With Neil Young putting out a new album this month, titled World Record and with his most frequent backing group Crazy Horse, I figured that I'd post something to mark this occasion, knowing that this is his 45th studio album since putting out his eponymous debut in 1969. Seriously, 45 albums across a period of over 50 years! But of course, he's also recorded at least six more albums' worth of songs that haven't been released in any form until his Archives series, beginning in 2009 with Vol. 1: 1963-1972 and Vol. 2: 1972-1976 eventually coming out in 2020, with Vol. 3 1976-198? due out in 2023 - hopefully!
Like I mentioned in a previous post, The Reconstructor did a revision of Neil Young's 1970s discography, although since the release of Archives Vol. 2, it's since been reworked. I did an Excel sheet compiling the revised Neil Yong discography, and so far, everything up until Hitchhiker follows what The Reconstructor has in mind; the only 70s albums that aren't final (yet) are American Stars n' Bars (which I've reworked as an odds and ends album of outtakes from 1971-1976), Oceanside, Countryside (the original title for Comes a Time) and a reworked Rust Never Sleeps. Of course, the sheet is far from a finished product, and things up until 1987 (at least, from what I've read online thus far) are subject to change. But today, I figured I'd go into a little more detail regarding Neil's first two albums of the 1980s.
Hawks and Doves and Re-ac-tor both marked the beginning of a commercial downturn for Neil Young, at least until 1989's Freedom. Although most of Rust Never Sleeps had been recorded in 1978, it was actually released the following year, as by that point, he'd had a son born with cerebral palsy, and that took up a lot of his time just caring for him. Yet he'd managed to take the time to record some new material during the first two years of the new decade, and by 1982, he was touring once again, and getting into petty squabbles with David Geffen.
With Hawks and Doves, the first side consisted of unreleased material from 1974 to 1977, while the second side was all new material recorded in early July 1980, and yet the album was still not even half an hour long! Heck, the second side was just short of thirteen minutes! Meanwhile, Re-ac-tor was close to 39 minutes in length, but that was because two tracks - "T-Bone" and "Shots" - were pretty lengthy, the former running at nine minutes, and the latter almost eight. Without those two tracks, Re-ac-tor comes up at nearly 22 minutes. Put them together, and the combined length is just short of 35 minutes, with two wildly uneven sides. Clearly, Neil was padding out his albums due to what was going on in his personal life, but if he was that focused on raising his son Ben, why couldn't he have waited it out before recording an album, let alone releasing one?
Luckily, there is a way around this. There were some songs during that timeframe that Neil didn't release at the time (or at all), and so I utilized those to help bring the album up to a reasonable length.
Side A (22:29)
1. Opera Star - 3:31
2. Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze - 4:15
3. Get Back on It - 2:14
4. Southern Pacific - 4:07
5. T-Bone - 3:47 [edit]
6. Rapid Transit - 4:35
Side B (22:16)
7. Coastline - 2:24
8. Stayin' Power - 2:17
9. Winter Winds (Turbine) - 3:15 (unreleased 1980 live recording)
10. Motor City - 3:11 (unreleased 1980 live recording)
11. Union Man - 2:08
12. Comin' Apart at Every Nail - 2:33
13. Are There Any More Real Cowboys? - 3:01 (original Old Ways 1 version)
14. Hawks and Doves - 3:27
One would assume that right out of the gate, this album wouldn't work because the country sound of Hawks and Doves and the proto-grunge vibes of Re-ac-tor clash with each other, and they'd be right. However, the way I've arranged the album was so that the heavier tracks would take up the first side, and the second side would be largely country. All tracks from Side A come from Re-ac-tor with "Motor City" (we'll get to that) and "Shots" (pushed forward to Rust Never Sleeps, first played live in 1978) removed, and "T-Bone" cut down to less than four minutes. I've provided a link to my edit of the track, but if you're curious, here's how I edited it down:
About half a minute of the opening guitar intro is cut in two different places (0:15-0:27 and 0:39-0:55), meaning that Neil's vocal comes in at the 33-second mark. The next edit comes in at 1:59 up to 3:20, removing the entire third verse (which is basically the same as the first) and merging the second verse's four "got mashed potato" lines with the fourth verse's two "ain't got no T-bone" lines, thereby making them a whole new verse. The next cut is from 4:10 to 5:51, which not only cuts the sixth verse (again, a repeat of the first), but it also allows the fifth verse with its two "got mashed potato" lines to transition into the seventh, right at the first "ain't got no T-bone" line. The third "ain't got no T-bone" comes from a guitar solo, shortened at 5:59 to 6:26. The final edit combines the eighth and ninth verses, with a cut between 7:10 and 8:36. Overall, well over five minutes have been cut entirely, and each of the four new verses sound unique to one another as opposed to repeating paired counts of "got mashed potato" and "ain't got no T-bone" between them.
The track arrangement of Side B is based upon that of a lone concert that Neil Young did in 1980, as detailed in a post by Albums That Should Exist, with the inclusion of "Are There Any More Real Cowboys?", which is said to have originated during the Re-ac-tor sessions, using the original recorded version for the first version of Old Ways from 1983. We don't have the 1980 recording, so that will do for now. Two other tracks, "Winter Winds (Turbine)" and "Motor City", come from the 1980 concert; in the case of the latter, I used that version instead of the official version to give the album some variety. The remaining five tracks all come from Hawks and Doves.
There are two other tracks from the Re-ac-tor sessions that have yet to be released - "Get Up Now" and "To Me, To Me". We still don't know how they sound, and I'm not sure how they will sound compared to the rest of the album, or even if they will fit. But as it stands, Hawks and Doves sounds pretty good, now running close to 45 minutes, with the first side being more "hawkish" and the second side more "dove" sounding. If Neil Young had put out an album like that in 1981, and hadn't signed up with Geffen Records, perhaps things could've turned out differently for him in the 1980s; they were practically a wilderness decade for many artists who came of age in the 1960s to early 1970s. But what do you people think?