNY and focus on the tracks that had a studio recording which featured at least three of the four members of CSNY.  That whittles our list down to only “Long May You Run”, “Human Highway” and “Pushed It Over The End” featuring all four members of CSNY and “As I Come Of Age”, “First Things First” and “And So It Goes” featuring three of the four members.  I have also dropped “Pushed It Over The End” from the running order, since it was essentially an average-quality Neil Young live recording with CSN’s vocals overdubbed, and didn’t seem to fit onto my reconstruction. 

We only have five Human Highway songs thus far that feature three or four members of CSNY.  Next we look at the songs recorded at the three Human Highway sessions that were not played during the 1974 Tour: from the 1973 sessions, we can use the original CSNY recording of “Through My Sails”, found on Zuma; the full CSNY version of “See The Changes” from a 1974 rehearsal session; “Homeward Through The Haze” is allegedly the only completed full CSNY recording from the 1974 sessions; and we can also use the full CSNY version of “Taken At All” from the aborted 1976 CSNY sessions, as well as an early mix of the Stills-Young Band track featuring Crosby & Nash’s vocals, “Black Coral”.  That leaves us with our required ten songs, but I included two additional tracks that featured two of the band members—“Carry Me” and “Prison Song”—to round off the album to two approximately 20-minute sides. 

The album opens with “Carry Me” from C&N’s Wind On The Water.  Although this track lacks Young and Stills, I felt that without the song, Human Highway has no real strong album-opener.  Next is Crosby’s “See The Changes” a full CSNY version found on the CSN box set.  After Young’s “Through My Sails” from Zuma, we have the Wild Tales version of “Prison Song”, again only featuring C&N.  While there exists a CSNY rehearsal recording from 1974, the tape is too degraded to be used here.  I chose the Wild Tales version because, honestly, “Prison Song” is the highlight of the album and an absolute necessity.  “Homeward Through The Haze” from the CSN box set follows, with the side concluding with the early mix of “Black Coral “ featuring all four members, found on the Carry On box set.  Although the sonic characteristics of “Black Coral” seem more “70s” than the rest of the album, it creates a solid ending to Side A and can be excused because of the anachronistic nature of this project in the first place. 

Side B opens with “First Things First” from Stills, a solo recording that luckily for us, also featured C&N.  My own personal remix of the unreleased CSNY-version of “Human Highway” follows, with “And So It Goes” from Wild Tales continuing, which also features C&Y.  The prerequisite CSNY song suite is created here with the CSNY recording of “Taken At All” from the CSN box set is crossfaded into the early mix of “Long May You Run” from the first pressing of the Decades box set.  Concluding the album is the “As I Come of Age”, a second track from Stills to feature C&N.  This Human Highway becomes a very solid and spectacular album, more idiosyncratic and adventurous than either CS&N or Déjà Vu.  Although it is a CSNY album that has 100% Crosby, 100% Nash, 83% Stills and 66% Young, Human Highway is a road that now can be taken at all. 

Sources Used:

Crosby, Stills & Nash – CSN (1991 CD box set)

Crosby, Stills & Nash - Rarities Volume 2: 1970-1974 (bootleg, The Chief's Tapes)

David Crosby & Graham Nash – Wind On The Water (2000 CD remaster)

Graham Nash – Wild Tales (original 1990 CD master)

Neil Young – Zuma (1993 CD remaster)

Neil Young – Decade (original CD pressing)

Stephen Stills – Carry On (2013 CD box set)

Stephen Stills – Stills (2007 CD remaster)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR, Audacity & Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

*md5, artwork and tracknotes included