In the parlance of Neil Young albums, “Ditch” refers to the trilogy of records he put out in the mid-1970s after the success of 1972’s Harvest and Neil’s star-making turn in Crosby, Stills, Nash, And Young. According to well-worn legend, these albums — 1973’s Time Fades Away, 1974’s On The Beach, and 1975’s Tonight’s The Night — represent Young’s rebellion against fame and mark an aggressive turn away from mainstream accessibility.
Here’s the problem: In the parlance of public esteem, those records endure as some of the most beloved music in Neil Young’s discography. You would have to look long and hard to find any Neil fan who believes that On The Beach and Tonight’s The Night are provocative or alienating. If anything, they are now considered entry points for newcomers into the man’s work.
I would argue that if we are talking about the actual “Ditch” in Neil Young’s career, you have to look one decade later, to the mid-’80s. At that time, Neil was battling crises on multiple fronts. He was pushing 40. His record sales had fallen off a cliff. The head of his label, David Geffen, was openly hostile to his new material. Not even music critics — usually a reliable base of support — could make sense of his idiosyncratic artistic whims. He appeared to be flailing, moving from one misbegotten experiment to the next. Synth-rocker one year, country traditionalist the next, rockabilly cat the year after that.
With the benefit of historical hindsight, we know that Neil Young pulled out of this tailspin by the end of the ’80s, and in the ’90s he enjoyed renewed popularity and cultural relevance. But in the moment, it must have seemed as though the icon had, well, lost his damn mind.
The most intriguing aspect of Neil Young Archives, Vol. III: 1976-1987 — a massive box set composed of 17 CDs (plus five Blu-Rays containing 11 films in the deluxe edition) — is that it’s not necessarily designed to dissuade you from questioning the sanity of ’80s Neil. On the contrary, it takes a warts and all approach to his most polarizing era, encouraging fans to revisit albums they might have dismissed years ago without quite making the case that they’re “secretly great.” There are gems buried in the mix, but there’s also plenty of misfires that will register as either fascinating or tedious, depending on your level of Neil fandom. (Who are we kidding — if you care about this box set, you are definitely a fanatic.)
To be sure, there are also some unequivocal triumphs contained here: The box covers the making of American Stars N’ Bars, Comes A Time, and the monumental Rust Never Sleeps. And it also has glimmers of the comeback that commenced with Freedom in 1989. But for the most part, Archives, Vol. III covers the stretch of time in Neil’s artistic life — ages 31 to 42 — when he teetered on the brink of permanent has-been-ism.
As always, Neil’s lack of vanity sets him apart from his peers. Unlike Bob Dylan, who seems utterly uninterested in his own voluminous vaults and leaves the reissue business to his dedicated team, Neil has always been hands-on with his archives. And that seems doubly true of Archives, Vol. III, which is accented with brief “raps” where Neil gives sparse details about the sessions compiled on each disc. (It sounds like he’s talking into a tape recorder in a remote log cabin.) But the biggest revelation of the box are the films, directed by Young under the “Bernard Shakey” pseudonym. Some of these movies have been fitfully available before going out of print, while others have never been distributed. Together they form a portrait of a great man losing his grip on greatness right before he regained it.
With a box this large, it might be hard to know where to start. With that in mind, I’ve created a listening and viewing guide with three tiers. Of course, Neil would likely disparage this approach. Why stay on the road someone made for you when you can just head for the ditch?
Tier 1: The Essentials
A lot of the music on Archives, Vol. III is either an acquired taste or of interest only to the most serious (or perverse) Neil heads. Across The Water is the exception. The double album and corresponding concert film document Neil’s world tour with Crazy Horse in 1976, with stops in London, Glasgow, and Tokyo. Can I interest you in live versions of “Cortez The Killer” and “Down By The River” culled from the mid-’70s, when this all-time world-class badass rock band was at the zenith of their powers? I thought so. (If Neil were only about showcasing his greatest music, we would have an entire box set focused solely on this tour by now.)
As for the film, it surely is the best-looking live footage of the Horse from this era in general circulation. The music is interspersed with fly-on-the-wall, cinema verité clips that emphasize the dullness of backstage life, as was the norm for “on tour” rock docs post-Don’t Look Back. And yet, for diehards, there might be something mesmerizing about watching Eliot Roberts take what feels like 20 minutes to order an elegantly extravagant breakfast from hotel room service. And it is definitely a blast watching the guys enjoy a post-show joint after blazing through an epic “Like A Hurricane” for a room full of reverent Scottish hippies.
In 1978, Neil commenced another legendary series of shows at San Francisco’s Boarding House, a tiny club with a capacity fewer than 300 people. Unlike the iconic stoner persona he adopted for the ’76 tour — and revived off and on countless times after — he cut a relatively clean-cut figure at these solo gigs. His short hair was a sign of allegiance with punk-rock, as was his emerging partnership with Ohio social deconstructionists Devo, who snuck off with Neil to record an anarchic version of one of his latest songs, “Hey, Hey, My, My (Into The Black).” You hear that take on the second of two Boarding House discs, which otherwise concentrate on Neil’s uniformly stunning acoustic performances. (The accompanying film is somewhat static as a cinematic experience, but still required viewing as an adjunct to the albums.)
In the late ’70s, Neil worked on two movies — the first was Rust Never Sleeps, rightly regarded as one of the great concert films, capturing Neil by himself and with Crazy Horse. The second was Human Highway, which was one of the oddest projects of his career — a largely improvised slapstick comedy about the downsides of capitalism and the dangers of nuclear apocalypse featuring a shockingly committed performance by Young as a Jerry Lewis-esque auto mechanic. Co-starring the members of Devo and some of Neil’s old running mates from the Laurel Canyon days — Dean Stockwell (credited as co-director), Dennis Hopper, and Russ Tamblyn — Human Highway hangs together surprisingly well and benefits greatly from the cinematography of David Myers, an Oscar winner for shooting Woodstock whose other credits include The Last Waltz and Wattstax as well as George Lucas’ feature-length debut, THX-138. The final result feels like a precursor to ’80s “outsider” cult classics like Repo Man, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and Blue Velvet.
Human Highway was not released in theaters until 1982, a truly bonkers year for Neil Young and one of the craziest years ever for any major rock star. Neil’s original plan that year was to put out Island In The Sun, a collection of breezy, synth-accented love songs recorded in Hawaii with members of Crazy Horse, Buffalo Springfield, and long-time buddies like Ben Keith and Joe Lala. But when David Geffen heard the record, he insisted that Neil go back to the drawing board and come up with something better.
If only Geffen knew what Neil had up his sleeve. Taken on its own terms, Island In The Sun (rechristened here as Johnny’s Island) is a charming (if also inconsequential) record. It’s not Neil’s best work by any means, but in 2024 it sounds more contemporary than any of the records he actually put out in this period. A yacht-rock pastiche made with acoustic guitars and cheap keyboards, it resembles any number of indie singer-songwriter records coming out of Brooklyn or Philadelphia in the past 10 years.
Instead, 1982 became the year of Trans, Young’s heartfelt attempt to merge his music with synthesizers as an allegory for the communication struggles he was experiencing with his young son Ben, who was recently diagnosed with cerebral palsy. While it was eventually reassessed in later years as an artistically brave detour, at the time Trans rankled critics and mystified fans. On the road, Young tried awkwardly to integrate the new material into a setlist still rounded out by the likes of “Heart Of Gold” and “Helpless.” Hopped up with ambition after seeing The Rolling Stones on the Tattoo You tour, he aspired to a similarly large-scale show and poured a fortune into tour production. But unlike the Stones, he wasn’t just sticking with the hits, he was also playing some of the least Neil Young-like music of his career. The hostile crowds drove the members of his backing band to pre-show drinking and drugging just to gin up the courage to get on stage. This naturally further incensed Neil, who wound up losing $750,000 on the shows.
Two films from Archives, Vol. III depict this era: Berlin finds Neil and his band performing in the titular city with something approaching professionalism. Highlights include a deeply strange and theatrical take on “Transformer Man,” in which Neil stalks the stage sans guitar while Nils Lofgren (who more than earned his paychecks for this tour) does what can only be described as an interpretive dance in the background; and the rarely performed song “Berlin,” which was abandoned after this era but nonetheless stands out as a spooky, noirish rocker. And then there’s the Hal Ashby-directed Solo Trans, a missive from the stateside tour that includes a mock TV reporter doing backstage athlete-style interviews throughout the show. It culminates with a preview of Neil’s Elvis-inspired Everybody’s Rockin’ guise with yet another backing band, The Shocking Pinks, which must have confused the already befuddled audience even more.
The multi-media elements of Solo Trans carried over to In A Rusted Out Garage, a concert film that originated as a pay-per-view simulcast from the close of Neil’s 1986 tour with Crazy Horse. Once again, the on-stage action is interrupted by a smarmy newscaster, this time dubbed Dan Clear. More importantly, Young was sounding more like himself than he had in years. These shows eventually produced 1987’s Life, Young’s most underrated album of the decade, which bridged the experimentation of the Trans period with the mid-career comeback signaled by Freedom. On In A Rusted Out Garage, this results in some bizarre juxtapositions — on one song, Neil storms the stage decked out in sleeveless flannel while stomping through “Cinnamon Girl,” and on the next tune Billy Talbot rolls up with a keytar.
The dark underbelly of In A Rusted Out Garage is Muddy Track, a truly singular gonzo document of the 1986-87 European leg of the Crazy Horse tour. Shot in part by Young himself on a video camera — he calls his handheld device “Otto” — Muddy Track unfurls one “bad vibes” vignette after another, with shows plagued by bad weather, low ticket sales, and the creeping sense that Neil is over the hill and past his prime. When the band screws up a song — given this is Crazy Horse, the screw ups are plentiful — we see an irate Neil cursing out the musicians. Whether this is real or staged is open to question; Neil seems predetermined to show the tour in a bad light. (As he gleefully instructs one camera operator, “Anything that’s bad happens, keep rolling.”) It’s a rough but riveting watch, playing like a cathartic, self-imposed bottoming-out at the heart of the Reagan era.
In that context, Summer Songs feels like a ray of light. Recorded in 1987, these demos were later reworked as album tracks for the so-so Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young comeback record American Dream as well as Freedom. In the case of the latter record, songs like “Someday” and “Wrecking Ball” actually sound better in stripped-back form on Summer Songs, positively sparkling as spare piano ballads. In the seeds of these tracks lie the next great artistic outburst of Young’s career.
Tier 2: Worthy Listens
Of all Neil Young’s musical collaborators, Nicolette Larson ranks among the most unjustly overlooked. In the late ’70s, she was Neil’s duet partner on American Stars N’ Bars and Comes A Time, and she even brought him back into the U.S. Top 10 with her cover of “Lotta Love.” But Larson drifted from Young’s orbit after that, and later died at the tragically young age of 45 in 1997.
Fortunately, Larson is well represented on Archives, Vol. III. She first appears on Snapshot In Time, an extraordinarily intimate live album from 1977 literally recorded at Linda Ronstadt’s kitchen table in Malibu. Ronstadt was among the people who recommended Larson to Young, and on this album you can hear him introducing songs like “Hold Back The Tears” and “Star Of Bethlehem” and the spontaneous harmonies they contribute. Later on, Larson returns on Union Hall, another circa ’77 live release covering rehearsals with a battalion of Nashville studio musicians dubbed The Gone With The Wind Orchestra. Highlights include lovably ragged versions of classics and deep cuts like “Are You Ready For The Country?” and “The Losing End (When You’re On).” The trifecta of Neil Young country records from 1977 is completed with Oceanside Countryside, culled from sessions in which Neil ran through songs mostly by himself that ended up on Comes A Time and Rust Never Sleeps.
Let’s pivot from the sublime to the ridiculous: Evolution charts Neil’s ’83-’84 years, with a sizeable (too big?) chunk reserved for previously released material from Everybody’s Rockin’. As for the unreleased songs, many of them utilize soon-to-be-obsolete technology, in mostly clunky but nonetheless compelling fashion. “Razor Love,” officially released 20 years later as a gentle country-folk number on 2004’s Silver & Gold, is presented here in a radically different form as a synth-rock ballad.
Neil treads more familiar ground on Touch The Night, which samples live selections from a brief run with Crazy Horse at the Catalyst nightclub in Santa Cruz. (The corresponding concert film Catalyst is appropriately ragged and grainy.) In the set, Neil and the Horse capably perform crowd-pleasers like “Barstool Blues” and “Welfare Mothers” but mostly stick to dunderheaded new material that strains to keep up with the era’s hard-rockin’ headbangers. (The first song is literally called “Rock.”) A more satisfying sample of live Neil from this period is Grey Riders, a document of his Old Ways era band The International Harvesters, with songs previously released on the archive LP A Treasure mixed with more Old Ways live material and country standards. (Meanwhile the concert film A Treasure relies on fleeting, choppy, and mostly incomplete live clips, and is largely unwatchable.)
Tier 3: Take Your Time
Followers of the Archives series are aware that Neil likes to repackage previously released material with music from the vaults. The positive way to spin this is that Neil is “remixing” his albums and creating something new. (I would argue he did this with the Dume disc from Vol. II, which remakes one of my favorite Neil albums, Zuma, and possibly improves upon it.) The negative spin is that Neil is making you repurchase music you already own.
Either way, there is a fair amount of this on Archives, Vol. III, which may or may not be a problem depending on how closely you keep up with past archival releases. (Some of the music is pretty great, but this designation is based on volume of familiar material, not quality.) This applies to Hitchhikin’ Judy (which draws largely from Hitchhiker and Songs For Judy), Windward Passage (composed mostly of songs from the live LP High Flyin,’ with his side project band The Ducks), Sedan Delivery (Live Rust and Rust Never Sleeps), Coastline (Hawks & Doves and RE-AC-TOR), and Road Of Plenty (Landing On Water).