Photo by Gary Burden
Neil Young turned 70 today. Happy Birthday Neil and Happy Neil's Birthday to everyone.
In the spirit of celebration, here's a nice article from last year by Matt Ashare that tries to deconvolute Neil's compulsive eccentricity by discussing the Pono/Voice-O-Graph contradiction. Fun for fans.
Alternate celebration mode: listen to the lost album, "Time Fades Away," on YouTube, which is about the only place you can hear it.
Mike
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Mani Sitaraman: "Happy Birthday, Neil! This, from 1971, is my favorite. Highly recommended to all."
John Hufnagel: "One can always buy 'Time Fades Away' online."
Del: "He was too 'noisy' for me for a while, but I have come full circle. He has enough incredibly great stuff that the noisy stuff is easily overlooked. Saw him and Willie Nelson last year at the concert to protest the XL Pipeline (defeated finally!). He still 'has it' and means it.
"A friend who is a photographer in D.C. ran into him at a protest over the same pipeline in D.C. not long before that. He just showed up, no entourage, just a guy who 'walks his talk.' 'Ohio' is a song that is always on my mind as is the event it memorializes. A great Canadian/American hero in my mind."
Seventy eh? I turn that number in a few months myself. To me Neil yOung is the son of the late Scott Young, sports journalist for Toronto Globe and Mail. Unlike all of my peers I never got into Young's music; like so many things about me, it was noise, not music.
Neil likes Lionel trains, and sadly does not live in Canada, anymore.
Speaking of Massey Hall, gorgeous acoustics, as befits an old downtown Toronto theatre however it has lousy seating, too many pillars in front
of the seats and aisles and meant for somebody who tops out at 5.5 feet in height. NO legroom in the seats.
Posted by: Bryce Lee | Thursday, 12 November 2015 at 06:44 PM
BTW, "Time Fades Away" is available through the usual bit torrent sites (for those conversant with such things) in 192kHz 24-bit FLAC format, ripped right from the Pono remaster, or so it's claimed.
It is in fact also available from the Pono site: http://bit.ly/1LcSiq5 but I don't know if that requires a Pono player or what...
-=-Joe (who used to do a mean Neil Young impression in coffee houses in the early 70s.)
Posted by: Joe Holmes | Thursday, 12 November 2015 at 07:53 PM
In honor of Neil Young's birthday I send him a piece of his lyric from the early eighties, also in keeping with the approaching season, "Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho". Just yesterday I was looking at old records in an antique store and came across Re*act*or for $7 and couldn't resist. I think I can enjoy some of his eighties music now, especially softened by old vinyl. Makes me laugh a little is all.
Posted by: John Krumm | Friday, 13 November 2015 at 07:22 AM