Friday, November 13, 2015

Neil Young and Crazy Horse Live at the Fillmore 1970

I've always been a huge fan of Young's and have been on another binge listening kick the last few days - maybe because it was just his borthday? I've had this CD for a while - just duped from a library copy so no packaging, though I remember that being mighty sparse.

According to Wikipedia, this is the first live release featuring Crazy Horse's guitarist Danny Whitten (who died in 1972) as well as pianist Jack Nitzsche. The set list is pretty impressive, although not many songs, there is lots of guitar work here. Opening with "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere", it moves into "Winterlong" (a song only released on Decades before this) and then the guitar tour-de-force "Down By the River" with leads sounding very different than any other version - tremelo'd guitar and harmonies abound here.

Not one of his more iconic tunes, "Wonderin'" is still a terrific number - dig the call'n'answer vocals here and Whitten's "C'mon Baby Let's Go Downtown", a cool rocker where Danny gets to trade off some lead vocals with Neil. A particularly powerful "Cowgirl in the Sand" closes out the collection with more terrific and dynamic Young guitar mangling that builds to a wild crescendo.

Kinda short and kinda skimpy on the packaging, but superb music, nonetheless.