Today's song is from the legendary album "Time Fades Away." I picked up this bootleg at Rocks In Your Head, the now-closed record store on Prince that I've discussed before. "Time Fades Away" is a live album culled mainly from Young's 1973 tour that has never been released on CD.
The title track is probably not my favorite track on the album, but it's probably the best advertisement for it (which is why I've posted it!). Don't Be Denied stands up with Neil's best work. The Bridge sounds like (and I think is) an outtake from "Harvest." Yonder Stands The Sinner is kind of a throwaway, but I like it. Love In Mind and Journey Through The Past have markedly better sound quality because they were recorded on an earlier tour; the latter tour was recorded on an early digital recording system, "Quad-8 CompuMix," that muddied the sound; the relatively poor sound quality as much as anything may explain why the album remains unreleased. It's certainly not bleaker than "On The Beach," which finally got released a couple of years ago. Is it better? This is a discussion Corbett and I started (between the two of us--you haven't missed anything) last week. I find "Time Fades Away" to be the more listenable of the two, but that may be because the passion and intensity are a little dissipated relative to "On The Beach."
One more reason for posting the title track. Both Time Fades Away and L.A. were recorded at the Myriad in Oklahoma City. I can't put my finger on how Neil Young ended up there, but I think the tour came through (in 1973) pretty soon after the Myriad opened (in 1971 or 1972?). This is interesting to me because my great-grandfather was the construction superintendent on the Myriad project (it may be one of the main reasons he moved his family to Oklahoma City in the late 60s? I don't know). Anyway, the Myriad was a big, big job, of course, and just like Neil's recording system, the construction used some advanced techniques that caused some trouble. The arena was to be supported by these massive pre-stressed concrete trusses, but when they went to raise the first truss, it failed, disintegrated, fell apart. (I can only imagine the look on my grandpa's face at that moment.) Lengthy litigation later revealed a bad batch of concrete to be the culprit, and the Myriad got built without further hitches. Time Fades Away is a bit of evidence that everything worked out in the end.
LISTEN.
Photo: The Grove (November 2006).
Friday, October 5, 2007
TIME FADES AWAY
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
You should post the whole record for people doing Google searches to find the bootleg. Oh yeah, and to piss Neil off...That guy's a real miser.
Take a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homegrown_%28album%29
It would be great to find one of these and post it! That's your challenge for the weekend.
1. I thought about it. I'm pretty sure someone's already done it though.
2. I came across this last week when I was getting these together. Pretty intriguing right?
Your great grandfather moved the family to OKC in 1969. The Myriad was just a part of the "urban renewal" in which a number of historic buildings, unfortunately, were destroyed to make room for bigger and better. He had traveled the globe for decades but once he lived with us, he decided we didn't need to be relocated so he took a number of jobs in Oklahoma after that.
Love, Mom
March 1, 1973.
Love, Mom
March 1, 1973 is when the Myriad opened? So Neil must have been signed up as part of the gala opening...
No, that is when Young had his concert. The Myriad opened in the fall of 1972, I believe. In October of 1971, your grandfather lost two men building it - the only ones he ever did and he was very upset, as you might imagine. If you ever recall the guy who always had the Indian Taco stand at the fair, he was the brother of one of the men who died. He had worked for your grandfather for many, many years but quit to open the Indian Taco deal and settle in OKC.
Love, Mom
Anonymous,
I would be interested to learn a little of the legal dirt bout the concrete provider (dolese, I think) Your mom always said that suit was the only one Lott ever won.. Mainly bc Peter Dolese gave me a (totally crazy) dog (I think I had him when we met) just bc he and his gf were regulars @ LJS, and my being a soft touch or summthin..
Fritz, the dog. Yes, it was Dolese and a review of the archives in the Oklahoman would detail a lot of what went on. The litigation and public scrutiny continued for many years. Because the roof had a relatively untested design that was intended to shift with weight, there was a lot of debate as to whether it was a bad batch of concrete or a design flaw. Or so I understood without actually studying it.
Mom
Post a Comment