SUGAR MOUNTAIN BREAKDOWN
Who needs seven Old Mans? And six Sugar Mountains? You do! All Neil Young’s Archive series releases, in order of their original recording dates, evaluated by
1. Archives Performance Series Volume 00: Sugar Mountain – Live At Canterbury House 1968 (2008)
“I never ever have told a lie on-stage,” claims Neil Young, almost 23 in November ’68, as he pads out a solo set in Ann Arbor with endearingly tallish tales. The nervous, goofy persona is a shock, but the chat does mean the flow of Buffalo Springfield relics and unreleased solo songs is somewhat fragmented. This version of Sugar Mountain first surfaced in 1969 as B-side of The Loner; Young’s contorted attempt at Mason Williams’ Classical Gas remains less fêted in the canon.
2. Archives Performance Series Volume 01: Live At The Riverboat 1969 (2009)
Choosing one of the Canterbury House and Riverboat shows for inclusion on the first Archives box set, Young opted for the latter, recorded three months later in Toronto. He’s still highly talkative, more stoned than shy this time out, though a distrait mood doesn’t undermine the precision and tenderness of Flying On The Ground Is Wrong and Expecting To Fly. Plus, a real rarity:
Whiskey Boot Hill, with the lyrics that would belatedly turn up as part of Country Girl on CSNY’s Déjà Vu.
3. Archives Performance Series Volume 02: Live At The Fillmore East 1970 (2006)
Enter Crazy Horse. Young began his March 1970 New York shows with solo sets, though it’s the phenomenal electric second half captured here. Poignancy comes from it being Danny Whitten’s last Crazy Horse tour (you’ll know this Whitten-led Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown from Tonight’s The Night), but exuberance, power and the Horse’s underappreciated agility dominate one of the very best Neil live albums. Has he ever played a better Down By The River?
4. Archives Performance Series Volume 02.5: Live At The Cellar Door (1970) (2013)
Young has obsessively revisited his shows from November 30, 1970 to January 22, 1971: no less than four acoustic albums from the period have been released thus far. Drawn from three Washington Cellar Door shows between November 30 and December 3, the growth in Young’s focus and confidence is striking – as are his new songs (See The Sky About
To Rain, four years away from official release). Key rarity: the only known solo piano version of Cinnamon Girl.
5. Official Bootleg Series 01: Carnegie Hall, December 4th, 1970 (2021)
Two days later, Young is in New York playing Cinnamon Girl on acoustic again, at the first of two Carnegie Hall shows (the second is an unofficial bootleg staple). Running parallel to the Archives series, he launched the Official Bootleg Series in 2021 with this long 1970 set. The grand concert venue means that The Cellar Door’s intimacy is missed, but you do get an extra 10 songs, including a rapturously received Southern Man, and some choice Buffalo Springfield excavations: it’s Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing that gets the surprise piano treatment.
6. Archives Performance Series Volume 03: Live At Massey Hall 1971 (2007)
January 19, 1971, and back home in Toronto the setlist has tilted away from the previous September’s release, After The Goldrush, and towards February’s imminent Harvest.
Over half of the songs were unreleased at the time, including a heartfelt Needle And The Damage Done and Dance Dance Dance, subsequently handed to Crazy Horse for their self-titled album before Young reclaimed it as Love Is A Rose. A gig so good, producer David Briggs lobbied to release it in preference to Harvest.
7. Archives Performance Series Volume 03.5: Young Shakespeare (1971) (2021)
The title alludes to the venue – the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut – where Young fetched up three nights after Massey Hall. The two setlists are broadly similar (Young Shakespeare adds yet another Sugar Mountain for your collection), with the A Man Needs A Maid/Heart Of Gold segue a stark highlight; “more calm” than Massey Hall, is Young’s verdict. The significant point of difference is 16mm footage of the show, some of the earliest live film of Young, shot for German TV.
8. Archives Volume I: 1963-1972 (2009)
The first Archives box set was not quite the rarities bonanza anticipated – only 47 out of 137 tracks were previously unreleased – and its optimal format (10 Blu-ray discs) has not aged well. Still, as a comprehensive document of Young’s evolution from surf-rock naif in The Squires, via Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse, CSNY and numerous solo incarnations, it’s still pretty essential. Crazy Horse mooching through schmaltzy oldie It Might Have Been, and a rowdy CSNY pulling
themselves together for Tell Me Why – gorgeous – are valuable curios.
9. Archives Performance Series Volume 04: Tuscaloosa (1973) (2019)
Young’s early ’73 American tour, with rootsy compadres The Stray Gators as backing band, is memorialised on
Time Fades Away.
But here’s part of an Alabama date from earlier in the jaunt, before Johnny Barbata replaced Kenny Buttrey on drums. The Gators are rambunctiously inspired (Time Fades Away itself is astonishing), the setlist pivots toward hits rather than new songs, and note Young’s developing attitude to the truth compared with 1968: “Don’t clap for this story because most of it I’m making up,” he admits, introducing Heart Of Gold.
10. Archives Performance Series Volume 05: Roxy: Tonight’s The Night Live 1973 (2018)
A few weeks after the tequila-soaked sessions for Tonight’s The Night were completed, Young shepherded Crazy Horse – temporarily reconfigured as The Santa Monica Flyers, with the addition of Ben Keith – down the Sunset Strip to the new Roxy Club. Compared with the frayed and destabilised studio takes, the live versions are slightly tighter, while still wired with loss, chemicals and a blackly comic, nihilistic vision of rock’n’roll. Key lie: Young’s insistence that the gig is taking place in Miami Beach, not LA.
11. Special Release Series Volume 02: Homegrown (1975) (2020)
If live albums in the Archive Performance Series have dominated Neil Young Archives editions, the Special Release Series is what many fans dreamed of when the project began: full unreleased albums, like this legendary artefact from 1975. Homegrown, amazingly, outdoes its myth: a quite different beast from the bootlegs, with seven songs appearing for the first time in studio incarnations, and some of them – notably the stomping Vacancy, the missing link between
On The Beach and Zuma – previously unknown to even the most assiduous Neil scholars. Worth the 45-year wait.
12. Archives Volume II: 1972–1976 (2020)
Originally promised for a couple of years after Archives Volume I, and planned to cover 1972-1982, Archives II eventually manifested in 2020, its 10 discs covering roughly half that timespan. Intense focus on ’72-76 proves rewarding: Homegrown figures alongside two more legendary unreleased albums (1975’s Dume and the ’76 live set Odeon Budokan). Among all the spectacular and radical alternate versions, 12 previously unheard songs – mostly great – are revealed. And the long-rumoured match-up of Joni Mitchell and the Santa Monica Flyers on Raised On Robbery is just as wild as we’d hoped.
13. Special Release Series Volume 05: Hitchhiker (1976) (2017)
True to ornery Young form, the first unreleased studio album to emerge in the Special Release Series was one previously unmentioned: an entirely solo session planned by Young as the follow-up to Zuma, rejected by his label as resembling demos. It’s certainly raw, but in a way which enhances rather than undermines these fine songs – among them one authentic lost classic, Give Me Strength. Note that Hitchhiker is Volume 05 and Homegrown Volume 02. Volume 10 is the soundtrack to Young’s 2018 film, Paradox; the names and provenance of the other albums in the series remain, predictably, unclear.
14. Archives Performance Series Volume 07: Songs For Judy (1976) (2018)
Young’s November 1976 US tour featured two sets a night: one with Crazy Horse, and a warm-up solo turn. Songs For Judy compiles choice performances from those opening sets (essentially an upgraded version of the Bernstein Tapes bootleg), ranging from Springfield cuts (a punchy Mr Soul) to songs that would stay on the shelf until 1990 (White Line) and a fragile, beautiful outlier, No One Seems To Know, that only exists elsewhere as a Zuma outtake on the second Archives box set.
15. Archives Performance Series Volume 09: A Treasure (1984–1985) (2011)
Young’s capricious 1980s should prove massive value when the Archives grapples with that decade in earnest, as Volumes 09 and 11 indicate.
A Treasure finds him kicking up the dust at rodeos and state fairs in the company of a troupe of Nashville vets he called The International Harvesters. Virtuoso hoedowns dominate, including some strong songs from the lost first version of Old Ways (Grey Riders is a gem) and a dreamy Flying On The Ground Is Wrong that foreshadows Harvest Moon.
16. Archives Performance Series Volume 11: Bluenote Café (1987-1988) (2015)
The second ’80s instalment showcases The Bluenotes, who backed Young on 1988’s This Note’s For You,a horn-laden R&B big band whose swing works better live than on that studio album. There’s a fair amount of arch showbiz shtick over the three discs, but the highlights are significant: the anthemic 12-minute trudge of Ordinary People, subsequently abandoned ’til 2007; and a ferocious Crime In The City, soon to be a cornerstone of 1989’s Freedom.
17. Archives Performance Series Volume 11.5: Way Down In The Rust Bucket (1990) (2021)
If Weld (1991) has long been one of the best Neil Young live albums, this effective prequel is just as good, with Crazy Horse warming up for the Ragged Glory Tour near Young’s ranch in Santa Cruz. Classic Horse burners Like A Hurricane, Cortez The Killer and an exceptional, newly-minted Love And Only Love, endless solo upon endless solo, close an epic 19-song set, which also has room for some chunky Re·ac·tor nuggets – Surfer Joe And Moe The Sleaze and T-Bone – and a rare outing for 1977’s Bite The Bullet. Quite a night.
18. Archives Performance Series Volume 12: Dreamin’ Man Live ’92 (2009)
A relatively slight entry in the series, Dreamin’ Man simply consists of the 10 songs of 1992’s Harvest Moon, recorded at a selection of US shows, mostly before the studio album had been released. The twist comes in that it’s another solo album, Young’s emotional verities exposed where they were cushioned on Harvest Moon by star backing vocals and The Stray Gators. Such A Woman notably benefits from the lack of saccharine strings; dog homily Old King, with some fiendish banjo picking, is an unlikely highlight.
19. Archives Performance Series Volume 16: Return To Greendale (2003) (2020)
Young’s restless 21st century has seen him plough through numerous new music projects at considerable speed and with scant second glances, while simultaneously curating the Archives. But he seems to have an ongoing engagement with the 2003 eco-opera, Greendale. This performance from Toronto captures the rickety community theatre vibes, but also the songs’ blues-inflected subtleties: Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina with a stereotype-defying lightness of touch; languid guitar from Young at his most lyrical, especially on Carmichael and Grandpa’s Interview.