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With the seemingly tireless 64-year old veteran’s release schedule for last 12 months alone including a brand new album (the charming if hopelessly half-baked garage-rock blast-out ‘Fork In The Road’), remastered versions of his first four solo albums and a mammoth 8-CD/10-DVD box set ‘Archives’, you’d expect even the most dedicated of fans would’ve had their annual Neil Young quota filled months ago.
Then again, Young tends to attract the kind of fan-bordering-on-fanatic listeners who’d quite happily sit through an album of the great songwriter’s burps. And whilst not necessary an ideal place for a NY novice to jump in (check out 2007’s astounding ‘Live at Massey Hall 1971 for prime solo Young instead), ‘Dreamin Man Live’ – the latest in Young’s ongoing Performance Series of vintage live sets - offers many compelling reasons for devotees to keep listening.
‘Dreamin Man Live’ captures Young doing what he does best – not giving people what they expect. Months after concluding a blistering, decibel-bingeing 1991 tour with Crazy Horse, here’s Young in hushed solo acoustic folkie mode. Audiences wanted to rock out or, failing that, at least hear legendary evergreens ala ‘Old Man’ or ‘Heart of Gold’. Instead, Young treated them to a range of new stuff from then-unreleased album ‘Harvest Moon’, all ten tracks of which are included here, stripped-to-the-bone and sequenced in a different order.
At first, the concept seems discouragingly limited. But apart from a couple of baffling exceptions ( ‘Natural Beauty’ is a live take on the original album, and the version here’s oddly sluggish, almost as if Young gets fed up with the tune during its 10+ minute course), it makes perfect sense as a listening experience.
Shedding the extra embellishments of their occasionally overproduced studio counterparts makes the likes of ‘One of These Days’ and ‘From Hank to Hendrix’ shine, with Young in exceptionally fine voice, savouring every word like he’d freshly written them. It’s hard to think of another performer who could cook up this intensity on their own, with just that reedy meow of a voice and guitar (or piano) for company. ‘Such A Woman’ and ‘You and Me’ are particularly revelatory, the removal of painstakingly applied polish – overbearing strings for the former, syrupy backing vocals for the latter – turning what in their original form sounded suspiciously like filler into a atmospheric hymns hovering halfway between devotion and despair.
