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

Buffalo Springfield – Stampede

Buffalo Springfield – Stampede

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1.  For What it’s Worth

2.  Mr. Soul

3.  We’ll See

4.  Pretty Girl Why

5.  Down To The Wire

6.  Everydays

Side B:

7.  Sell Out

8.  My Kind of Love

9.  No Sun Today

10.  Bluebird

Happy Fourth of July!  What better way to celebrate the birthday of Murica with a bunch of expat Canadians who sang about the unfair treatment of peaceful protesters by the uptight US government!  This is a reconstruction of the unreleased Buffalo Springfield album Stampede.  The brainchild of more their label than the actual band, Stampede was to be released in the summer of 1967 to capitalize on Buffalo Springfield’s hit “For What It’s Worth”.  Due to internal band conflict—namely ego battles and the departure of vocalist/guitarist Neil Young and bassist Bruce Palmer—the album never materialized and instead the fractured Buffalo Springfield Again was released at the end of the year.  This reconstruction attempts to recreate what Stampede could have been, particularly focusing on full-band recordings rather than the assemblage of nearly-solo tracks as heard on the eventual Again.  This reconstruction is presented in mono and all songs are volume adjusted and sequenced for a cohesive whole.  And of course, as much Neil as possible! 

After a bidding war over the young Los Angeles band with stars in their eyes, Buffalo Springfield recorded their self-titled debut album and released it at the conclusion of 1966.  Although a powerhouse in the local LA scene, the album and its lead single "Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing" made little impact.  It wasn’t until lead singer and guitarist Stephen Stills witnessed the Sunset Strip Riots in November, in which local law enforcement unfairly cracked down on the counterculture 'loiterers'.  Influenced by the emerging madness and civil unrest of the 1960s, Stills composed “For What It’s Worth”, a cautionary tale of a government policing its citizens who should otherwise have the freedom to peacefully assemble.   Recorded in December, the song was released in January 1967 and hit the Top Ten nationally, becoming a peace anthem as well as eventual history as one of the greatest rock songs of the 20th Century. 

While “For What It’s Worth” was the song that made Buffalo Springfield, it was also the song that destroyed them, as the young band was not ready to attain superstardom so quickly.  Neil Young had to briefly leave the group in January due to epileptic seizures, but returned in time for their first recording sessions of 1967 in New York.  After working on several new compositions for a second album tentatively titled Stampede (Still’s “We’ll See”, Young’s “Mr. Soul” and guitarist Richie Furay’s “My Kind of Love”), Palmer was arrested for marijuana possession and deported back to Canada.  Throughout the next six months, Palmer was temporarily replaced by a number of revolving bass players including: Ken Forssi of Love, Ken Koblum of The Squires, Miles Thomas of The Poor, Jim Fielder of Blood, Sweat & Tears and The Mothers of Invention... and not to mention Buffalo Springfield road manager Dickie Davis who famously mimed the bass parts on a television appearance! 

The band went in and out of several studios in February and March with Fielder on bass.  Although the label thought they were tracking Stampede, the bend felt they were just killing time until the turbulence subsided: Stills’ “Pretty Girl Why”, “No Sun Today” and “Everydays” and Young’s “Down To The Wire”.  In April, the band tracked “Bluebird” with session player Bobby West on bass, as well as more recording and mixing done to the January recording of “Mr. Soul” in attempt to compile a follow-up single to “For What It’s Worth”.  Meanwhile, Atlantic Records capitalized on the success of the top ten hit by re-issuing the band’s self-titled debut album, dropping “Baby Don’t Scold Me” for “For What It’s Worth”.  The move worked and the album shot up the charts, unlike its original configuration several months before.  The label then booked Buffalo Springfield to pose for an album cover photo shoot for the Stampede album they were pressured to be making throughout the turmoil.   While this picture itself became a classic—with Davis posing as the missing Palmer, face obscured—Stampede never did, as the album never was. 

Aside from the missing bassist and thus a lack of a solid foundation, a second variable was at play: Neil Young.  In-fighting had developed between Stills, Young and Furay, all vying to edge their compositions into the band, resulting in each member essentially producing the sessions for their own songs.  By June, Palmer was able to return to Buffalo Springfield but Young had already left, attempting a solo career free of the Buffalo Springfield.  Young was temporarily replaced by Doug Hastings of The Daily Flash and then briefly David Crosby of The Byrds.  More studio works was done to ‘kill time’ during the summer: Furay’s “A Child’s Claim To Fame” and Stills’ “Rock ‘n’ Roll Woman” and “Hung Upside Down”.  Buffalo Springfield’s trajectory had only increased after playing Monterey Pop Festival and the band was surprised to find that Neil wanted to rejoin.  Unfortunately the damage was already done and by August the band realized they needed to deliver an album to Atlantic.

Oddly enough, the fractured and reassembled Buffalo Springfield scrapped most of the material recorded throughout the tumultuous year, and instead cobbled together an album mainly consisting of solo recordings.  Chosen was: the Palmer-less “Bluebird” and “Everydays”; the Young-less “A Child’s Claim To Fame”, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Woman” and “Hung Upside Down”; Young offered his own recordings of “Expecting To Fly” and “Broken Arrow” originally meant for his short-lived solo album; Furay offered his own recordings of “Sad Memory” and “Good Time Boy” (the later which was sung by drummer Dewey Martin and session musicians filling out the rest of the instrumentation!).  Only “Mr. Soul” featured all of the classic Buffalo Springfield lineup.  Despite being full of fantastic material, Buffalo Springfield Again was incongruent and was hardly Buffalo Springfield as a band.  Are these faults something we can correct?

Many people have theorized and reconstructed what Stampede could have been, but due to the lack of any finalized tracklist—or even the confirmation that the band believed they were making an album in the first place—the results vary wildly.  Despite this, there are two chief methods to organize the album: it could have either been a collection of the songs Buffalo Springfield were working on in 1967 before Young quit, or it could have been a cash-cow album by the label using unreleased 1966 material as filler.  Here we will attempt the former, making an album that would chronologically follow their debut album and replace Again with a more unified “band-sound” with Neil, rather than a stopgap collection to stand alongside both Buffalo Springfield and Again.  Furthermore, we will make the assumption that the Stampede album would have touted “For What it’s Worth” and the debut Buffalo Springfield will remain as it was initially released in 1966 without it.  Finally, this reconstruction will be presented in mono, which is what the Buffalo Springfield preferred. 

Side A begins with “For What It’s Worth”, taken from the Buffalo Springfield boxset.  It’s followed by the rare single mix of “Mr. Soul” with a more upfront lead guitar and bass track, taken from a vinyl rip by Professor Stoned.  Next is “We’ll See” and “Pretty Girl Why” from the Buffalo Springfield box set, followed by Neil’s vocal version of “Down To The Wire” from his Archives Vol 1.  Side A concludes with the mysterious “Everydays” from the mono vinyl rip of Again by Professor Stoned.

Side B gently departs from my theme of not using the 1966 outtakes, using Neil’s fantastic “Sell Out”, taken from Archives Vol 1.  Recorded near the very end of the Buffalo Springfield sessions in September 1966, Neil plays all the instruments and the recording was meant as a publishing demo; regardless, it fits well in my Stampede (not to mention it being my favorite track on the album!).  Following is “My Kind of Love” and “No Sun Today” from the Buffalo Springfield box.  Ending the album is the rare 9-minute version of “Bluebird”, taken from a vinyl rip of the obscure 1973 Buffalo Springfield double LP, collapsed into mono to match the rest of the reconstruction. 

Sources used:

Buffalo Springfield (1973 Atco Records, noxid vinyl rip)

Buffalo Springfield (2001 Rhino Records 4CD box set)

Buffalo Springfield – Again (1967 Atco Records Prof Stoned mono vinyl rip)

Buffalo Springfield – Bluebird b/w Mr Soul (1967 Atco Records Prof Stoned mono vinyl rip)

Neil Young – Archives Volume 1 (2009 Reprise Records CD)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

* md5 files, track notes and artwork included

Neil Young - Chrome Dreams

Neil Young – Chrome Dreams

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1.  Pocahontas

2.  Will To Love

3.  Star of Bethlehem

4.  Like A Hurricane

5.  Too Far Gone

Side B:

6.  Hold Back The Tears

7.  Homegrown

8.  Captain Kennedy

9.  Stringman

10.  Sedan Delivery

11.  Powderfinger

12.  Look Out For My Love

By overwhelming request, this is a reconstruction of the famous unreleased 1977 Neil Young album Chrome Dreams.  Originally compiled from material recorded between 1974-1977 and slated for a release after an acetate was allegedly compiled, Young withdrew the album and restructured it into American Stars ‘n Bars.  This reconstruction collects all the best possible source tapes into the sequence generally accepted as being Chrome Dreams.   It is banded as a cohesive album and attempts were made to create a large dynamic range between the acoustic Young songs and the full-band Crazy Horse songs.   While my reconstruction isn’t necessarily anything that hasn’t been heard before, it attempts to be as close to a finished album as possible with the best possible soundquality, an improvement on circulating bootlegs.

Ups and downs and an epic back-catalog of recordings were Neil Young’s modus operandi throughout the 1970s, the true seeds of what would eventually become—and then not become—Chrome Dreams.  So epic in fact, that Young simultaneously worked on different albums and collections of songs thought the mid 70s, in as much as cultivating numerous projects that either never materialized or were shifted into something else, often completely unrelated to each other.  After his triumphant success with 1972’s Harvest, Young attempted to undo the very success he initially strived to reach by recording his “Ditch Trilogy”—the more challenging Time Fades Away, On The Beach and Tonight’s The Night albums—partially instigated by the death of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten.  As well as “The Ditch Trilogy” albums, Young also composed a set of ‘Water Songs’ meant as a concept album about, well, water, which was never realized and the songs scattered to other projects.

Aside from those three albums and abandoned concept, Young also offered a slew of originals for the reformed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album Human Highway which never materialized either (but of which this blog has already tackled).  And still aside from those five projects Young also recorded an entire folk/country album concerning his separation from his wife Carrie Snodgrass, entitled Homegrown.  That project nearly saw the light of day as the second album of the ‘Ditch Trilogy’, but Young scrapped the more somber and painful Homegrown for the more raw and immediate Tonight’s The Night (which the label put on hold making it the third album of the Trilogy).  Young’s classic 1975 album ZUMA collected some of the scattered leftovers from the six mid-70s projects, following it with a duet album with Stephen Stills, 1976’s Long May You Run.

Finally bringing us to Young’s next project in 1977, it was to be a hodge-podge of new material and leftovers that dated back to the unreleased Homegrown album.  Titled Chrome Dreams, it was to be a fairly schizophrenic record, jumping from Nashville country-rock, solo acoustic folk and full-blown Crazy Horse rock anthems, all tracks simply culled from his personal vaults, recorded between 1974-1977.  The few that have heard Chrome Dreams commented that it could have been one of his strongest albums of the 1970s.  But for reasons unknown to this day, Young scrapped the album and recorded a completely different set of forgettable songs as the meat of American Stars n Bars, which was released in Chrome Dreams’ place in 1977.  While this completely new set of mediocre songs occupied all of side A, four of the original songs slated for Chrome Dreams found its way onto side B, giving the second half of the album a hint at the greatness Chrome Dreams could have been.

A few of the Chrome Dreams songs—“Pocahontas”, “Sedan Delivery” and “Powderfinger”—were re-recorded for Young’s triumphant finale of the 1970s, Rust Never Sleeps.  Aside from a few more trickling out over time and mediocre follow-up albums, Chrome Dreams was never a shared dream with anyone outside Young’s inner circle.  Its reputation grew over time, accumulating to an officially released sequel in 2007, Chrome Dreams II, a completely new set of songs by a Neil Young not without a sense of humor.  Luckily a few acetates of the original tracks have leaked out into the bootleg market as well as an alleged copy of the album’s tapebox (although denied as being accurate by some close to Neil, but never necessarily confirmed).  With all of the material existing either on bootlegs or the original 1970s albums, we will be able to reconstruct one of the great Neil Young albums that never were.

Side A begins with the original acoustic version of “Pocahontas”.  While the official version on the Rust Never Sleeps album features subtle overdubs, this is the unadorned version found on the bootleg Chrome Dreams “GF Rust Edition”.  Following are three songs all taken from the album versions of American Stars n Bars: the eerie and ethereal “Will To Love”; “Star of Bethlehem”, a track salvaged from the Homegrown album; and the epic “Like A Hurricane” which became a hit for Neil Young.  “Too Far Gone” releases the tension built up from the hurricane blast, this being the original unreleased version taken from the Black Label bootleg of Chrome Dreams rather than the re-recoded version from 1989’s Freedom.

The longer Side B starts with “Hold Back The Tears”, which was re-recorded for American Stars n Bars; presented here is the original acoustic version taken from the GF Rust bootleg.  "Homegrown" from American Stars n bars is next, a re-recording of the allegedly acoustic title track from the unreleased Homegrown album.  My personal favorite “Captain Kennedy” is an alternate unreleased mix as compared to the version from Hawks & Doves,  also taken from the GF Rust bootleg.  I used it here as it is in true stereo and matches the mixing of the other acoustic songs on the album, probably sourced from the same tape.  My own remaster of “Stringman” from the GF Rust bootleg creates a smoother intro to the song which was otherwise too loud, a track eventually re-recorded for Young’s 1993 Unplugged performance.  The unreleased original studio versions of “Sedan Delivery” and “Powderfinger” follows, taken from the GF Rust bootleg.  Closing the album out is the official album mix of “Look Out For My Love” from Comes A Time.

The last task of our reconstructed Chrome Dreams is an original artwork by LCM, representing the original conceptual artwork for the album: an anthropomorphic grill of a 1955 Chrysler as “a beautiful chick”.  When set alongside Young’s 1970s discography, Chrome Dreams shines brilliantly over its own dull replacement American Stars n Bars, and can fend its own against Young classics ZUMA and Rust Never Sleeps.  According to the man himself, a reconstruction of Chrome Dreams (as well as Homegrown) will appear on Archives Volume II, set to be released later in 2014… allegedly anyways, knowing the vast length and improbability of ‘Neil Young-time’.  Until then, we can only dream.

Sources used:

American Stars n Bars (2003 Reprise CD remaster)

Chrome Dreams (bootleg, 1993 Black Label)

Chrome Dreams (bootleg, 2008 Godfather Records)

Comes A Time (1988 original CD master)

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

*md5, artwork and tracknotes included