Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 (1963 - 1972) CD

This eight-CD box set, with about one-third previously unreleased material, sparks the beginning of a promising series of Neil Young ARCHIVES, and serves as a document of the heady exploration and growth that the beloved artist undertook between the innocent early 1960s and the explosive early '70s. The first CD preserves some early solo demos and his work with his teenage band the Squires, a Duane Eddy-ish enterprise that made the best of Young's nascent signature guitar style--simple, effective, dramatic. The second disc covers the Buffalo Springfield years, and includes two versions of the delicious "Flying on the Ground is Wrong."
The rest is prime Young, from DEJA VU through HARVEST, with and without Crosby, Stills, and/or Nash, Stray Gators, and Crazy Horse. Album tracks mingle with previously unreleased mixes, demo versions, and sizzling live tracks, and the final disc contains the 1974 film JOURNEY THROUGH THE PAST replete with the original film trailer and other extras. Needless to say this is the most complete Neil Young collection currently available, and a must-have for fans, no matter what point of the journey they got onboard with Shakey.
Any project in the works for two decades is bound to generate its fair share of myths and so it is with Neil Young's Archives, a series of a multi-disc box sets chronicling Young's history. Originally envisioned in the late '80s as a Decade II, the project quickly mutated into a monster covering every little corner of Neil's career. With its escalation came delays, so many that it sometimes seemed that the project never really existed; it was just a shared fantasy between Neil and his faithful. During that long, long wait, fans held tight to the idea that Archives was a clearinghouse of rarities similar to Bob Dylan's The Bootleg Series, a treasure trove of unreleased songs and epochal live performances that would trump whatever bootleggers had to offer. While rare and unheard music is certainly a key part of Archives, particularly on the first disc covering the pre-history of 1963-1965, viewing this project as merely a CD box set is wildly misleading. Neil Young has designed Archives as nothing less than an immersive multimedia autobiography, an interactive experience where the music, text, video, and pictures feed off each other, creating a virtual journey through Neil's past.
Because this is a biography, Archives, Vol. 1 winds up relying very heavily on previously released recordings, containing almost all of Neil Young, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, and Harvest, key Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young cuts, and the previously released archival live albums Live at the Fillmore East 1970 and Live at Massey Hall 1971. Such a large chunk of familiar material is bound to disappoint any listener expecting Archives to be a rarities-only set, forgetting that its origin was as a sequel to Decade, the triple-LP set that mixed up hits with unreleased tunes. Archives follows a similar blueprint, excavating many rare gems -- some, like "Bad Fog of Loneliness" quite familiar to bootleggers; some, like an extraordinary "Dance Dance Dance" cut with Graham Nash, not -- and placing them neatly alongside his well-known jewels, so the end effect isn't a rush of discovery but ongoing quiet revelation, an impression underpinned by the set's leisurely pace.
The entire Archives is designed to trace Neil's evolution, to explain how his dead ends were really detours and how his mood swings weren't all that wild; it preserves Young's history as he perceived it. To that end, the DVD and especially BluRay editions of the set are essential to understanding both the project and Neil himself, so much so that the CD edition feels almost like an afterthought, a skimming of the surface of a deep lake. Often, Young delayed Archives due to the limits of technology, a claim that seemed no more than an excuse to keep the project incomplete, but Archives in itsSpin (p.92) - "[Young] is a cracked angel with an endless stream of brilliant songs."
Pitchfork (Website) - "For Neil Young, the years of 1963 to 1972 were marked by a rapid maturation and a series of successful stylistic reinventions that rivaled the Beatles."