CD review:NEIL YOUNG:Live At Massey Hall 1971

[KiwiCoromandel]

It may be strange to say that a concert that has been bootlegged for 30 years (but never heard with this sonic quality), from a man who has released scores of studio and live albums, contains revelations. And it may be stranger still to say that such a belatedly released album is one of the standout albums of this week, this month, this year.

Strange but true. Neil Young's reedy - some less charitable would say whiny - voice alone on stage is simultaneously the loneliest and the most inviting thing. Here, with naught but a guitar or a piano to accompany him, he plays a show of such intimacy that you imagine Toronto's Massey Hall is the size of a terrace house living room and Young is sitting on your battered second-hand couch. And you don't want him to leave.

Young (sounding a little, ahem, self-medicated) says at the beginning of the stately piano-and-voice Journey through the Past, "I'm going to sing mostly new songs tonight - I've written so many new ones that I can't think of anything else to do with them other than sing." He is being rather disingenuous, of course, given his notorious impatience with even the suggestion of standing still, whether it is songwriting styles, albums or performance.

You don't need to go much further than the first two albums in this archive release program to see that the Massey Hall concert is the polar opposite of the Fillmore East concert with his band Crazy Horse, which was released last year.

Such an approach can be both a boon and a bugbear for fans, of course. In this case it's all rewards. The concert is dominated by songs that would appear on 1972's Harvest and later albums (and some that would rarely be seen again) with some fascinating throwbacks. There's a radically different take on a song he originally recorded with Buffalo Springfield, On the Way Home, alongside a nascent Heart of Gold, not yet finished and here appended to the borderline misogyny of A Man Needs a Maid. There's a version of Old Man that seems more suffused with weariness than the more famous studio version and an emotionally chilled Down by the River. And others that stir your heart such as Love in Mind.

This was a great show because the songs and Young opened up before you. That it's 36 years old matters not at all.

source/bernard zeul/smh.com.au

image:AP:NEIL YOUNG...Live At Massey Hall 1971..."That it's 36 years old matters not at all"...