Obsessives typically don’t play well together. Whether on the battlefield, the football gridiron or a backyard drinking party, when two hard-headed, determined, focused types come into conflict, like the old songs says, something’s gotta give.
A similar musical tilt has been playing out in recent weeks, although the antagonists may surprise you.
In this corner, a fervid, loyal, vocal sector of Neil Young’s fan base.
In the other corner, Neil Young.
The source of conflict: Young’s 20-years-in-the-making multimedia anthology project, Archives. After countless promises and delays, Archives, Vol. 1, which covers only the earliest part of Young’s career, from 1963-1972, was announced for a late January 2009 release. Amazon.com began taking pre-orders. After so many disappointments and postponements, the motherlode of Young’s oft-fabled unreleased music, video, film and other material was nearing arrival. The well-sourced Neil fan site ThrashersWheat.org even organized an online Q&A session last week with an unnamed individual intimately associated with the project to taut its merits to fans.
Aside from a hefty price tag (over $300 at Amazon), what’s not to love? Ten hi-res Blu-Ray discs packed with 128 songs, mastered in vivid 24-bit/192-khz audio (also available on slightly cheaper but much less interactive, lower-res DVDs). An innovative interface allows fans to mine deep files on each song – individual tracks, possibly alternate versions or mixes, handwritten lyrics, reviews, contemporaneous photos, video clips. Plus a 236-page hardcover book, and the possibility that web-enabled Blu-Ray players will be able to download additional material over time. There must be joy in Youngville, the mighty Archives is coming out!
Not so fast. While it’s likely that the majority of fans are stoked for the release, and it is easy to find people giddy with the prospect of the box’s arrival, there are hints of dissent. Look at the comments section at Amazon.com, and the vocal minority snark is already out.
Said one Amazon.com customer: “I don’t care if Neil raises the dead on this set, I’m not buying. I was disappointed in the cost of his last tour tickets but this is the height of arrogance and greed…”
Most of the opposition seems to focus on the set’s price, followed by the apparent intent not to simultaneously issue the music on regular CD or download format. To further muddy the waters, Rolling Stone quoted Young as saying the music would eventually be available in all formats, but not until the Blu-Ray version got out the door. Even more controversial, a pair of Neil Young Archives Performance Series preview concerts that trickled out on CD in recent years (Live At The Fillmore East 1970 and Live At Massey Hall 1971) will both be included in the Archives, Vol. 1 set on Blu-Ray and DVD. So if you ran out and bought those CDs, you’ll be buying them again with this set, albeit in much higher-resolution. On the other hand, if you really did have a preference for CDs, and if you are interested in picking up the long-rumored Live At The Riverboat 1969 concert, that baby will only be released with Archives on Blu-Ray and DVD, but not, apparently, on compact disc. To compound confusion, it appears the Live At Canterbury House 1968 set issued on CD last week will not be part of the Archives set when it arrives in stores. Go figure.
And finally, while a track list has not been made available at this writing, there has been speculation that the set might include everything Young recorded during a defined period, or possibly focus on unreleased material. But based on the questions and answers at the Thrasherswheat.org forum, it appears that Archives will be an odd compromise of some unreleased material – 43 of the 128 tracks – but also some of Young’s previously released material from that period. Does that mean the set will include, say, four of the seven tracks from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere instead of the whole deal? Expect agitated Young fans to skip back through Jimmy McDonough’s wonderful Neil Young biography, Shakey, to confront the singer with his own declared vision for Archives: “The real picture – that’s what I’m looking for. Not a product. And I think that’s what the die-hard fans want – the whole fuckin’ thing.”
“As a hard core, long time fanatic who simply cannot afford the Archives as they are being released, I am truly disappointed,” one anonymous fan posted in the Thrasher’s Wheat forum. “Now, I am a Neil Nut who will be forever unsatisfied and left without ever experiencing his Archives. To think that I waited decades for this disappointment.”
Added another anonymous Thrasher’s Wheat poster: “This, my friends, smells of a RIP-OFF. Check that, it REEKS of a rip-off. What kind of scam is he running? Neil can get away with it because he’s a so-called legend…but he’s also a hypocrite!” The testiness during the forum got bad enough that the website’s unnamed guest Archives insider posted this response: “What a pity. If these type of comments continue, we’ll ask (the moderator) to remove the entire post and comments, thus terminating this forum that was created to foster understanding and knowledge.”
Those comments are at the extreme, but there are degrees of confusion and bewilderment out there among Young’s fans. At least part of the agitation comes from the anticipation accrued during the decades of delays in producing this set. Back in the late 1970s, Young spoke of a cache of unreleased material – including some completed albums that had been stashed away for posterity – which would one day be released post-mortem under the morbid title The Bus Crash Tapes. Through the years, there has been chatter that a release was drawing near; the set would appear and then vanish from release schedules. An acquaintance in the Canadian music business told me in the late ’90s that they had been dispatched to acquire copies of old Canadian newspaper columns by Neil’s father, Scott Young, for inclusion in the then-imminent set. A couple of years ago, a 2007 release date was announced and a website was erected by Reprise Records, complete with a tantalizing trailer and the promise of eight CDs and two DVDs. That web page still mocks Young fans with its long-vanquished promise in the banner: “Coming in 2007.” In May, Young appeared at the JavaOne conference to unveil a demo of how the technology would operate the interactive component of Archives, and yet another trailer was posted:
Throughout all this, the artist himself has been stubborn about ignoring the pressure to just get the set out there and has been content to tinker and toy with the form and content, no matter how wrenching it is for his fans. Young has never been a fan of CD audio, and the advent of Blu-Ray, with its massive storage capacity for finer audio and video quality and interactive capabilities, seems to have spurred him toward the finish line. But the decision to favor a nascent technology that would require a serious home entertainment upgrade for many has been a particular sore point with fans.
That this back-and-forth exists is one of the consequences of the influence that the web now has in our lives. Think back 20 years: Even if fans were to get worked up about this sort of thing, what would be the outlet for it? But the ability of devotees to fire back has emboldened them to, in some cases, take a proprietary view of the project. Which may come as news to the headstrong Young, who has held out this long to do exactly what he wanted to do. Who knows? Maybe the outcry will spur him to rethink the concept. Maybe he’ll just pack it up and cancel the whole thing.
The mixes signals keep on coming. Even after this flurry of activity, and with less than two months to go before the Archives street date in late January, fans who preordered through Amazon.com received word last weekend that the set has now been bumped until February 24. You could hear Neil’s fan base groaning in unison: Here we go again.
Maybe that’s why, with not a small amount of irony, yet another trailer for Archives, included as a freebie with the new Canterbury concert set, ends with a clip from Young’s 1968 song “I’ve Been Waiting For You”:
I’ve been waiting for you
You’ve been coming to me
For such a long time
The wait is almost over. Until it isn’t.
