Warning, Mature Content

Perhaps you noticed that my last post earned a mature content warning designation from the mysterious powers-that-be behind Tumblr.

This has happened twice of late and I have no sure explanation - after all, you may have noticed that I do not curse in these posts beyond a mild “I curse thee!” now and then directed at Stephen Stills, and you have surely noticed that I write mostly about fairly gross old white men with whom no one wants any sexual content connected, ever, and perhaps you’ve noticed that the only violence I reference comes with its own musical notation, like the gunfire one can find within Neil Young’s Shots…

But I do have a few theories.

The first flagged post contained reference to a famous Dick, namely Moby. You know, the whale. I have one of my own, but I have no interest whatsoever discussing it here with you, ever. Rest assured!

Anyway, perhaps Tumblr finds Melville’s cannibalistic descriptions of Queequig problematic on a post-colonial level and therefore warned you all of my reference to the novel; I could see that. Or maybe their AI algorithm is simply too dumb to understand my intent when using the word dick.

The second occurrence of this mysterious labelling occured with yesterday’s post discussing The Dark End of the Street. What could be the cause? Well, that post does indeed describe someone employing a chain - perhaps Tumblr’s crack team of investigators are reasonably on the hunt for any talk in favor of human bondage, sexual or literal? If so, I get it.

But, then again, Tumblr’s crack team of investigators also tell me I have a typo every time I type the word Tumblr, which is the freakin’ name of their freakin’ platform, and you’d think they would train their program to recognize that it is not a typo, so maybe they’re just idiots.

What’s more, the chain I referenced yesterday was connected to Aretha Franklin setting free a whole pack of metaphorical hounds. So maybe Tumblr’s “crack team” is, again, just a cracked-into-utter-incompetence algorithm.

So what could it be? I know! Maybe yesterday’s post was flagged because it included a photo of Linda Ronstadt fully clothed. And we all know that Linda Ronstadt, even when fully clothed, is seriously mature content.

Anyway, let’s test my theories and see if I can earn another mature content label again today.

Here’s a photo of Linda, once again clothed, and another use of the word dick, as in Moby.

Holy smokes! Moby Dick himself would cease to pummel the Pequod were Linda aboard.

And here’s another equally lovely Linda track. This one actually is problematic from a post-colonial angle because Randy Newman wrote it and Randy is forever grinningly problematic.

Sail Away!

Update: Okay, it didn’t work! No matter how many references I made to Linda clothed and Moby the whale, rather than anyone’s swinging bit of manhood, Tumblr did not grant me another mature content warning for this post.

I apologize for failing to endanger your innocence once again here in the Dollar Bin. Now someone please teach Tumblr how to spell its own name.

The Dark End of the Street

We’ve tracked the changes over time for one of Carole King’s masterpieces, for Bob Dylan’s Dream and for Roberta Flack’s final uplift of a Nina Simone deep track. Let’s wrap up a largely lousy year by charting the chronological transformation of another archetypal track: a classic soul brooder entitled The Dark End of the Street.

Dan Penn entered Nashville in the mid-sixties like every other musical Southern white male of his generation: he wanted to be Elvis.

Here he is, assuming the stance.

Somehow he hooked up Spooner Oldham, who, at age 168 or so, currently mans the keys in Shakey’s chrome farts, assuming the almost inaudible role of Methuselah.

60 years ago Penn and Oldham had plenty of musical potential and no lyrical clue. Here’s their “greatest” hit:

Oldham cleared out quick after that, allowing Chips Moman, an Elvis insider, to swoop in and provide Penn with the missing poetic touch. They soon enlisted James Carr and a classic began to take shape:

The song’s masterful structure is already in place: a building melody grows over a steady beat, promising the great heights that indeed arrive when they find us, You and Me. Carr walks with us down the song’s troubled avenue, providing the kind of strength and reassurance Penn and Moman could have never assembled on their own.

And then along came Aretha…

The song is suddenly epic. She leashes it on a gold chain, dragging its tempo to a nearly perfect stop before unleashing a whole pack of show dogs upon the avenue at the 2:30 minute mark. Forget the song’s original sense of darkness and dread: Franklin is in the illumination business here. And she’s striding into the light.

Well, clearly no one will ever compete with her take. Happily, the great covers that have followed have not sought to do so.

Check out Ry Cooder in 1972. He can’t sing worth a damn, but his slide guitar sure can, and he lets it do all the work here, reinstating the song’s core, aching melody.

Next it was Linda’s turn. Her 1974 take, which dwells at the heart of the greatest Dollar Bin record of all time, forges the perfect marriage of Franklin’s epic gesture and Cooder’s grace. The song even boasts a great guitar solo, a rare feature in a Ronstadt track.

The darkness threatens once again in Linda’s take: this is no safe street to pace. But we’d risk doing so if it meant we could walk alongside her.

It sure seems like that should be the end of the story: four great versions were in place by 1974, each of them vital and unique. There are only four cardinal points to follow when it comes to questing the song’s pavements, right?

Well, apparently not. Richard and Linda Thompson offer a fifth direction: they take to the sky.

Another Very Shakey Christmas

I’m not into Christmas Movies.

My wife and youngest have watched their fair number this year, all without me. I don’t know how things worked out for the lady in the midst of a bad break up whose car spun out in the vicinity of a solitary and surely sexy mountain man during a tough winter storm, or for the woman who decided the only way to get her daughter the ski or skating or dog sledding lessons she desperately needed was for her to go full Drag Santa in disguise, or for the family who all body swapped, dog included, due to a bizarre Solstice astrophysical event.

I don’t know how things worked out for any of them because I spent the hours in which they streamed joyfully puttering around in some other fashion, my dollar bin pair of bluetooth headphones projecting Neil Young from my turntable into my skull all the while. Trans, Chrome Dreams, Toast, last year’s Xmas focus, Dorothy Chandler, Life: Christmas Movie season means I have plenty of chances to revisit Shakey records that my family does not want to hear.

Neil has never recorded a Christmas album. I think this is a good thing, especially as I feel the same way about Christmas Music as I do about Christmas Movies. I see Ben Keith made one, and I guess I’d listen to that, hoping it would get weird. But unless Neil unearths a previously unissued version of him teeming up with Ringo and Billy Talbot for a rendition of Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer I’m good having never heard Shakey’s take on our invented-by-Dickens-then-reinvented-by-Capitalism holiday substitute for Winter Solstice.

After all, I’ve already got the one, fairly perfect, Christmas song that Neil actually appears on dialed up on the turntable for later today.

If Neil ever feels compelled to do anything Christmas related on his own I’d prefer that he go ahead and make his very own Christmas movie. I could totally see him and his New Robot greeting a friendly Jawa/Road Eye out in the desert just as a freak winter storm hits. He’d pile them all in his donut-fat-fired-Hummer and then hit the open road, regaling us with stories about both Elvises - his dog and the man - before finally pulling into a blissful winter cabin filled to the gills with Daryl’s giant dogs and his Rust Never Sleeps Stonehenge-sized fake amps and perform Dirty Old Man on the pump organ before a crackling fire. The whole thing would end with us travelling into the alien’s consciousness to find that they and Neil’s robot are in love and plan to dedicate the rest of eternity operating his giant barn worth of toy trains.

It sounds kind good! Or at least more understandable than Human Highway….

Anyway, if you want the closest thing to a Neil Christmas Movie check out his film version of what I’d say is his last totally solid studio record, Barn. The album opens with the very pretty Song of the Seasons, includes the retirement-community-watching-Loony-Tunes vibes of Shape of You, features, in Heading West, a pretty rockin’ and far more concise rewrite of his first, largely interminable, sonic biography, Don’t Be Denied, dabbles with a semi-return to psychedelic songwriting on Welcome Back and They Might Be Lost and closes with the very slight but still pretty Don’t Forget Love.

It’s good! I listened to it yesterday while the family engaged in normal Christmas behavior around me.

And the movie makes it even better…

Dinosaur Jr’s Green Mind

This one’s for my buddy Ned…

I spent my breaks between weeks of work at a summer camp in 1992 tooling around North County San Diego in my Grandma’s big gray Buick blasting Dinosaur Jr’s Green Mind.

I had my license, zero responsibilities and a $43 pay check to burn on Neil Young records and bean burritos. So when I saw her wagon I got on in.

Poor old Grandma was getting older. Widowed at that point for over a decade, she weighed under a hundred pounds and tended to tell the same story about the neighbor’s dog’s intense but reasonable interest in her plants two or three times a day. I shrugged it off until I saw her hunched down behind the Buick’s mammoth, suede-encased, wheel.

“Now, do you see that light ahead?” she asked as we pulled to a halting stop before the obviously red indicator which required us to do so.

“Yeah Grandma, I see it real good.”

“Well, you keep an eye on it and let me know when it changes to green. I can’t see that far.”

I checked my seat belt, took a deep breath and swore to myself that I’d do all our driving from that point forward. Then I told her that the light was green.

She nodded and then barreled forward. Hey lady: where you going?

Later that day I sneaked into the farthest room of her house and called my folks, keeping my voice low so as to avoid Grandma hearing me as I stabbed her future behind the wheel solidly in the back.

“HELLO!” my house painter of a dad unhelpfully boomed back at me once he picked up.

After two decades spent handling spray guns run by clattering generators he was already starting to lose his hearing. Plus, he’d never really understood telephone technology: in his mind a phone was a device you yelled through.

“Dad, it’s me. Listen: you gotta take Grandma’s car keys away from her. She’s totally blind and it’s freakin’ me out.”

“WHAT?!” he boomed back, having heard nothing whatsoever of our conversation so far. “WHO IS THIS?!”“

"YOUR SON!” I hollered back, figuring that at least this part of the conversation could be safely overheard by grandma.

“WHAT? Which one!?” he demanded.

There were three of us so I guess this response was at least partially reasonable. Then again, my famous brother and my other, almost famous, brother were heading into 8th and 3rd grade respectively at that point, and both were probably in the same room with him when he answered, watching The Simpsons and cuddle-punching each other with mirth. Meanwhile I was 16 and spending the summer away from home.

So, nevermind: his response was not reasonable.

I sighed, and then I problem solved.

“LET ME TALK TO MOM!”

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” he responded. “But you need to speak up! No one can hear you!”

My poor dad… I imagine that, for him, every single conversation is about as discernible as Mascis’ typical lyrics are for the rest of us. Does J really place a verse about hanging frogs in the title track of Green Mind? Or, on a certain level, are we all just lost, dad-style, when it comes to understanding him?

Happily, J and my dad are incredibly cool anyway, a fact we are reminded of every time Mascis solos and every time my dad cracks a joke.

Anyway, my mom eventually got on the phone and heard the news about Grandma’s wavering eyes behind the wheel. I felt pretty awful telling on her like that. Would adulthood always be like this, I wondered, swiping freedom away from the people who trust me for their own benefit? If so, I was finally starting to understand another of Mascis’s lyrics:

Please, someone, get me a bucket.

That’s how I often felt that summer. Sure, I was so excited to cut that one leg free and be independent. But I was also terrified and totally unprepared for what lay ahead. The best option in the face of it all seemed to be to take another aimless ride in the Buick, waiting up for the weird flute vibes to give way to another sledgehammer riff over J’s wandering worry.

Damn, these songs all sound just as good as they did back then: so much sadness and so much sighing hope, nearly all of it layered up by one ridiculously talented human being…

Happily, potential romance seeped in throughout that whole summer, and that helped.

I’d been dating a really lovely girl for a year and a half at that point. But she lived on the top of an altogether different mountain from the one I was working on at that point, literally and figuratively, and her parents made it hard for us to see one another very often. Even so, as a dedicated monogamist from day one, I had no conscious plans to ditch her, ever.

But there were a lot of other very cute and amazing California Girls at my summer camp in 1992. One of them was impossibly outta my league on every level. (A year later, I threw caution to the wind and kissed her. Six years after that we got married. 33 years after that she is currently six feet away while I write this, having a detailed conversation with our cat).

And a different one of those California Girls just happened to live in my Grandma’s neighborhood. Grandma was in a gated community which meant that, by Buick, that girl was six minutes away. But I found that if I dialed the shortest song on Green Mind up on my walkman, scaled the brick wall in my grandma’s backyard and did a little jogging jaywalking I could be at her place, climbing through her bedroom window, (because that entrance was cooler than the front door), before the song was over.

I know why! I know why! You run around…

That whole phase ended with one last drive in the Buick. And I took that girl with me.

I will never forget standing beside her late at night, the Buick parked. We were looking out over the dark ocean, both of us finally still after an evening of spontaneous laughter and another play through of Green Mind.

It was then that I realized, with a start, that I was in the middle of a date with someone who was not my girlfriend. I thought we were just buddies but I suddenly realized what was actually going on. (I wasn’t too swift.)

Anyway, it occurred to me then that it was now time to kiss her, and that in doing so I would set in motion the end of all things known and safe in my silly little life and begin an utterly unknown, terrifying and exhilarating future.

I saw all of that before me, down across the water. But I wasn’t ready. I loved Green Mind’s chaotic fervor and reckless life. But I wasn’t ready to live that way. Not yet.

And so, I did not kiss her. Rather, I drove her home in the Buick, then headed back to Grandma’s.

Happy Solstice everyone…

Tonight’s the Night, Final Chapter

While Dylan steals with a smirk, Shakey usually does so with a sigh.

Whenever he’s swiping the poetry of a Confederate soldier or pilfering Moby Dick’s Sparknotes, Bob is perfectly content to simply tap into his own wacky version of white male privilege and argue that, “there are different rules for me.”

Not so with Ditch era Neil: every time he purloined a phrase, harmony or riff he quickly and humbly passed on apologetic credit. Did you enjoy Ambulance Blues’s guitar line? Well then thank Bert Jansch. Care for that melody on Tonight’s the Night’s blissfully rambling Speaking Out?

Neil always did what Bob would never have done in a zillion years: he instantly acknowledged its source as Dylan’s own Pledging My Time.

And then there’s the sonic gut punch that is Borrowed Tune. No interview was needed for Shakey to acknowledge his debt to the Rolling Stones. He does so right there in the lyrics.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought Neil’s apology was hardly merited. Sure, I hear that the verses follow the same basic notes. But can you imagine two more different songs?

Mick wants to don some kind of floppy Renaissance hat so as to pay homage to the many ladies who stand by, ready to meet his needs. Neil, meanwhile, just wants to talk himself back from the ledge.

I grew up hearing Borrowed Tune as the nadir of Young’s entire career. His spun-out-to-the-breaking-point vocals, his quest for anything that matters, his fundamental doubts: Borrowed Tune offered up one of my first and strongest explanations of suffering: where it comes from and how it feels.

I often pictured him performing the song utterly alone in the Tonight’s the Night studio. He’d been temporarily or, more likely, permanently abandoned by the ramshackle band which otherwise appears with him on the record. Borrowed Tune was Neil’s Black Eyed Dog. And I had no idea how he’d escaped it.

But that’s not the real story.

Check this out: Four months after giving up on and shelving Tonight’s the Night altogether Young sat down and recorded one of his loveliest, lightest and most hopeful songs of that era.

Doesn’t he sound great here? Sure, there’s a worry in the lyric - Neil doesn’t know if we’ll believe him or be able to find him - but that really doesn’t matter because he’s found his lifeline from across the sea. And she is SO fine.

Hearing a song like this in the aftermath of the Tonight’s the Night sessions seems to explain exactly how Neil did indeed make it through. He fell in love!

Yeah, again, that’s not right. Because guess what else he recorded the exact same day as Traces? You got it: Borrowed Tune. The song is not truly stolen from the Rolling Stones. No. Rather, it’s borrowed from another era altogether in Neil’s impossibly complicated 70’s.

I don’t have any idea how Young summoned up such pleasure and pain on the very same day, allowing him to capture Traces alongside Borrowed Tune. But he did it. He’s sure damn Shakey.

Tonight’s the Night, Part 5

You would think a track entitled Everybody’s Alone would be the perfect candidate for inclusion on Neil Young‘s bleakest record.

Neil and/or David Briggs certainly thought so for a hot second, and so the three-year-old-at-that-point outtake was dug up to receive the Tonight’s the Night treatment, complete with Ben Keith’s trembling, alt-Nashville surges and the record’s signature, keening-up-from-the-ditch, harmonies.

But the song, with its buoyant high notes, power chords and oddly complacent lyrics about a future spent kicking back in the shade beneath the cool summer breeze in blissful independence, was intelligently shelved.

Indeed, Everybody’s Alone did not come to light on any level for another 35 years with release of Archives 1 and even then it was the song’s superior and original Crazy Horse take, which features Neil’s boldly liberated lead guitar, which earned initial release.

All of this chalks up to good decision making on Young and Briggs’ part. After all, they had a brand new song about being utterly alone already set for Tonight’s the Night. And it is about as bleak and beautiful as they come.

Neil Young wrote Everybody’s Alone at the joint terminations of his first marriage and his first band. He longed to be alone.

But after three years mired in that independence, all of it rooted in death, pain and soul crushing fame, he longed simply for fried eggs and country ham. He needed, “somewhere where they don’t care who I am.”

I am blessed to have never shared this mournful sentiment. I hope you are too. Neil bravely climbed into that ditch for us. And he reported his findings.

Tonight’s the Night, Part 4

There are at least 402 different angles of consideration one could take when it comes to Neil’s creation of the perfect space for the ghost of Danny Whitten late in the A Side of his album-length brood upon death.

But it’s Friday afternoon and I’m wiped out and ready for a little something palpable poured over ice. So, let’s cut right to the chase and celebrate that my buddy Matt has always insisted that when Danny and company declare, “I’ve got lots of gas” they are not referring to the state of their automobile.

Rather, Matt loves to believe that Danny is warning the lady in question, or perhaps it’s literally his newborn baby, about the state of his digestion after consuming a healthy portion of “steak eyes and french fries.”

“Roll down the window quick baby,” Danny declares. “We got to let in some fresh air. I got lots of gas.”

I hope none of you feel the same way this weekend. Here’s to your good health.

Tonight’s the Night, Part 3

Much of Neil Young’s literary genius can be summed up by the staggeringly drunk couplet with which he opens Tonight’s the Night’s B Side.

It’s too dark to put the keys in my ignition.

And the morning sun has yet to climb my hood ornament.

Yeah, I know, it’s not exactly Shakespeare. But, oh man, every time I hear him “sing” (you gotta put the music quality of his opening delivery in ironic quotes) those lines I just can’t stop…

1. Grinning,
2. Picturing the scene, and
3. Wishing I was there with him, right now, staggering about and, oh, so deeply alive.

Much of the opening’s effectiveness, of course, comes from its ridiculous lack of a rhyme. Every other end line in the song manages to follow standard song writing convention (might/light, while/smile, away/day).

But as he flails initially and fruitlessly away behind the wheel Neil is just too wasted to search for a successful rhyming partner for “ignition”, let alone adhere to any reasonable form of rhythm and meter. And there’s no way he’s gonna double back and start the song/thought all over again. After all, every available rhyming option, from fruition to contribution to attrition to convolution, exists far beyond his current, drunken, ten word, vocabulary.

And that’s my point here: Neil’s best lyrics - and songs- are forever brand new. Even when a song is decades old, his genius within it springs forth in real, utterly unique, time every time.

And, so often, Shakey partners his wide open, courageous honesty with the literary present tense:

It is too dark to put the keys in his ignition. All her friends call her little wing. Daddy is a traveling man.

And tonight? Tonight is the night.

Tonight’s the Night, Part 2

I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Indeed, I often forget there even is a drawer and then wind up sticking all my knives into the first available pumpkin instead.

So when I started this new Tonight’s the Night expansion project yesterday I was working with the assumption that I’d already dedicated a whole slew of past posts to praising and parsing the original record’s songs, meaning and story. Tonight’s the Night is, after all, one of the two or three most vital records in the history of Shakey, which means that it is also one of the most vital records in the history of American popular music.

Yeah, well my assumption was wrong. I did do one of my standard Stephen Stills gripe sessions around his macho man version of New Mama way back when, but that obviously doesn’t do the record any kind of reasonable justice.

And so, let’s ditch the “final pieces” tag I initially placed on these current posts and just start examining every color, texture and scuff mark to be found on the whole ragged and lovely wino coat that is Tonight’s the Night.

And let’s start with the title track.

I’ve never been a big fan of the phrase in question. “Tonight’s the Night” strikes me as a better tag line for an 80’s Budweiser Ad than the entire chorus for one of Neil’s signature tunes.

It didn’t help that when I first heard the song I was up way past my bedtime, hovering in the rafters of the Fabulous Forum - the Lakers home stadium - during Shakey’s Weld tour.

The show was amazing, yes, but the Horse’s droning surges and apoplectic, cave man rancor was also way over my early ninth grade head. At that point the only Neil Young I’d ever heard was MTV versions of Rocking in the Free World and This Notes for You and my cassette editions of After the Goldrush, which struck me as too sensitive for my sense of manly, and Ragged Glory, which struck me as awesome but a bit boring. Forgive my ignorance: I was 14.

Anyway, 8 or 12 minutes into Tonight’s the Night I just wanted Neil and his buddies to stop announcing what night it was.

I probably got my hands on the actual original record, Tonight’s the Night, a few months later, just about when Weld came out, and I initially preferred the Weld version of the title track: I still didn’t love the song but at least it sounded like the guys had now learned how to play it.

Meanwhile, the original versions, especially the second take, sounded like a bunch of weird rusty grandpas had swapped instruments and huffed too much helium.

Well, I obviously bought a clue eventually.

Tonight’s the Night, in its twin original forms, is a mothercuddler of a song if there ever was one: Neil shoves selfish and grim Odysseus aside on the Isle of Death and summons Bruce Berry’s fresh ghost up from the dark earth, Elpinor style, allowing him to chug from the cup of sacrificial blood while every other victim of their shared generation’s wasted genius - some of the them freshly dead, others slowly dying - from Jimi to Janis to Danny to Jim to Syd to Gram to Arthur, lurches about, begging for a taste. The song is thoroughly harrowing and utterly electric. Plus, eventually it rocks.

So, what about the original record’s newly unearthed “Tonight’s the Night, Part 3”? Does it add another piece to the puzzle? Or is it just 21st Century filler alluringly placed on a preposterously priced piece of vinyl?

I don’t know because I’ve never heard it. So let’s correct that fact and listen to it together right now for the very first time…

Hmmm. I’d say this sounds more like “Part 1”: Neil might be teaching himself, and everyone else, what he has in mind. We don’t get any piano until two minutes in, for one, and there’s a tentativeness in the air. “Is tonight actually the night?” they seem to be asking. “Or is it tomorrow?”

Don’t get me wrong: I’d be perfectly happy if Neil would stop being so cute and just throw up every single freakin’ thing recorded at these sessions onto his forever Beta version website, Pet Sounds or Like a Rolling Stone style. You know there are hours and hours more like this still in his vault, hopefully including those lost raps we discussed yesterday. The guys spent at least seven days together in the studio 52 years ago, getting hammered and hammering it all out.

Hey, Neil: release every damn recorded moment. Bruce Berry wants us to hear it all.

Tonight’s the Nights’ Final Pieces, Part 1

I am not an instant customer when it comes to Neil Young’s glossy, 21st century reissues.

I listen to every new take of Barefoot Floors or Homegrown with leaning-in, come-on-and-destroy-us-Neil focus but I only buy that new material when I find cut rate $12 vinyl copies a year or more later online or getting dusty in some overly optimistic shop’s bin.

And so I definitely don’t yet have a copy of Tonight’s the Night’s 50th Anniversary, rainbow-saddled edition. Not only is it currently retailing at a bazillion bucks, it’s also not the reissued record we deserve.

As many of you know, the version we deserve is the record in its original form: eight or so tracks that Neil, David Briggs and their mates recorded during a studio destroying bender in 1973 following the twin deaths of Danny Whitten and Neil’s bleary-eyed roadie, Bruce Berry.

According to Jimmie McDougal’s seminal Neil bio, Shakey, that original version flexed out to full length thanks to a number of “raps” interspersed between the songs. If you are anything like me, you’ve spent the decade or two since you read that book longing to hear those raps: after all, nothing could be better than listening to Neil speechify in harrowing and hilarious fashion about the record’s heavy content while stacking up a new Tower of Babel or two out of the few dozen empty bottles of tequila the band produced each day on the job.

Well, neither Decade, Archives 2 or this new 50th Anniversary deal have offered us those raps. My famous brother tells me that they are either lost for good or too wrecked to issue.

If the former is true, that sucks. And if it’s the later, Neil needs to get a life. Lord knows he has already issued plenty of sub-optimal recordings. And we’ve loved them all.

But, let’s start a new run of Neil posts dedicated to appreciating the new material he’s offered up in place of the lost raps. That sounds fun.

To begin, check out this new, staggering, slow-mo train wreck:

To begin, there may be no better argument for the greatness of the Stray Gators than this take. Neil’s Harvest touring band is of course responsible for the infinitely more energized, powerful and organized live take of Lookout Joe that actually appears on Tonight’s the Night.

Buckle your seat belt if you somehow don’t know what Neil’s bizarro rewrite of Walk on the Wild Side is capable of:

Suffice it to say that Neil did the right thing when it came to selecting the version to initially release. The band sways and pulses; Ben Keith shoots lasers.

Even so, I love the newly issued studio take. It’s hard to imagine Young and the boys sounding more gleefully drunk than they do there; it’s a wonder anyone made it out of the studio without court ordered ankle bracelets and preposterous neck tattoos. I get a contact high just listening.

I’ve always assumed that when Neil describes someone singing with “too much soul” on Hawks and Doves’ incomparable Lost in Space he’s ruminating on the worst of his former bandmates; you know, either Crotchety, Silly or Nerd Club. But this new version of Lookout Joe let’s us know that Neil may very well have been singing about himself.

And, if so, he was wrong in his assessment. Neil can’t sing with too much soul.

Old Times were Good Timmmmmessssssss!