The Neil Young Archives

A Timeline



1979. Rolling Stone

One of Young's long-standing jokes is that he's saving his best material for his "Bus Crash" album. The few who have heard samplings of Young's tape vaults-songs that didn't fit into the flow of his albums, entire unreleased works, live tapes, Buffalo Springfield tapes-agree that some of his most compelling performances are amongst the unreleased material.
"All those songs," he says, "they're still there. They're there. And they're in an order. They're not gone. But, you know, they're old songs. who wants to hear about it. They're depressing. They are. It's like ancient history to me. I don't want to have to deal with that stuff coming out." "Until," I ask, "you're not around to deal with them coming out?" "That's right," he says. "Then they're there. I think every artist plans the future like that. I have things in a certain order, so that if anything ever happened to me it would be pretty evident what to do."

1988. Rolling Stone

"I'm gonna try and expose those things I tried to do on Decade II, which should come out next year. Now that I'm back on Reprise, I can do whatever I want. So I can do Decade II. On Geffen, Decade II would have been impossible, 'cause it's a three-record set, and they would never do that. There's no way they could make the money they want to make out of it."

1989. Village Voice

Young feels he will be vindicated by this seven-CD anthology he's preparing for next year, his 25th anniversary in the music business. A compilation of approximately 100 songs - nearly half unreleased material - Decade II will encompass the original Decade, deleting some songs and adding some new ones, and then take on Young's work in the '80s.
"It's a big task, it wears me out just thinking about it," says Young. "I'd rather be making new music. But I want to set the record straight as much as I can. Through outtakes and chosen cuts I'm going to try to bring out more of the feeling that's hidden in those records. I think I can enhance the experience by putting them all in a long line, shortening them, and changing them." What I've heard of the unreleased material Young performed live certainly surpasses the '80s records. But can Young really make us understand Trans, Everybody's Rockin', and Old Ways?

1990. Rolling Stone

Shit, that's a giant. I'm still working on it. It's rediculous. I recorded everything I did over the years, and I also videotaped every tour. I have somewhere around a hundred unreleased tunes, and a lot of them are videotaped. There's some really funky stuff, real obscure shit. Like the Ducks in Santa Cruz, and Crazy Horse at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz in 1982, or 1984, playing a bunch of songs that we could never record. We went to New York and tried to record these songs for three weeks, and we didn't get one track. We just blew a whole bunch of time. That was when I first introduced the horns; we had a horn section with Crazy Horse. We just never could get it to gel.
I thought it was my responsibility to try to put all of this stuff in order and try to get it all sorted out so that if something ever happened to me, I wouldn't have to count on anybody else to take care of it for me. Because I do know where everything fits in and where it's supposed to be.
It'll come out as a multi-CD set and a multivideo set simultaneously with books that refer to the songs and their place in time and what was going on and who was there. Little stories about each song and opinions from different people. It's going to be really interesting, and I'm really into it, but it's not something you can just knock off in a year.

1990. Vox

Young is now readying a 180 track compilation of his three decade career for C.D - 'Decades I, II and III to be made available on Warner Bros late next year.
"There'll be 50 or 60 unreleased songs. There's three whole unreleased albums to go on too - 'Homegrown', 'Big Room' and 'Old Ways', the album Geffen sued me over. There's stuff from back in 1962 going on this collection, there's a bunch of stuff with CSNY - a whole aborted album called Human Highway, a-bunch of live Crazy Horse, some of my best stuff. Songs like 'Nothing Is Perfect', the 'hostages' song I did at Live Aid and 'Ordinary People' 'this 15 minute number I left off'Eldorado'. Both those songs dated too quickly. They were too topical. But they work in a retrospective like this.

1991. Pulse

For anyone who bought Arc/Weld thinking it's some live documentation of the sprawling Young oeuvre ... forget it. First off, he refuses to make Crazy Horse cover material on which the band didn't originaIly play (although "Crime in the City" and "Rockin' in the Free World," both originally from 1989's Horse-less Freedom, are definite highlights of the new set). Second, the above- mentioned project is already underway, with Young exploring a massive database of unreleased material for an archival series, with the first set due in late 1992.
Open with obscure material from Young's 1965-66 period, where he meandered around his native Canada with bands like the Squires and Mynah Birds, these annual four-CD volumes will, foreseeably, progress through unreleased Buffalo Springfield to early Crazy Horse recorded live at the Fillmore East, and will possibly include an alternate take of Ragged Glory's "Fuckin' Up" from a Saturday Night Live rehearsal ("We all came in and just wailed the shit outta that song.... I don't know if that tape still exists, but if it does it'll be on there"). The first volume, he says, should cover 1964 to 1970, ending right before he electrified Crosby, Stills and Nash on Deja Vu.
"There's so much stuff," Young says. "[It's] everything I can find that I like or I think has any merit to it. It's going to be a different kind of project, really, than a Decade II. It goes back before Decade started, to the very beginning of my recording experience, back to a group called the Squires in Canada. We have four songs by the Squires, then it goes into a folk period that I was in around '64. It comes out of that into unreleased Buffalo Springfield stuff, unreleased songs of mine from that period. There's almost as much unreleased material, in some cases more unreleased material, from every era of about a 26-year period, than there is released stuff.
"Decade should stand on its own. This is a different thing. There are so many songs. It's going to come out in volumes over a period of years. Each volume is gonna be four CDs. It'll have a box you can get with it or later, 'cause there'll be empty spaces in the box for the other pieces as they come along. I've been working on it for almost two years. I would really anticipate volume one to be ready by this time next year--a complete book and four CDs.
"So there's a lot of unreleased stuff and I need to feel that I've saved it all. I'm kinda like a freak for saving things. It was all haphazard, but now I've organized it all, got it all on computers."

1992. Canadian Radio Interview

"We've got lots of tapes from back then of songs that haven't been heard. All kinds of stuff on this 'Archives' project from that time. I think there's 7 songs, or 8 or 9 unreleased songs before we get to Buffalo Springfield. So there's a lot of early stuff there....I've sequenced the ones that I want. Of course, everything's chronological, so I just had to choose the ones I didn't want to include....It'll be a multi-boxed set. It's going to come out in volumes over a period of time.
I'm just organizing my life's work into chronological order, putting all the documents that go with it in the same kind of order, and making books. And, you know, we're into it....It's a specialized thing, almost for musicologists or something, you know. And if Reprise wants to pick certain things from it and put them out, they're welcome to do that. That's fine. I just want everything in order. Everybody'll know the way it's supposed to be. Then they can decide whether they want to change it or not. But I want them to know what it is first....The beginning is pre-Squires. It's doubtful if there would ever be anything recorded from before the Squires, although it's not completely impossible. There could be something. We're still looking for things."

1993. Musician

"There's a lot of stuff in there. I think for fans it'll be fun. There's several ways of doing it, which we haven't quite decided yet. There's a lot of options, since there's so much stuff. I tend to want to do the complete thing, just put it all out in chronological order, and then if you want to get it by mail order, it's expensive as hell but we're not trying to shove it down your throat. Then there's a commercial version where you have respect for the fact that you don't want to make 'em buy a bunch of stuff they may not want to hear but there's still depth and stuff they haven't heard. Not for fanatics. And there's the surface type thing for whoever, you know, maybe all they have is enough money to buy one CD and have an overview. But nothing's locked in yet.
My idea is to have an unbelievable amount of CDs, each with their own package, representing the time they came from. Some of them being 35 minutes long, some of them being 70 minutes long, depending on what the content is, not just trying to cram the CD full but to make it an era. some eras have three volumes, some might only be 35 minutes long. But you can hear what's happening and see the images and pictures from that time and take that CD with you. Then you've got 1986 or 1964. There are 11 songs from 1964 and '65.
We've got a couple of really good ones back there-the first time I felt that I'd made a really good record, we have a tape of that. Plus there's a lot of solo performances of early stuff, real early stuff. It's interesting, if you're into it. It's fascinating purely from a librarian's point of view that we managed to keep all of this stuff together. I'm such a pack rat."

1995. Spin

The biggest influence on Young's music in recent years has been listening to the collected works of Neil Young, since he's assembled what will eventually be released-now that High Definition Compatible Digital has solved the transfering problem-as a vast set of Neil Young archives. A "consumer" edition will include the best of the released and unreleased work, but he's more deeply interested in the complete archive, which will document every session he ever did for collectors, in chronological order. "From the worst piece of shit to the best thing I ever did- you make the choice." (I get a salivatory taste of things to come when I ask Young if he's ever worked with female musicians and he mentions unreleased recordings with Joni Mitchell from the Tonight's the Night sessions).

1995. Mojo

Legend has it that Don't Cry No tears from Zuma is the first song you wrote.
"No, that was only one of the first 30 or 40 songs I wrote! Oh yeah, there were a lot of them from back then. Unfortunately, we only have 'glimmers' of most of them but we do have actual recordings of five of them which you're going o hear when the Archives finally appear. I really love these tracks, by the way. I'm not embarrassed by them or anything because I'm so young. I mean, some of them I wanted to hear over and over again, whereas others were clearly not so successful. I think it's real interesting wehn you hear the bad ones with the good ones."
After the Squires, you joined a band called The Mynah Birds in '65 and apparently even recorded an album with them that never came out..
"Yeah, and there are tapes of me and The Mynah Birds but I've not been able to het a hold of them. I only sang a little bit in that group..Rick James and Bruce Palmer were in that group also."
"Just after I'd begun playing with CSN&Y, I went out on the road and did some really funky things that indicated that our next album would be in that vein (country rock). We recorded Wondering, Dance Dance, Dance, It Might Have Been, Winterlong and several others. They'll appear on the Archives, I've had them transferred to digital."

1996. Stephen Barncard, CSNY Engineer

I just got back from Neil's ranch today and personally observed his archive crew working at a fever pitch mastering the Anthology and other re-releases. After trying every A-D coversion scheme in the universe, archivist John Knowland and historian Joel Bernstein are working day and night on the project, transferring to HDCD format. I've heard some of it, and it was stunning. I hope the record buying public appreciates the effort that went into this.
People will buying thousands of HDCD converters to hear this at it's best. I'm really jazzed. These guys get to do it right.
It's all I know, except I heard the demo of "Broken Arrow". And I cannot make any predictions on release dates, but I just know the logjam is broken.

1996. Much Music, "Neil TV"

"July"

1996. SF Chronicle

So with HDCD, the DECADE 2 project, which could ultimately yield 20 cd's including 78 unreleased tracks and is now dubbed the "Selections for the Neil Young Archives, Volume 1" is said to be headed for release in October. There is also talk that Young is piecing together a companion video collection featuring never before seen footage of vintage concerts such as his appearances at Carnagie Hall and the Fillmore East.

1997. Fachblatt Musikmagazin

“It's good to have them (the archives) at our disposal. There's constantly something to talk about without having to work for. The archives help to keep the myth. If we'd really release them the myth would be ruined. So it will never happen. The release of the archives would be the most self-destructive step in my career. Believe me.”

1998. Rolling Stone

According to Elektra Records, Young, along with his former band mates in Buffalo Springfield have committed to a full round of press interviews next January to promote the Buffalo Springfield box set that will finally be in stores next February. While the box does not have a firm release date, or even a title, it will have seven unreleased tracks, according to the label.
Young's long-awaited box set, focusing on his solo material and recordings he did with Crazy Horse in the Sixties, is also penciled in for a possible September release. "This will not be Decade 2," said a source at Reprise. "Rather, it's the first in a series of Neil's archival recordings." And that's still not all. We could also be in store for a deluge of television appearances from the erstwhile Mr. Soul. According to our sources at VH1, there have been talks about a VH1 Storyteller segment as well as some other special programming surrounding these releases.

1999. Sonic Net

Additionally, Young continues work on the first installment of his long-rumored career-retrospective box set, according to Warner Bros./Reprise Records spokesperson Bob Merlis. "It's not currently scheduled, but we hope to have it out later this year," Merlis said.
Although Roberts said he couldn't confirm the set will feature eight CDs, he said that number was probably accurate. The set is slated to cover Young's career -- from his work with his teen-age band the Squires, through his early '60s group, the Mynah Birds (which also featured funk-pop idol Rick James), until the end of his stint with the influential Los Angeles-based folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield in 1968.
Included among that material will be three CDs of live material that Roberts said featured "staggering" performances from the early stages of Young's solo career. "These are shows that defined Neil as an artist," Roberts said.
The earliest live disc in the set is from Young's first appearance at the small Toronto club, The Riverboat, from the late '60s. That show in Young's hometown was one of his first live gigs following his departure from Buffalo Springfield.
The other two performances are from the early '70s, Roberts said. The second live disc features a show at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, England, with Young's hard-rocking backup band Crazy Horse. The third live CD is from an appearance at the Massey Hall in Toronto, recorded just before Young released his landmark 1972 album Harvest, which features such classic rock ballads as "Heart of Gold" (RealAudio excerpt of studio version) and "Old Man." The show also found Young previewing material from his 1973 follow-up to Harvest, Time Fades Away.
"[The third live disc] has all the songs for his next two [studio] albums in their original form," Roberts said, "and the performances are just staggering." Roberts said Young is hoping to release the entire set in October.

2000. Austin

"Well, it's almost ready to come out, actually. It's in its final phases of production -- of post-production. And its form is -- it comes in a box -- in a square box, tall box. And it has the package of CDs. There's eight CDs. And it's -- the music is chronological from the beginning of my recording all the way through. And it's -- there's selections. It's not every song. But there's a lot of selections from different -- from different periods and some, a lot of unknown ones and unreleased ones and different versions of things. But the thing that makes it interesting is the chronological order that it's in. You know, you can really sense a growth and a change as it goes through it. And it reveals things about where songs actually fit, because a lot of times I'll record songs and just hold on to them for three or four years and then drop them into a record. So as this thing unfolds, it kind of puts my earlier records in another perspective. And then there are a few performances in there of one live record that I did with Crazy Horse at the Fillmore East that was never released. And it's in there. And some other early performances. So I -- of -- at the River Boat in Toronto where I played in a kind of folk acoustic, little, small coffeehouse setting where you can hear, you know, the glasses tinkling and there's only about 20 people there. And I'm singing really soft and, you know, it sounds very young and very open. Anyway, there's a lot of chronological -- it just goes from, I think, 1962 or '63 to something like 1972 or something like that."
"It's Volume One. And along with that, there's a book that comes in there that's got all kinds of -- it's a different approach to a book. What it is is, it's all the things that people wrote about us, about me and about the songs and everything. Negative and positive. They're just all in there. Everything that we could find we just crammed in. It's like a scrapbook of comments and stuff. And that's all it is. It doesn't draw any conclusions. And then on top of that, there's a DVD of the -- of all of the film and video, et cetera, that I did back in those years. And so that's a chronological DVD also that covers the same period. And there's a lot of stuff in there with -- that's never been seen. The original Harvest recording sessions that we filmed and the recording A Man Needs a Maid with the London Symphony Orchestra, the sessions. There's a World with the London Symphony. All this stuff. And there's just a lot of information in there that has never been released before. And that's in one DVD. And the other DVD in there is a film that I made back in, I think, 1971 or `2, called Journey Through the Past. And that has -- it's kind of a collage film."


2000. Rolling Stone

"We may have overstepped the bounds of reality with this thing." Neil Young says with a broad grin. "People may not be prepared for the amount of detail that this has. But this is the Information Age." Young is in a Michigan hotel room, taking time out from the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunion tour. But he is talking about another mammoth undertaking, one that has been a decade in preparation: Neil Young Archives, the long-awaited four-part series of retrospective box sets documenting Young's life in music. Volume One is pencilled in for release by Reprise in the third quarter of this year and features 8 CDs and two DVDs, covering Young's career from 1963 - his earliest recordings with the Winnipeg, Manitoba, combo the Squires - to the 1972 single "War Song". Young's classic and rare work with Buffalo springfield, Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young is also featured, and more than half of the live and studio material in the box is previously unissued. Three audio disks are exclusively devoted to live shows of the period.
"You hear the good and the bad," Young says candidly of the set. "A lot of people will say, 'Well, there's a lot of trash on this thing.' But if you take it as a whole, it tells a story. And that's what I like to do."
He also describes the packaging as "pretty cool. It's set up so that when you put the whole set [of Boxes] together" - Young spreads his arms apart, as if beholding a bookshelf of the complete Shakespeare -"it starts talkin' to ya!"
Photographer and archivist Joel Bernstein, who has worked with Young on this project since January 1990, says that at one point in the mid-Nineties, Young considered making the set an all-rarities affair. But Young returned to his original plan, which was to document his best work over the years, released or otherwise. "You're really looking for magic," Bernstein explains, "not perfection. Remember, this is Neil Young," he adds, laughing. "we're not looking for everything to be perfect. We're looking for feel."
"I can make a smooth record," Young says. "But if I only have a casette recording of a certian thing and there is nothing else, I'm shameless. I couldn't care less. To me, that is part of the documentary. So that's what I've done.
"It's rediculously huge," he admits of the four-volume Archives. "And I don't even know if there's going to be an interest in it. But to me it's a chronicle - something that people can refer to, myself included, just for fun. Or for my grandchildren. It's something I can show them. Like, 'Hey, look at this. Listen to this weird song I once did.'"

2000.

Neil Young's Official Website Launches

2001. Sound And Vision

Young does recognize the value of DVD-Audio as an archival medium. In fact, the long-awaited Neil Young Archives, a series of four boxed sets spanning his entire career, will indeed appear on DVD-A, he announces eagerly. "We're going to do the boxes at the highest-possible resoulution that DVD allows. And I'm so happy that we're getting the DVDs out before the CDs come out. The CD is not gonna beat this thing to the market. The DVD will be first."
"Or simultaneous...," his publicist politely advises. "Yes," Young politely responds. "Or the DVDs will be first by a couple of weeks.
"Here's what I want to do with the first Archives box, which will cover everything I did from 1963 to 1971. It's an eight-disc set. It has highlights from the albums I put out plus a lot of unreleased material and some other interesting things. That'll all be on DVD-Audio. At the same time, all the albums I released during that period will come out on DVD-Audio. That's how I want to do it - so that it's chronological and if just keeps on going. Once you start collecting the albums, if you're really into it, you can get all of them - or if not, you can just pick and choose. But it'll be orderly, and the stuff will come out in a way that makes sense."
Any idea, then, when we'll actually see the first box?
"Well, a lot of the art is finished, but I really have no idea.... Last year when I remastered the tracks, I did them at 88.2/24 for HDCD. Now I'm starting over for DVD-Audio. It's driving me crazy; this is like the third time I've had to retransfer everything."


2003. Chicago Tribune

Those holding their breath waiting for Neil Young to finally release his long-promised, long-delayed career anthology -- the multivolume follow-up to his revered "Decade" retrospective -- might want to exhale.
Young's manager, Elliot Roberts, says the project has been shelved, at least until Young stops writing songs. "I've killed the box set," Roberts says. "I've always been against it, because it's the type of project you do when you're retired or dead, and Neil isn't close to being either." Young's prolific nature consistently frustrated plans to release the anthology, a 32-CD career-spanning beast that was to have been divided into four sets. These would have included 80 unreleased Young songs, several complete concerts and bonus DVDs. Roberts says the first two volumes of the anthology are sequenced and ready to go; they include a concert from Young's first acoustic tour in 1968, a Crazy Horse gig in London from 1974 and a legendary show with Miles Davis at the Fillmore East from 1972.
"It's great stuff, but it's so voluminous that it would cost a fortune," Roberts says, "and Neil doesn't want to break stuff out into individual CDs for marketing purposes, because that would defeat the whole point of a project like this. So we're putting it away for a while, until maybe some Christmas down the years."

2003. Mojo

The first volume of a career-long audio-visual retrosepctive of Neil Young is complete. A release date has yet to be set, says Young, because existing DVD technology isn't advanced enough to handle his needs.
"It's just moving along and by the time everything is ready I'll just dump it all onto a really good medium, " he told Sylvie Simmons. "I've worked on it a lot and we've got the first voumes finished and now we're into the second volumes. It's going to be three or four volumes - it's way too big. When I started working on it there were no DVDs. Then DVD came along and I tried to do it, but DVD wouldn't play back the music at a high res, and now you can't have a high res picture and a high res sound."
Started in 1989, the project was to be a multi-CD epic spanning Young's entire career, incorporating released and unreleased tracks.
So far Young has transferred all his songs from analogue tapes to digital - three times.
Don't be too eager to hear and see it all though.
"You don't need a retrospective yet." says Neil. "No reason for it."

2005. Detroit Free Press

For Neil Young fans, the question is not when will the next album come out, but when will all his unreleased material come out? After years of planning, Young says he will release the first volume of "Archives," an 8-disc set, later this year.
"It will only cover from 1963 to 1973," says Young. It will begin with recordings of his first "real rock band" in Canada, the Squires; he says the videos of live shows, demos, home recordings and unreleased material will be presented in chronological order.
Young says he has been working on the project constantly, but "I wanted to wait until the right technology was around to make it the way I saw it. With BlueRay DVD technology, I've created this time line on the discs that will take you through the entire story, putting everything on there that's relevant."
Asked by director Jonathan Demme if there will be any "Easter eggs," the term given to hidden material on the DVD, Young says, "We're trying to figure out how you hit on something from about 1967 and get a virtual bong. To enhance your listening pleasure."

2006. Rolling Stone

"Yeah, it's been a long time. It's a lot of music. It's going to come out, and we get closer and closer to having it finished. I'm not exactly sure when it's coming out, but I don't think it's going to be a year from now when it will be out, I think it will be out before then. We have a lot of it finished now. There are four volumes, and each volume has a number of CDs in it. It's a big set, but it's a chronological thing. It's a trip from my first recording up through the most recent ones. That's how we can divide it up. The first one stops in 1971 or '72, I think it's '72.
There's a lot of video stuff that's going to be in it. There's going to be a live performance, actually, two live acoustic performances, solo acoustic performances, that are groups of songs, long groups of songs, full sets. And it's kind of interesting to see the early Seventies and late Sixties that way. With this funky old 16-millimeter film and everything.

2007.

Archives Trailer on display on Neil's Web Site.

2007. Uncut

Long-awaited details about the forthcoming Neil Young Archives box- set have surfaced today.
The anticipated release date of 'Archives, Volume 1' is September this year.
The collection will feature eight discs, including "Live At the Filmore" (released last November) and "Live At Massey Hall", a solo set from 1971 which is due out on March 26 .
Thirty-eight previously unreleased songs will feature on Archives, billed as a 'musical autobiography' of Neil Young. Tantalisingly, the eight CDs only cover the period from 1964 to 1971, suggesting it is only the beginning of a vast release campaign.

2008. Mojo

"Now we have the techology to put it out, so it's coming out this year. we've finished Volume One. It will be eight DVDs and Blu-ray, that'll be it."

2008. SF Gate

Singer Neil Young said Tuesday that he is tapping the same new technology used in the latest movies and video games to release his archive of music, photos, videos and other memorabilia.
Young, in a baseball cap and dark sunglasses, appeared on stage at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco to introduce the Neil Young Archive.
The archive will take advantage of Blu-ray technology, the high- definition DVD, to offer a retrospective of Young's songs dating to 1963.
Young said he has wanted to release the archive since the 1980s but had been held back by technology. Blu-ray offers higher sound quality than CDs and standard DVDs, more storage capacity, more interaction and, with the latest players, the ability to access the Web to download additional features.
The first of five volumes, a 10-disc set available in the fall, will include a chronological collection of 128 tracks, 500 photos, letters, manuscripts and additional material from 1963 to 1972. Designed as a file cabinet, it lets fans listen to the music and browse the archive on the screen at the same time.
"We want people to spend the same hours on it like a video game," Young said.
Young, who started thinking about assembling an archive after the release of his compilation package "Decade" in 1977, said it will contain not just his best, but also his worst recordings to show the evolution of his career. "I wanted to tell the whole story, the successes and the failures," he said.
Young said he also wanted to wait until better digital sound quality was available. He dismissed CDs and digital music tracks - "My heart goes out to them," he said of people listening to music on their iPods and other MP3 players - and said their poor sound quality has been destructive to the music industry.

"In reply to all those who demand to get a free mp3 version with their BD edition- This won't happen, so just get used to that reality. This free mp3 is some option that you folks just made up here on this forum (Thrasher's Wheat). It doesn't exist in the real world." - Archives Guy 12/22/2008.

2009.

Neil Young Archives Vol 1 released on 6/2/09 simultaneously on Blu-Ray, DVD, CD and Digital Download formats (and the BD and DVD versions do come with a free MP3 download card...).

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