Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 (5* for Neil fans, mileage will vary for others)
And, yes, I do realise that it’s not, strictly speaking, an album....
Maybe it's no wonder that it's taken years for the format of the box set to evolve beyond a couple of disks in a package about the same size as the disks themselves or a book with the disks mounted inside the covers.
I've bought plenty of box sets in my time, and the shelves in Hughesy's office and the vinyl collection in the living room are there to prove it. The CD shelves, however, are never going to be able to accommodate the Neil Young Archives. Quite simply, the box is too big.
Looking at the box itself is probably the appropriate point to start looking at the Archives, a project that doesn't fall into line with established practices when it comes to CD or DVD packaging. Neither, by the way, do the contents, but we'll get to that little kettle of fish a bit later. Assuming you own a couple of other collections, this won't slot in nicely beside them - it's taller, for a start - so you're probably looking at creating its own little niche for it. Right from the start you're looking at something that doesn't sit comfortably beside established practices.
At a guess, the wrap around graphics on the outside would mean that eventually the four boxes could be arranged to present a single panel, but when you're talking Neil Young, such expectations have a history of failing to materialise.
Opening the box is best done with some care since there's a handy listing of the contents on the plastic wrap which you'd more than likely want to keep intact for reference purposes. I didn't quite manage to...
Once you've lifted the lid, the contents are, more or less revealed; the book, a big chunky volume that brings its own atmosphere with it; the poster, depicting a filing cabinet drawer with tabs for the various items on the disks; the box that holds the disks themselves; and the 'bonus goodies' box that contains the download card, a note pad from the Whisky A Go Go and the extra Sugar Mountain which represents the first repeat of a previously-released disk.
When it comes to a look at the contents, the book's a natural starting point. Bound in an imitation leather cover with a carved tree around the spine and a rising sun in brown, orange and gold tones, the book's every bit the family album, running from Young's parents' wedding through his childhood years (featuring the sort of chubby kid photos many of us would prefer to consign to oblivion) into high school and from there to his years with The Squires. Photos, newspaper cuttings, handwritten lyrics, letters, it's all there.
It even smells like it's been stowed away at the bottom of a cupboard somewhere.
If you're not particularly interested in those early years, the interesting bit cuts in around page 40 with the formation of Buffalo Springfield which was, for most long-term fans, the first point where Young's presence was likely to register.
The next thirty-odd pages take you through that era, and then the following hundred-odd pages bring the story up to the release of Harvest in 1972, a rich visual record of the years that launched Neil into prominence. There's CSNY content in there, but the majority of the material focuses on Neil Young solo and his collaboration with Crazy Horse.
But the most enlightening section of the book comes at the back - the Archives Selected Tracks section - which places the contents of the disks into perspective as you look at what, apparently, is actually in the Archives.
Amid the speculation that followed the initial wave of publicity about the forthcoming release, many of us expected that the box set would contain almost everything that was out there somewhere, a vast collection of studio cuts, live performances, TV appearances, guest spots and everything else that you can imagine.
Neil is, after all, one of the more widely-bootlegged artists of the era, and there are existing recordings, from almost every tour, band lineup and era. Predictably, those recordings vary widely in sound quality, so you wouldn't have expected everything to end up getting a guernsey. There're space considerations for a start, and bearing in mind the varying quality of those existing recordings you wouldn't expect everything to make the cut.
Disk 3 does, however, contain a legendary recording from The Riverboat in Toronto, with selections from shows from February 7 to 9, 1969 and presumably what's on offer here is all that survived from the recording process. All of them come from the Master log and presumably any outtakes have long since disappeared.
If that sounds like an unreasonable proposition, I'd point you to Disk 5, which duplicated the previous release Live at Fillmore East, drawn from shows with Crazy Horse on 6/7 March 1970. The book lists a number of recordings of each track with the disk drawn from the JN Remixes (JN being Jack Nitzsche) with the exception of the closing Cowgirl in the Sand (P. Siegel 3/8/70). The Neil solo set from 7 March is missing in action, and the disk avoids duplicating Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Winterlong from the 6 March show, where only those tracks and The Loner/Cashbox Rap seem to have been recorded.
Rolling over to Disk 7, which again duplicates a previous release, Live at Massey Hall is drawn from two solo shows on 19 January 1971 and again avoids repeating tracks. Most of the content is drawn from the late show and only four tracks from the early show seem to have been recorded.
Among the live omissions, there are CSNY tracks from the 1969 Big Sur Folk Festival (Master PA Mix) and the Fillmore East (Sea of Madness makes the cut) in 1969 and Fillmore East and Chicago shows from 1970 (Tell Me Why and Only Love Can Break Your Heart used).
Also largely unrepresented are solo shows from the Cellar Door in Washington from late 1970, Royce Hall and Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles in 1971 and the BBC TV In Concert appearance in February that year.
The Archives, in other words, are hardly the comprehensive collection that many fans had been expecting, and at the price (I didn't get much change out of $A250) you could well end up feeling short-changed.
There are, of course, a couple of pluses. Not many, but let's look at it from the glass half full side of things.
For a start, despite all predictions to the contrary, the package has actually appeared, and with the issues about formats and configurations presumably settled, we might see Volumes 2 through to 4 appear at regular intervals over the next couple of years. When they do, it's reasonable to expect they'll be increasingly content-rich. The early years of anyone's career are likely to be the least-thoroughly documented, after all.
Maybe by the time Volume 2 appears Young's preferred format (Blu-Ray) will be sufficiently well established in the marketplace to make it the preferred option for the majority of consumers. By that stage, of course, we might well be looking at a whole new platform, with the usual backwards-compatibility issues.
But if you're looking for positives the biggest is undoubtedly the sound quality. Anyone who bought the remastered Greatest Hits would have a fair idea of what to expect, but the quality, particularly on the earliest recordings, is quite stunning. Far better than you'd think it has any right to be.
Then there are the extras hidden away on the various disks - something you'll presumably miss if you opted for the CD version - though they're not always easy to locate once you get past the pins on the time line side of things.
Reactions to the package have been rather mixed (as you'd expect).
Having bought the DVD or Blu-Ray version, you might expect something more than a screen showing a turntable playing a vinyl disk though the image does change from track to track. With the Blu-Ray you can apparently check out the contents of the file drawer for each track while it's playing, which might help avert the boredom that comes with watching a not-very-interesting image on the screen.
Which brings us to the main point here. We're looking at a big package, that's going to take some time to explore properly. It's not the sort of thing you're going to be able to put on in the background while you read a book, for instance, so it's going to be a while before I'll be able to go into the contents in detail.
At the moment, after a couple of weeks, though, I'm glad I bought it and looking forward to delving deeper, though there's no rush in that regard...
A Guide to the Neil Young Archives