Time Fades Away Neil Young
Boasted of steering his career into “the ditch” in the early 1970s, choosing to make sad, lonely, difficult records in the wake of ’s wide success. The “Ditch Trilogy” (as Young enthusiasts dubbed it) of Time Fades Away,., and marks his creative peak—yet for decades, this era was neglected and incomplete. On the Beach only made it to CD in 2003, and Time Fades Away was never reissued digitally. Thanks to the vinyl revival, the trio is finally available.
Rereleased initially as a pricey Record Store Day box set, and now as individual LPs, the “Ditch Trilogy” records—plus its sunnier epilogue,.Zuma—.are back in print for the first time since their original releases. So while On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night are well-established masterpieces, now’s the time to consider the on-ramp and the off-ramp to the Ditch, and understand how Young entered that dark spiral and how he escaped it.
Time Fades Away is the album Neil Young didn’t want us to hear; in several interviews over the years, he’s bluntly referred to it as his “worst album.” In Waging Heavy Peace, Young’s 2012 memoir, the 1973 live album is mentioned exactly twice, which is approximately 1,000 times fewer than his electric Lincoln and his Pono music service. Even when major missing pieces of his ’70s catalog, Time Fades Away was left to rot in the archives. Several theories have circulated to explain the conspicuous snub, most often returning to the cursed fog that hung over Young’s 1973 tour. Originally, the band was supposed to include Danny Whitten, Neil’s guitar foil in —but, fighting drug addiction and alcoholism, Whitten couldn’t hack it at rehearsals in fall 1972, and he was fired and sent back to Los Angeles. That same night, he was found dead from an overdose of alcohol and Valium. Whitten’s death cast a shadow over the tour, which started the following January and wormed its way across the United States in a rigorous. The stories from the tour, as regaled in Young biographies, are like a nightmare version of Almost Famous, replete with drug indulgences, money arguments, audience riots, medical issues, and technical problems.
Two-thirds of the way through, Neil’s vocal cords were shot, leading to show cancellations and inclusion of David Crosby and Graham Nash, to no great help. Young’s band the Stray Gators, the murderer’s row of session musicians from Harvest, didn’t translate to basketball arenas; drummer Kenny Buttrey had the worst time of it, with Young asking him to play louder and louder until he literally bled on his drums.
Neil Young's troubled, long-fabled 'Ditch Trilogy' is finally released in full alongside an unexpected, mercurial coda. Java games 240x320 touch screen. Lyrics to 'Time Fades Away' song by Neil Young: Fourteen junkies too weak to work One sells diamonds for what they're worth Down on pain street.
Legendary producer and arranger, playing piano, self-medicated his stage fright with alcohol; for his own part, Young spent the tour chugging tequila and trying out a new Gibson Flying V guitar instead of his totemic Old Black, his dissatisfaction with the sound leading to endless soundchecks and after-show spats. So this wasn’t exactly the tour you’d want to commemorate for eternity with a live album—but at least initially, Young was perversely excited to reflect its chaos, and left the recording mostly free of the overdubs that glossed many live albums of the era. “Money hassles among everyone concerned ruined this tour and record for me, but I released it anyway so you folks could see what could happen if you lose it for a while,” Young wrote in the liner notes of 1977’s Decade. But in retrospect, he was too harsh.
Find album reviews, stream songs, credits and award information for Time Fades Away - Neil Young on AllMusic - 1973 - Anyone who has followed Neil Young's career.
The Stray Gators were one of Young’s most interesting bands: they were fragile, straining, and desperate. One could easily see where their heavier material, such as “Yonder Stands the Sinner” and “Last Dance,” would have fit Whitten-era Crazy Horse. Here, pedal steel wizard Ben Keith levels up from a classy hired hand on Harvest to assume Whitten’s role, his instrument providing wobbly, intoxicated howls that amplify the haunted mood.
Nitzsche plays a deceptively clunky piano that turns “Time Fades Away” into a chicken-wire saloon and creeps with tinkling anxiety around the edges of “Last Dance.” When Crosby and Nash show up, they create an alternate-dimension CSNY that uses their harmonies as a weapon instead of a balm, with Young and Crosby’s “Yonder Stands the Sinner” choruses particularly deranged. Coming on the heels of the slick Harvest, Time Fades Away was a crucial swerve for Young, and it established the proudly flawed aesthetic that has kept his work immediate and powerful for decades.
These are weary, acidic songs about the hollowness of stardom—recording them during a tour from hell is an asset, not a flaw. Even the crowd noise between songs heightens the despair—blissful, oblivious applause from an audience too remote to see Young’s naked pain.
Songs previously lost on Time Fades Away are key parts of Young’s story. “Don’t Be Denied” is one of Young’s best autobiographical songs, wistfully telling the story of his Canadian childhood through ’s early days. “L.A.” is a wonderfully cynical kiss-off to the city where that band found stardom, a land of dreams beset by earthquakes, traffic, and smog.w Because Zuma was packaged with the trilogy for the Record Store Day vinyl box set, there’s been some recent chatter of a “Ditch quadrilogy.” But Zuma is a poor fit with the other three; it’s a record made on a beach instead of On the Beach, a happy reunion and fresh beginning for Crazy Horse, and a goofy boys’ club hangout released only five months after Tonight’s the Night’s tortured slog. It hits the reset button in many ways—most literally with its opener, “Don’t Cry No Tears,” which recycles the melody from “I Wonder,” one of Young’s first recorded works with his high school band, the Squires.
It also marked Young’s decision to reform Crazy Horse for the first time since, with new guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro filling the big rhythm guitar shoes of Danny Whitten. That Young could even stomach replacing Whitten, two years after his death, signaled that the session in Malibu would be one of recovery and rebirth. That period was particularly debauched, with the recently divorced Young and his bandmates enjoyed the company of California girls and Colombian powder, and the party carried over into the “studio” (essentially just a room in producer David Briggs’ rental house). There, the new Crazy Horse got to know each other over some hastily written material, simplified to work with Poncho’s rudimentary guitar.
This lackadaisical formula explains the uneven nature of Zuma, which is equally filled with classics and duds. “Cortez the Killer” and “Danger Bird” are two triumphantly moody, electric epics—lesser cousins to the “Down by the River”-style sprees of the first Crazy Horse, but still spacious opportunities for Young to revive his trademark lacerating guitar tone. It’s here that the sludgy Crazy Horse known today takes shape: the trade-out of the communicative Whitten for Sampedro’s simpler style creates that blunt sound. The rhythm section of Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina lurches menacingly through “Cortez” and “Danger Bird,” and Sampedro’s blocky guitar caddies for Young’s lengthy soloing. The album’s two other highlights revive a breezy, poppy Young that had been missing since. “Don’t Cry No Tears,” is simple twangy country-rock well in the Horse’s wheelhouse, gilded with innocent backing harmonies. “Barstool Blues,” despite being a fairly shameless rip of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” is a convincing and catchy depiction of drunken euphoria—and a pretty accurate portrait of Zuma’s making.
On the less lovable side of the endless party, “Stupid Girl” is nowhere near good enough to justify its casual misogyny and title swipe from, and “Drive Back” is barely a song beneath its mighty riff and creepy piano. Leftovers tossed in from Homegrown (“Pardon My Heart”) and the aborted second CSNY record (“Through My Sails”) don’t quite fit the mood, presaging the less cohesive and spottier records over the rest of Young’s decade. Still, if Zuma is an epilogue to the Ditch Trilogy, it’s also a prologue to the rest of Young’s career, kicking off his fickle, impulsive zig-zagging between genres and volume levels.
That restlessness would keep Young vital long after his peers faded—and it can be traced all the way back to the stoned sunsets of Malibu, where Young decided to cry no more tears and move onward down the road, swerving all the way.
Time Fades Away is a 1973 live album by Neil Young, consisting of previously unreleased material. It was Young's first live album, and was recorded with The Stray Gators on the tour following 1972's highly successful Harvest and has not been reissued on CD due to Young's dissatisfaction with that particular series of concerts.
Time Fades Away Neil Young
Although Time Fades Away received much critical praise, has been widely pirated, and is highly sought after by fans, there are no current plans to reissue the album. Time Fades Away was recorded directly from the soundboard to 16-track using the Quad-8 CompuMix, the unreliable first digital mixing soundboard—against the wishes of producer David Briggs, who referred to it as the 'Compufuck' but was forced to yield to the desires of Young. This resulted in a murky-sounding release. 'There were no 2 track masters ever made of this record. The master discs were cut directly from the 16 track masters through the Compumix system. A mix was recorded to a second 16 track machine-we had 2 that would run perfectly together-to feed the variable pitch system of the lathe-but was discarded when we were through.
I was the mastering engineer who cut the masters.' —Phil Brown Because no two-track stereo master tape was ever made as would commonly be done, the album cannot be remastered in a traditional manner. If any new release was to be attempted, a new mix would need to be made from the original multitrack tapes. Technics SL-1200 with AT ML440, Technolink TC-754 Preamp, Lavry AD11.