Gone Dead Train: The Best Of Crazy Horse 1971-1989 CD

While Crazy Horse have often been praised as one of America's great rock & roll bands, that's usually when they've been working in collaboration with fan, friend, and frequent patron Neil Young. On their own, Crazy Horse have recorded a handful of worthwhile albums, but they've never connected with audiences the same way they have when working with Young. Of course, it doesn't help that the band has never had a consistent frontman, guitarist, or songwriter of their own, with bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina the only musicians to play on every Crazy Horse album. (Original guitarist Danny Whitten died of a drug overdose in 1972, while Frank "Poncho" Sampedro has often drifted out of the group, usually to work with Young.) Crazy Horse's career has followed a strange and crooked path, but they've also made some fine music along the way, and Gone Dead Train is a compilation which attempts to make sense of the band's checkered recording history outside of their work with Neil Young (though his unmistakable guitar tone is apparent on several tracks here). Gone Dead Train features material from four of Crazy Horse's five albums (the band's wildly disappointing second album, Loose, has thankfully been ignored), and while each record has a distinct personality of its own, the sequence gives the material an admirable flow, from the gutbucket country-rock stomp of their self-titled 1971 debut to the "Neil Young without Neil Young" fury of 1989's Left for Dead. The disc also includes two cuts from the first and only album (released in 1968) by the Rockets, which featured Talbot, Molina, and Whitten before they formed Crazy Horse (and the woozy "Pills Blues" sounds like an uncomfortable foreshadowing of the drug problems that would take Whitten's life four years later). Gone Dead Train shows that Crazy Horse don't have to have Neil Young around to make great rock & roll records, and makes you wish they'd head into the studio on their own a bit more often. ~ Mark Deming

For the first time in any format, Raven presents the Best Of the best garage band in the world: the incomparable Crazy Horse. Featuring the cream of their explosive recordings for Reprise, Epic, RCA and Heyday, Gone Dead Train 1971-1989 captures the essence of the band. Kicking off with the incendiary 'Pill's Blues' by the Rockets - the band from Laurel Canyon that formed the nucleus of Crazy Horse in 1968. Their 1971 debut Crazy Horse included Grin (and later Bruce Springsteen) guitarist / songwriter Nils Lofgren and legendary producer/pianist/arranger Jack Nitzsche. These outstanding recordings for Reprise showed the band was a lot more than merely Young's backing group, still rockin' it out with Neil 30+ years later. The tragic loss of founder Whitten to drug overdose in 1972 allowed his replacement Frank 'Poncho' Sampedro to cement his place with Talbot and Molina as a unit that embodied the essence of grunge years before Nirvana etc.