Outsiders examining this ten disc (Blu-ray or DVD), 128 track, sumptuously packaged, excruciatingly detailed, image-laden, minutia packed, monolith of a box set, whose complex menu navigation system more closely resembles a video game than a movie, can be forgiven for mistaking Neil Young for a raving egomaniac.

Fans, many enthralled with Young for forty plus years, know better. Though he’s the subject and object of the two decade long, ongoing and only partially completed project, Young clearly shares their fascination. He’s observing his own spectacle as another outsider even as he stars in it. All the while you watch, there are those eyes: fierce, brooding, inviting and off-putting at the same time.

That’s the impression you get watching Young being interviewed, performing and even assembling this set in some of the bonus footage: a force of nature unleashed and withdrawn as needed, refreshed and renewed each outing.

The more Young you watch here, the less sure you are of who he is and exactly why, after all these years, you remain a fascinated, perhaps even obsessed fan. Young is at the same time self-effacing and self-absorbed, vulnerable yet clearly ready to turn and strike out against anyone he perceives as a threat. Few musicians who came of age in the ‘60s have managed as well as Neil Young has to maintain an “of the moment” stance onstage and in the studio (another would be Dion but that’s for another discussion).

That’s why Young is as vital today as he was back in 1967; different but equally essential. Not an oldies act, even when singing those old familiar tunes.

Like the fans that will be attracted to this set, Young seems to be a collector, a hoarder, and a completist. He just happens to include himself among his collectibles!

As you watch and listen, you’ll realize that Young (and others) saved and archived virtually every note he recorded and every scrap of paper upon which he wrote just about anything. Well, he did, along with his trusty photographer/archiver Joel Bernstein who saw early on that Young would be both an enduring and important artist and a generous employer. In Bernstein Young found a friend, confidant, supporter and first class photographer as well as a meticulous archivist.

In a recent Charlie Rose interview Young referred to his talents and abilities as “a gift.” Back in 1968 on the bonus “Sugar Mountain Live at Canterbury House” DVD/CD Young described himself as a “radio” that received songs whole. He described transcribing “Mr. Soul” word for word and not changing even one once it was finished. He asks the audience to suggest improvements if they can think of any, because he can’t.

Early on, Young wrestles with his financial success and hippie image. Between songs during the 1971 Massey Hall concert he sort of mocks himself and expresses ambivalence and perhaps some guilt about being a rich hippie ranch owner. He also gets on a photographer’s case for snapping shots during a song, going on a bit too long about it, attempting to win over the already sold audience and to express his artistic purity. It may remind you of a less severe version of the recent Christian Bales on-set dustup that made the internet rounds.

Fame and fortune came relatively early to Young, though he’d been gigging since the 9th grade, well before The Beatles hit. Elvis was his first inspiration as his ever-present sideburns hint. After The Byrds issued “Mr. Tambourine Man,” June, 1965 thousands of kids formed bands and/or flocked to Los Angeles in the mid-sixties looking to join one. Few made it. One of those kids was Stephen Stills, whom Young had met in Canada earlier that year.

While looking for Stills in New York later in 1965, Young met Richie Furay and taught him “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing.” In January of 1966 Young and fellow Canadian musician bassist Bruce Palmer along with two other friends headed to L.A. in a hearse looking for Stephen Stills whom Young had met the previous year in Canada. In February of that year Richie Furay got a call from Stills, whom he had met in Greenwich Village back in 1964 and headed to L.A. to join him. While looking for Stills in Los Angeles, Young made ends meet by renting out the hearse to shuttle concert goers between clubs and Canters, the famous Fairfax Jewish Deli and after hours hangout. By early April of ’66 Young hadn’t yet found Stills and was about to give up and head home when, by chance, they met in the street.

As the box set’s “Early Years (1966-1968)” Blu-ray disc announces musically and the sumptuous bound scrapbook demonstrates graphically, shortly after reconnecting with Stephen Stills, Young, Stills, Furay and Palmer added drummer Dewey Martin and Buffalo Springfield was formed. Within weeks of reconnecting with Stills, Young and the band played a Monday Hoot at the Troubador, were heard by Chris Hillman and soon thereafter were opening for The Byrds at The Whisky A-Go-Go.

Signed to Atco, they released three albums only one of which, Buffalo Springfield Again could be considered truly great. The first had some good tunes, including “For What It’s Worth” (which hadn't been included on the original pressing) and the third Last Time Around was a mop up operation produced after the band had essentially broken up. It too contained some good, even great tunes, but some good, even great tunes does not a great album make!

The real action for Neil Young came later when he turned solo artist, though his eponymous debut was overproduced and in the opinion of many, was a dud, though of course not to his adoring fans who had found that the Buffalo Springfield songs to which they responded most intensely were written by the brooding brown eyed guy with the big fringed leather jacket and the triangular shaped sideburns.

The Archives

Pop open the tall scrapbook walled box and you’re greeted by four wells holding the embossed faux leather perfect bound scrapbook, the fold-open Blu-ray (or DVD) container, a fold open poster of the “filing cabinet” format that organizes the tunes from first to last on the discs and a mysterious black box containing a bonus CD and DVD video of Sugar Mountain, Live at Canterbury House 1968 along with a replica of the “SPEAKING PAD” found on the tables at the Whisky A Go Go during the 1960s. There’s also a plastic credit card with an early photo of Neil on the ranch sitting in his vintage yellow Jeep. On the back is a code you can use to download all of the audio tracks as MP3s. The plastic card and box will no doubt remind oldsters of similar set-ups used during the ‘60s to cull seeds and stems. While this box and card can be used for the same purpose today, if the shit you’re smoking still has seeds, you’re smoking the wrong shit!

The 10 Blu-ray discs packed 5 to a side of the fold open box are nearly impossible to get out but no big deal. You'll find a way.

The first one “Early Years (1963-1965)” represent Young’s formative years and while they are interesting, particularly if you wish to understand the backdrop against which Young soldiers on, only diehards will come back to the disc, something the archivists acknowledge by giving it a “0” instead of a “1”. Disc 1 covers the Springfield era, 2 the early Topanga years, 3 the live at the Riverboat concert and 4 the later Topanga years (1969-1970). The next five discs cover live at the Fillmore East, Topanga 3 (1970), the Massey Hall concert, the North Country (1971-1972) and finally Young’s cinematic flirtation “Journey Through the Past.”

How are the discs’ menu systems organized? Take “The Early Years 1966-1968”: pop the disc into your Blu-ray player and you’re greeted with a picture of Buffalo Springfield in concert accompanied by an audio loop from their final concert containing an announcer warning the crowd that if they don’t get back to their seats “there will not be a show.” Neil says “We’re all so scared up here…” You can choose “play all” “song selection” “more” and “set-up.” Choose “set-up,” navigate the contents and you get the idea that Neil reallywants you to hear the 192/24 bit sound, so make sure you set your system up to do so if possible. He also wants to make sure your monitor is correctly set for the 16X9 aspect ratio. There’s also BD-live info but my player is too old for that but apparently, you’ll eventually (or now for all I know) be able to access additional content via the Internet.

If you select “play all,” you’ll hear the disc’s tunes played one after the other with admittedly lame HD visuals, since there was little or no video footage available. If you like cheap, sometimes obscure vintage gear you’ll enjoy the visuals. For instance the visual for the demo of “Flying on the Ground is Wrong” shows a pretty rare Dual cassette deck playing a Scotch cassette tape. A Gold Star studios acetate envelope sits behind the deck. For “Burned” you get the white label promo single playing on an old RCA 45 changer, a nickel on the tonearm. Surrounding the player are photos of the group and the familiar (to some) Atco single sleeve. That’s followed by “Out of My Mind” from the first Buffalo Springfield album, the visual being the original plum/mustard Atco stereo label LP played on a really old and cheap changer with a flipover cartridge weighed down with an old buffalo nickel. What a waste of vinyl! The demo “Down Down Down” (which became “Broken Arrow”) plays on a vintage Ampex professional reel to reel deck. A demo 45 of “Mr. Soul” plays on an old AR turntable, but the record sits on the inner-platter, exposing the belt, the dual pulley and the subplatter below. At least there’s no coinage on the headshell! And so it goes through the disc’s programming of released and unreleased material.

Don’t worry: the visuals are faux. The sound is from the masters and if you have a good home theater set up, you’ll find the 192k/24 bit sound sensational! If this had been CD sound, well, I’d still be happily spinning vinyl but probably happily spinning digital too. But it wasn’t CD sound, so don’t get me started!

You can listen through this way, or while the tunes play use the pop up menu to hit “information,” which will pop up a visual giving you the date and place it was recorded, the producer, the players and where the song first appeared if it had been previously issued.

While the tune plays you can choose “song folder” via the pop up menu and see a hanging folder, the front of which contains the same info visual. However, move the cursor and a red dot lets you access memorabilia and photos surrounding the particular tune. Hit “ok” (or whatever your player has in the center of the navigation ring) and the selected photo fills the screen. Select “caption on” and you get details like “March 12, 1967, NY in front of fountain, Sausalito, photo by Henry Diltz.” The caption mars the photo so you can turn it off. Trust me, you will get lost and there will be dead ends until you figure it out.

You can go through listening to each tune either bywatching the vintage gear, or via the hanging folder. The hanging folder route offers more to look at and plenty of bonus material. For instance the folder for the “Mr. Soul” demo (issued originally on Rhino’s Buffalo Springfield box set) has some great photos of the band and Neil, some press excerpts (including one from “Hit Parader” magazine in which Neil admits the obvious: that he lifted the riff from “Satisfaction”) and a great piece of memorabilia: a Broadside listing the acts for the January 20th 1967 edition of the ABC-TV variety show “Hollywood Palace,” in which Buffalo Springfield performed, as did Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (probably as the 2000 year old man) and the team of Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse. 1967 was a time of great contrasts and rough transitions!

But look carefully and you’ll see hidden behind the main information box “pasted” onto the front of the hanging folder, another label. Navigate around the screen and you’ll see loudspeaker and television icons appear on the label. Hit the center button on your remote’s navigation ring and you can listen to an audio tape of Neil explaining the “Satisfaction”/”Mr. Soul” connection, while the interviewer says that the Stones admitted to lifting their riff from Martha and the Vandellas’ song “Nowhere to Run” (the visual for this is an oscilloscope trace dancing in front of a cheap Concord tape recorder microphone). Below that is the fantastic video of Buffalo Springfield being introduced by host Tony Martin and then lip-synching “Mr. Soul.”

When the oh, so young Neil gets to the line about his head being “the event of the season,” he breaks character and does a bemused knowing aside that makes him look older and wiser than his years and definitely lets you know what a goof it was for them to be appearing on such a “straight” variety show! Dewey Martin does his best Ringo-ish sitting upright pounding (which Max Weinberg seems to have picked up from Dewey) and Steven Stills prances around in what looks like a desperate attempt to steal focus from Neil. No such luck!

The point is, unless you navigate carefully, you could miss this, or many of the other gems tucked neatly within the folds of the complicated navigation system, so take your time!

You can also access the filing cabinet in which all of the folders are stored and select any of them and thus the tunes that way. When you’ve moved past the folders on the screen a sound effect of a big filing cabinet drawer moving accompanies the drawer’s movement to reveal more folders.

You are tantalized by folders from the next disc in the set that are darkened but visible in front of the final tune on this disc, which is “I Am a Child.” That folder includes a great KSAN interview with Young explaining how he didn’t have much to do with the final record (Last Time Around). “The last Buffalo Springfield abum was Again” Young says, adding “Jimmy Messina did a miserable job of mixing it (Last Time Around).” Young lets all of his frustration out complaining about the wrong vocal track being used for Stills’ “Four Days Gone,” among other grouses.

The sound of “I Am a Child” was great on the original LP. It’s simply stunning on the Blu-ray, with Martin’s rim shots popping brilliantly, Gary Marker’s (who?) bass plucks ringing deep and clean and Young’s acoustic guitar sounding richer and more distinctive than I’ve ever heard it. I still like the “feel” of the original LP better as well as the textures it produces but in terms of detail, the 192/24 bit Blu-ray file rules.

As you move through the folders (a red dot shows you where you are), the album covers pop up at the appropriate break between tunes. Select it and a folder pops up showing, for instance the Again album cover, the tunes the recording venues (Gold Star, Columbia, Hollywood and Atlantic, New York January-Sept. 1967) and the various producers( interview I conducted with Gold Star owner Stan Ross: http://www.musicangle.com/feat.php?id=122)

You can and should also access the timeline found on each disc, which gives you a running event order via what looks like wall mounted memorabilia, album covers, etc. Don’t glide by them too quickly or you’ll miss that some light up and can be selected to reveal great bonus footage. And be sure to attempt to navigate around every static screen shot. When something lights up, go for it!

There are other surprises, including that the Massey Hall concert was filmed, so after listening to the double LP (sorry, but though it sounds great on Blu-ray it sounds even better on vinyl) you can watch it here in all of its dark, primitive glory.

Going through it all in detail would take days to write and you’re better off doing it yourself. However, the timelines were particularly useful in placing a personal context around each event in Neil Young’s life. If you’re of a certain age, as the timeline ticks off both world events and Neil events, you’ll find yourself calculating where you were and what you were doing at any given checkpoint as you first saw a given album and heard a particular song. The box truly is a “journey through the past” and fittingly Neil’s movie of the same name is the tenth and final “official” disc in the set, not counting the aforementioned bonus discs found in the rolling box.

Which brings me to a story that I might have told in some other review regarding this film and Neil Young. As the memorabilia section’s poster indicates, “Journey Through the Past” had its premier engagement at Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Orson Welles Cinema, October 10th 1973. I was there both because I was a big Neil Young fan and because I was then an on air personality at BCN-FM.

Everyone had high expectations but it became evident early on that calling it “A film by Neil Young” probably overstated what it really was, which was an overindulgent mélange of concert footage, radio station interviews, ponderously staged original sequences including black robed and hooded guys on horseback holding crosses (a “Southern Man” reference) and all kinds of other stuff, probably intended, to some degree, to impress Cary Snodgrass, Neil’s girlfriend at the time.

After a quick (un)establishing shot of Neil and Cary getting into a vintage car shot on his ranch, it suddenly switches for no good reason to Neil and entourage swooping into a young Scott Shannon’s radio show. Shannon was as lame back then as now: unfunny, arrogant, just plain plastic bad news—the essence of AM Top 40 DJdom. You can bet everyone from the very hip BCN groaned and laughed at Scott and the even funnier contrast of the hip Neil sitting there with the plastic Scott. At the same time every one of us was thinking “Scott gets Neil and we don’t?”

The movie meanders on with Neil rolling and lighting a big fat doobie, cutting back to Scott in the studio talking to Neil, intercut with Buffalo Springfield footage and so on. It took about ten minutes to realize that this was not really Neil Young’s excursion into serious cinema, but rather some stoned out hippie’s lame personal visual indulgence. This was to Neil Young what “Magical Mystery Tour” was to The Beatles, though now the concert footage of B.S. and CSN&Y is fun to watch, and hearing a guy complaining about the “insane” $10.00 concert ticket prices is beyond amusing.

In any case, after that first ten minutes, the gathered “hipourgeoisie” began to get beyond restless. At about the time the footage cut to some zombified guy lying in the desert, the crowd grew restless. The guy gets up and begins to walk out of the frame as the soundtrack cuts from desert wind to unmistakable stoned hippie giggling. The visual cuts to CSN&Y smoking pot and talking about legalization of “grass.”

That’s when I got involved. The crowd was out of the movie, the movie sucked and so I started interjected funny comments. The more people around me laughed, the louder I got. The louder I got, the more people laughed. They all know who it was since mine was a very familiar voice in Boston at the time. Pretty soon I had the crowd in my “Mystery Science Theater 2000” hands and I ran with it, stopping my interference during the musical sequences, some of which were great then (especially in the days before rock videos) as they are now.

The juxtaposition of the straight world of Nixon and Billy Graham with the hippiedom of Young and Crosby back then resonates today with the juxtaposition of Obama and the reactionary “teabaggers” today. Like the Nixonians back then, the teabaggers laughably think they are the last great hope for the preservation of America.



When the “movie” was over and the lights came up, everyone was laughing, both at Neil’s lame attempt at “cinema” and at my joking. Charlie McKenzie, a Warner Brothers promo man, sitting about ten rows in front of me, turned around and said “Very funny Fremer, guess who’s sitting right behind you?”

I turn around and there’s Neil Young and David Crosby! Oops. On the one hand, I felt justified having sat through such crap— and at the august Orson Welles cinema of all places. On the other, I felt like an asshole, which for me at the time, was not all that unusual. I was also too much of a chicken shit to engage Young or to apologize to him, so sheepish grin on my face, I turned around and slinked out of the theater.

That was my recollection of the event, which over time, may have been greatly embellished, but I don’t think so!

Back to the Archives!

So what you have here are 128 audio tracks presented in spectacular 192K/24 bit sound (Blu-ray only), 43 unreleased, 13 of which have never before been heard, thousands of images, photos, charts, graphs, lyrics, letters, interviews, you name it, all meticulously organized and presented in a way that lets you appreciate the magnitude of Neil Young’s creative output (not counting “Journey Through the Past”) as well as your own life (if you’re old enough) and how you journeyed through the past to arrive where you are today, sitting on a couch, perhaps still dreaming dreams that Neil Young lived out in the real world years ago.

Neil, (among others who contributed some of the amazing memorabilia), kept everything and here he gives it back to you. I can’t imagine any Neil Young fan who wouldn’t get his money’s worth pouring through this compendium even if just once. I found myself watching repeatedly, for weeks, finding something new each view and enjoying what I’d already seen as much the third time as the first.

Yes, it’s expensive and you probably have some of it already. If you’re a true fan, you might have most of it but here the sum is far greater than the parts. The Blu-ray’s superior navigation system and high resolution sound makes it the one to have if you’re going to spend the money in the first place and if you’re a true fan you won’t be disappointed.

As far as I’m concerned, we’ve been lucky as hell to have been able to share the past 40 plus years with the likes of Neil Young. I saw him play Madison Square Garden December of 2008 and he was as good as ever, if not better than ever.

He’s a ‘57 Buick Limited and a Chevy Volt, a roll of Ampex 456 and a 1T hardrive, an AR turntable and a Blu-ray player, a stoned hippie and a landed aristocrat, a Lionel train and a Learjet, a Reaganite and a peacenik all rolled into one! Long may he run!