everytime i think about back home it’s cool and breezy

Just a rambling post on influences, Neil Young in particular.

More on “This Is Somewhere” via this article in Jambands.com.

To a person, they are coy about This Is Somewhere being a response to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Given Tournet’s love of Neil Young, it’s not that hard a mystery to divine. It also stems from their trepidation about moving to Los Angeles to record the album. “We do not like being captive in a city. When you’re from Vermont and the biggest town is Burlington, there’s something really strange about being in a big city,” explains Potter. “The process of making the album and moving [out to L.A.] for a half a year was a really hard thing for us.” Though it’s hard to imagine any of the four of them being overwhelmed by a metropolis, it made the band more insular and the increased trust and reliance they placed in each other manifests itself on the album. “I was dreading it at first,” recalls Dondero. “We were in our little routine. We would leave the apartment, be at the studio for 12-13 hours, then go back and crash and watch VH1 Classic. That was pretty much it for two months.” A favorite of the band turned out to be VH1’s Classic Albums series that usually runs in the wee hours. While swapping favorite moments from the show, Dondero and Tournet joke about sitting behind the production board twenty years down the road moving levels up and down while explaining the genius of what they were trying to accomplish.

More about “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”

Knowing the full story of Young’s doomed guitarist, Danny Whitten, gives an added poignancy to an album like Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. Young later said that “every musician has one guy on the planet he can play with better than anyone else,” and his guy was Danny Whitten. Listen to the way their guitars meld on the dark moody drama of “Down by the River,” and you know what Young’s talking about.

“Down By The River”

From a review of “The Soul of Mr. Soul” on why Crazy Horse was such an awful band.

McDonough provides a helpful litany of abuses: “Muffed changes. Tattered harmonies. Tempos that slow down, speed up or collapse altogether. Guitar passages that last longer than a lifetime. Songs about nothing that never end. Repetition to the point of lunacy.” David Crosby is more blunt: “They should’ve never been allowed to be musicians at all. They should’ve been shot at birth. They can’t play.”

“Cowgirl In The Sand”

Rolling Stone Review of the album

in the epics that end each album side, “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” Young and Whitten circle, prod and light into each other like boxers in a sweaty fifteen-round match, the notes stabbing in and out, answering each other in short staccato bursts while the rhythm section stolidly keeps things from flying apart. The quartet’s interplay is at once primitive and abstract, more suggestive of Ornette Coleman’s fractured free jazz than the jam-band psychedelia that was the prevailing West Coast fad at the time. Some listeners found it crude, but the gloriously spontaneous sound forged on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere would endure, not only as a blueprint for Young and Crazy Horse (even after Frank “Pancho” Sampedro replaced Whitten, who died of a drug overdose in 1972) but as an influence on countless bands, from Sonic Youth to Son Volt. (RS 819)

For you Neil Young fanatics out there, if you don’t have copies of
A Perfect Echo I’m making it available for download for a few days only. Click here to download (367MB - BIG!)

Originally from Sharing The Groove

Braden Strickler has done it again. He’s compiled and lovingly mastered, almost exclusively from soundboard recordings, an 8-DISC SET which runs chronologically from August 1967 to January 2001. It’s like an expanded version of the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Cowboy” concept, but with far superior sound.

This is a compilation of soundboard recordings from 1967-2001. The term soundboard is a bit of a misnomer. By soundboard I mean, basically, not an audience recording. Some are true soundboards, while others are FM, TV, ALD, or video-sourced recordings. The recordings were all taken from cdrs or videos that are circulating in the trading community. There are a total of 115 tracks (109 songs, as 6 get repeated). Some years were heavy with available recordings (1976 and 1989 come to mind). I tried to balance the set by not using too many songs from a single show. The entire 8 discs run in, roughly, chronological order.

This will use way too much bandwidth so I’ll have to take it down in a few days. Get your copy now!