Almost four years after I wrote this speculative piece I’m in the process of transferring the content from the old MobileMe site to here while we’re still waiting for Archives Volume 2. Volume 1 didn’t quite work out as anticipated, and doubtless Volume 2 won’t either.
Rant: The Neil Young Archives
If you picked up some strange rumblings in the world of music during the first week of May 2008, relax.
It had nothing to do with Chilean volcanoes or any other manifestation of the Pacific Ring of Fire, although the source of the rumblings was a city on the fault line and they created deep divisions in certain on-line communities.
However, it seems official. The Neil Young Archives are on their way. You’d better start saving if you’re a fan, because the impact on your hip pocket is likely to be substantial.
Not that there’s anything new about announcements about the fabled trove of Mr Young’s musical and other musings. Once a suitable interval had passed since the release of Decade back in 1976, there have been reports of the imminent release, first of Decade Vol. 2 and then The Archives.
Back as far as 1996, members of the Rust list and other on-line Neil Young-fan communities had put together their own version of the project, the wonderfully-titled Archives Be Damned - first on three cassette tapes and around the turn of the millennium on five CDRs.
But in a staged announcement at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco Young announced the imminent release of the first portion of what will be a massive project.
How massive? Ten Bluray DVDs for the first of four instalments, covering the period up to 1973, though I for one am a little puzzled how he’s going to get enough data to go anywhere near filling that sort of space.
Many will also take issue with the fact that he’s releasing the project in a specialised format that may require a substantial hardware upgrade before the average fan will be able to enjoy it. Of course, all Bluray players are supposed to be backward-compatible playing all previous digital media as well as the latest-and-greatest. At least until the next latest and greatest happens along.
Simple. You just buy a new DVD player. The one you’ve already got is probably due for an upgrade anyway. Right?
Not quite. The Archives are not, as far as I can make out, going to be yet another box set like the other box sets sitting on the shelf beside Hughesy’s armchair.
I mean we’re talking Neil Young. You don’t expect anything to be that straightforward. He doesn’t operate that way.
The first set of disks are largely drawn from the years before he set himself up at the Broken Arrow ranch south of San Francisco, so I guess he’ll have had to trawl through all sorts of places to get the contents for the initial package. After that, however, the sheer potential mass of digital and other data threatens to stagger the imagination.
We know, for instance, that these days every Neil Young concert is professionally recorded, usually by his son Zeke.
Having been in a position to more or less shut himself away on the ranch, which has recording studio facilities, and play around to his heart’s content without anyone in the outside world being any the wiser, there will be stuff appearing in The Archives that even the most hardcore fan hasn’t heard the vaguest whisper about.
So once they’re released, you’ll be able to wander through the masses of pictures, lyrics, diaries and whatever else is included at the same time as you’re listening to high-quality digital audio (24 Bit 192khz Stereo, apparently) that won’t necessarily be linked to the stuff you’re looking at.
You’ll need a Bluray DVD player with a hard drive that’s capable of downloading upgrades and new material as it becomes available over the internet, which is why Mr Young is suggesting that we all shell out for a Playstation 3.
More than likely you’ll need to upgrade your audio-visual hardware as well.
So is it likely to be worth the money? What’s going to be in the package?
For a start there's absolutely no doubt that over a forty-five year career Young would have accumulated a mass of material, and there's no way that all of it will be in an audio format - we're probably looking at some combination of audio, film, photograph, text and other material that won't fit into any one conventional format. And, as additional material surfaces you’ll be able to download it and incorporate it into the original package.
I would expect that the first parcel is likely to contain the smallest quantity of actual data. The last time we heard The Archives are comin’ it was going to be eight CDs, two DVDs and the box would contain slots where you’d be able to insert the snippets from the project - CD releases Live at the Fillmore East 1970 and Live at Massey Hall 1971 - which have already appeared and may (or may not) be reprised when the main body of the project is released.
Since the change to Bluray, I’m guessing that you’ll get everything that’s already been officially released in the package, plus everything else that’s sitting in the musical section of Neil’s basement, with the material that was originally going to be on the two DVDs slotted in where it belongs., since Bluray will allow the project to integrate audio and visual content that would previously have required separate disks.
If you haven’t seen it already, check out the preview at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgSpVU50-m4
I’d expect the project will totally replace all your previously collected Neil Young material, with everything sorted into the correct chronological sequence and accessible in a variety of formats. So that, for instance you could have everything recorded for, say Harvest arranged in chronological sequence with a couple of options on an interactive menu, with, maybe, the opportunity to compile your own alternative version of the album by picking and choosing from the various alternative takes.
Or, once the Digital Rights Management issues have been tackled, you’d be able to do that using whatever tools you have in your computer set-up.
And, while the fur and feathers are flying on the various on-line forums regarding the decision to go with Bluray and Java, could I momentarily pose one (to me, anyway) interesting question.
Was the choice of format a deliberate decision NOT to exclude people operating on a particular (computer) platform?
Imagine the kerfuffle if he’s decided to go to Apple, for instance. The tools to deliver what Neil has in mind probably already exist in the Mac universe, though it couldn’t be distributed on line through iTunes (at least not at the quality he’s looking for).
But imagine the furore if he had...
Or, worse still, if he’d crawled into bed with Microsoft.
It’s been fairly obvious for a while that Mr Young has certain, shall we say, techno-geek tendencies.
For a start we know he’s a model train freak. If you don’t believe me, check out:
http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/Smokestack%20Lightnin__%20Neil%20You/
It’s also fairly obvious that he’s fairly well up to date with the latest technological developments and has his own take on how they intersect with what he wants to do.
And, if you’re a Neil Young fan, why would you expect anything different?
And if you’re looking for more on the subject, try:
http://www.thrasherswheat.org/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/sns-ap-neil-young-blu-ray,0,4660318.story
http://www.news.com/8301-13953_3-9937142-80.html
http://www.java.com/en/java_in_action/neil_young.jsp
And those are just for starters...