(Silver Fiddler)

Neil Young's 1973 live opus Time Fades Away has attained semi-mythic status among Young aficionados for a number of reasons, not all of them strictly musical. For one thing, Young himself has called it the worst record he ever made, telling a British journalist in 1999 that "it makes me so nervous. The whole tour was a nervous experience. It wasn't really a lot of fun. I kind of got into documenting that vibe. It's not something I want to listen to a lot and when I listen to it I'm not that impressed." With an anti-endorsement like that, who could blame fans for being drawn to the album like cellphone camera-wielding travelers to a freeway wreck?

From the artist's point of view, Young's comment is perhaps understandable. Time Fades Away was recorded at selected dates in February, March and April of '73, Young having embarked upon a U.S. tour in the aftermath of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten's overdose that previous November (the same month Young's bizarre soundtrack album/career "overview" Journey Through the Past came out), and Young reportedly still shouldered guilty feelings over Whitten's death. In tow were the Stray Gators, several of them holdovers from the Harvest album sessions - Johnny Barbata on drums, Tim Drummond on bass, Ben Keith on pedal steel and Jack Nitzsche on piano, with David Crosby and Graham Nash also helping out at certain stops on the tour. But what had imagined as a relatively intimate series of concerts spotlighting material culled largely from Harvest and After the Goldrush (each night Young was to do a solo set followed by a full band set) turned out to be a tequila-sodden, drug-fueled slog through cavernous hockey and basketball arenas in front of perplexed, restless audiences. Young losing his voice midway into the itinerary didn't help his state of mind, either.

Time Fades Away, then, is a partial documentation of what Young has acknowledged was a dark personal and professional time for him, and the album came to be known, informally, as the first installment of his "Doom Trilogy" - the other parts being 1974's John Lennonesque On The Beach and 1975's harrowing Tonight's The Night.

The record, however, remains unique in the songwriter's voluminous back catalog for having never been released officially on CD. For years, fans had bemoaned the fate of the so-called "Missing Six" - Re*Ac*Tor, Hawks and Doves, American Stars ‘n' Bars, On the Beach, Journey Through the Past, Time Fades Away - which Young steadfastly refused to reissue on CD, he being an outspoken critic of the format's sound quality. Finally in 2003, when technology apparently caught up with Young's personal sonic standards, he relented and put four of them out; still conspicuous by their absence were TFA and JTTP.

Was Young being perverse, or did he literally cringe at the thought of tackling the TFA remastering job and dredging up painful memories in the process? An in-depth discussion of the album at Young fan/archival site Thrasher's Wheat offers a more prosaic technical explanation:

"The problem with Time Fades Away is even worse, as it naively stated on LP labels: ‘This Recording Was Mastered 16-Track/Direct To Disc (acetate) by Computer'; the multi-track master tape was recorded/mixed LIVE, leaving little room for remixing the ‘warts & all' tape hiss, bad notes & crowd noise. To reassemble the album, someone would need to sort through fifty or so ¼" and/or 2" multi-track reels & ‘a few' cassettes. Finding the right version by date would be easy enough, but at what stage would the mix be at? Raw recording? Truck monitor mix? Mono PA monitor recording? And what about necessary over-dubs (‘L.A.', ‘Last Dance')? Where are Crosby's vocals? How'd they layer the voices like that? ... impossible."

Whatever the reason - and Young ain't sayin' - Time Fades Away's literal elusiveness further adds to its mystique. There's even an internet petition a group of fans organized a few years ago to persuade Young to rectify the matter.

If you're thinking right about now, "Hmm, I wonder if Time Fades Away has been bootlegged?", well, go to the head of the class.

Around the turn of the millennium, an enterprising no-name bootleg label decided to do the entire "Missing Six" on pro-grade CDR, transferring the vinyl albums to disc with some obvious care put into de-noising and equalization. The booklets were high-quality mini-reproductions of the original LP sleeves (front, back and interior details), and each disc also included a brace of bonus material, although in the case of TFA the extra tracks were oddly non-proximate to the actual album: seven hailed from a cache of 1965 demos Young cut for Elektra, two were recorded live in Boston in 1970, and "Needle & the Damage Done" was taken from Young's 1971 appearance on a Johnny Cash television special. No doubt as the downloading era came into its own, the digitized TFA also became a staple of many file-sharers' MP3 folders.

It's telling, then, though probably coincidental, that the same week Young's Dreamin' Man Live '92 album is released (see the BLURT review here), yet another underground edition of Time Fades Away surfaces, this time on the cheekily named Silver Fiddler label, a nod to both Young's publishing company Silver Fiddle Music and to the actual physical artifact: this bootleg's no CDR, but a factory pressed silver disc. This time around, no bonus tracks, just the original record, transferred from vinyl, and as with the earlier bootleg, the LP sleeve art has been nicely reduced and reproduced, making it a fine addition to your CD library, particularly if you don't own a pristine vinyl copy of the album, a USB turntable and access to an oversized-item scanner.

But what of the music? Is it as shudder-inducing as Young suggests?

O ye of little faith. While not quite the Young Holy Grail it's sometimes portrayed as - hardly an obscure title, after its release in October '73 it reached #22 on the Billboard album charts and soon notched gold record status in both the U.S. and the U.K. - it's still a crucial chronicle of both the tour and Young's frame of mind at the time. And even though it has some noticeable sonic flaws (chief among them a general "flatness" that sounds closer to a monitor mix and undercuts the kind of 3D imaging that makes a concert recording come alive), it seems to link spiritually with Tonight's The Night (which in its own psychic darkness is another you-either-love-it-or-hate-it record).

The title track kicks things off, a kind of revving-up-to-cruising speed vibe powered by clanging, careening guitars and Nitzsche's barrelhouse piano plus alternately swaggering and woozy vocals. A solo piano number, "Journey Through The Past," follows to effectively halt momentum, but luckily things pick right up again with "Yonder Stands the Sinner," one of Young's great, underrated classics, a kind of drunken (listen to the off-key vocal whoops for proof) slice of footstomping, twangy R&B. And from there the non-hits keep coming: the apocalyptic cosmic country of "L.A."; another piano ballad, "Love in Mind," that hearkens back to After the Goldrush territory; the loping, autobiographical blooze/country rocker "Don't Be Denied"; one more piano reading, "The Bridge" (this time with harmonica added); and a blazing, almost Crazy Horsian 9-minute finale, "Last Dance," that manages to be laid-back and funky at the same time.

The latter song, incidentally, gradually reaches a frenzied, almost chaotic climax of slashing guitar chords, shrieking pedal steel and twinned Young-David Crosby vocal paroxisms of "No, no no - no, no no!" In that instant you get a clear sense of what must have confronted audiences on the tour who arrived at venues expecting a feel-good evening of "Heart Of Gold"-friendly tunes only to get a man and his band lunging at demons. The intensity of "Last Dance" and a few of the other tunes is what ultimately gives Time Fades Away its staying power, and one can only hope that Young will wake up some morning, say to himself, "What the hell, let's do it..." and put the album out officially so the public at large can feel that power. With this year's long-overdue release of the first installment in his Archives, one imagines he might finally be predisposed to revisiting TFA as a means of exorcising a few ghosts.

There's one final Times Fade Away tidbit worth noting that directly relates to the album's mythic status. The cover is a photo taken from the p.o.v. of looking out over the edge of the stage into the audience. In the foreground is a long-stemmed red rose, presumably just then tossed onto the stage, and beyond that you see a guy gazing at the camera and flashing a peace sign.

In filmmaker Cameron Crowe's 2000 love-letter to rock in the seventies, Almost Famous, there's a scene right before the fictional band Stillwater comes on stage that effectively reproduces the TFA cover: lights strobe, as if a photographer's camera is going off, and you see a rose at the edge of the stage and a guy flashing the peace sign. It's an indelible image that no doubt brought a smile of recognition to theater-going Young fans' faces the first time they viewed Almost Famous.

Me, I laugh out loud in delight every single time it gets to that scene. More barn, Neil!

Standout Tracks: "Last Dance," "Yonder Stands the Sinner" FRED MILLS