Another harvest of Neil Young

[Analogman]

I agree, who would want to do that.

 

I mean - I can see some hardcore Neil fans doing that - but not most people. Although, maybe this sort of thing is only for hardcore Neil fans.

[Synthesizer Patel]

I mean - I can see some hardcore Neil fans doing that - but not most people. Although, maybe this sort of thing is only for hardcore Neil fans.

 

What it sounds like to me is someone who is really not very 'cutting edge' with this sort of thing thinking that they are very 'cutting edge' with this sort of thing. Someone needs to tell him the truth about all of this, and the sooner the better.

 

Actually, I wonder how many people he's spoken to about all this? And nobody's told him he's talking out of his arse about what people want from Archives? or any other music dvd or whatever he thinks it is.

[Analogman]

I figure he has a lot of power over his releases - I bet it's going to be 100 + to buy it. Like he said in that interview, someone will figure out how to rip it. I don't buy boxsets anymore, but I was looking forward to buying this one - but I don't see that happening - due to the format it is in.

[blue_94_trooper]

I wonder why he thinks people want to look at pictures scrolling by as they listen to music?

 

If I read the release correctly they chose Blu-Ray because you wouldn't just have to passively look at pictures scrolling by but could actively search pictures, documents, etc. while listening to music. The BD-Live feature would also allow them to add stuff to your collection (presumably on storage on your netwrok but logically (magicly?) tied to the overall package). I'm sure the technology is quite cool and I'm equally sure that Neil is being well compensated for being Sun's poster-boy for this (as opposed to just doing it to be difficult).

 

Anyway you slice it this is for hardcore fans and it sounds like much more than just an uber-anthology. I'm betting $200 - $250 for the whole mess.

[Analogman]

I was thinking 100 was probably too low - since it is possibly an ongoing deal. I see what you are saying.

[CortezTheKiller]

I mean - I can see some hardcore Neil fans doing that - but not most people. Although, maybe this sort of thing is only for hardcore Neil fans.

I consider myself to be a hardcore Neil Young fan, and I think the whole fucking thing is absurd. The guy is a tech geek/snob. This archive thing has been floating around about a decade now. I'm sure he has a sense for what his fans want, but he doesn't really care. He thinks he's going to be a trailblazer with this blue-ray nonsense and if he alienates some fans along the way, what skin is it off his back? This whole concept of "not putting his name on the technology that's out there" bullshit is crazy. The mediums upon which music is distributed is what it is and has been for decades. When he released all his previous studio albums upon which he built a very successful and lucrative career, the technology at the time was good enough to "put his name on." It was good enough for the Fillmore album, the Massey Hall album, and Chrome Dreams II. Suddenly it's no longer sufficient? He can release the aforementioned live archives performances on 180 gram vinyl and charge $30-$40 per release, but god forbid he make an attempt to release the archives box set on 180 gram vinyl or (the thought!) CD. Save the planet for another day? Let's impeach the president for lying? Let's be a pretentious douchebag and squeeze some more $$$ out of the masses.

[Choo Choo Charlie]

I was thinking 100 was probably too low - since it is possibly an ongoing deal. I see what you are saying.

 

The answer to the ongoing problem facing the record industry is staring them in the face :

 

Vinyl albums.

 

By far the most enjoyable and true listening experience, it's still a format prized by serious music fans. Not forgetting the fact that you get proper sized artwork.

 

My copy of After the Goldrush is pretty worn but I wouldn't trade its pops and crackles and warmth for any Blu-Ray/2496 format.

 

Think how much money's been spent converting people to the idea that iPods are the be all and end all.

 

If they put their marketing budgets and energies they wasted into fighting mp3 pirates into a complete relaunch and remarket of vinyl as a leading format then they could help themselves.

 

Embrace mp3 as a convenient, lower quality format useful for promotional purposes only. If listeners like what they hear, they could get the proper LP. LPs are very unlikely to be pirated. Sure you can tape an LP or dub it onto mp3/wav/cd but the listening experience is not the same as actually dropping the stylus onto the album.

 

Fantastic turntables are available for little more than the price of a full sized iPod.

 

The future is the past !

[Analogman]

I think that is his deal -he wants to control the quality of his product at all costs. It will interesting to see how many of them are sold.

[Synthesizer Patel]

do you think when he sang Will To Love in front of a fire making loads of crackle noises, on whatever shitty portable recorder he used, it meant that the song wasn't as enjoyable as if he'd waited 30 years and recorded it in a modern studio with all the trimmings? and to be fair i don't want to look at pictures of neil young at the best of times, let alone whilst i'm enjoying his music.

 

i think he should wait until we have the technology to build a time machine so that he can invidually carry people back in time to sit in on the recordings.

[Analogman]

I wonder if he is going to put that 76 tour film on there? That, I would like to see. You can see some of it in Year Of The Horse, of course. I have seen bootlegs of it, but the quality was terrible.

[Dreamin']

I'm sure he has a sense for what his fans want, but he doesn't really care. He thinks he's going to be a trailblazer with this blue-ray nonsense and if he alienates some fans along the way, what skin is it off his back? This whole concept of "not putting his name on the technology that's out there" bullshit is crazy.

Remember, this is Neil Young we're talking about. The guy is perverse. He's finally found a way to release the Archives and piss of his fans at the same time. Genius!

[Vacant Horizon]

Remember, this is Neil Young we're talking about. The guy is perverse. He's finally found a way to release the Archives and piss of his fans at the same time. Genius!

 

he is crazy as y'all say. same shit, different decade. i mean, when will the dude mellow. blue ray will be over in the next 5 years anyway. hell, dvds were around for what, 5 years? vhs is still on the shelves of some video stores, dvd has not even totally taken over, and now it is obsolete? as with Geffen, Reprise should sue him for not putting music out in consumer friendly ways. not to mention all of his comments in the webcast and interviews are just plain goofy. just tell us when it's coming out and what the F is on the damn thing. is toast on the back burner now!

[TCP]

Ummm I can't recall the last time I saw a VHS tape in a store...

[Vacant Horizon]

Ummm I can't recall the last time I saw a VHS tape in a store...

 

 

Ummm you prolly dont go to the cool stores...

[Analogman]

[CortezTheKiller]

 

Forever Young

Neil Young's Long-Promised Archive

Is Actually in the Works

And Coming Out on Blu-ray

By ETHAN SMITH

May 16, 2008; Page W7

 

Since the 1980s, Neil Young has been telling fans he is close to releasing an exhaustive, interactive archive of music, photographs, video footage and other material from his storied career.

 

The project has achieved legendary status in the music world, not for the music it contains but because it has never surfaced, despite Mr. Young's periodic promises. The Canadian rocker has attributed the serial delays to technical shortcomings and sound-quality problems in media ranging from CD-ROMs to DVDs.

 

Read the rest here.

[Dreamin']

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm excited.

 

In the end, it's Neil's vision... his trip, not ours. This comment on Thrasher's Wheat kinda sums up my feelings now.

 

What people don't seem to grasp is the Archives is not just music' date=' pimped with film and memorabilia.

 

It's Neil's legacy. It's his autobiography. It's his freaking epitaph. This is what scholars will look at someday when they conduct research on popular music.

 

People just don't get it--that's why he's so obsessed/paranoid/unrelenting with the quality/sound/visuals.

 

Nevertheless, it is a daunting investment for many of us. Someone in Neil's camp should point him to the latest unemployment stats. People ARE hurting and some of those people are fans. And, I'm one of them.

 

In the end, I wouldn't be surprised if Reprise will issue a cd/dvd highlights. And don't forget, they are suppose to be available as dvds--not just Blu-ray.

 

As an aside, to cynically imply that Neil received 'a strong financial incentive' from Blu-Ray is akin to suggesting the reason he favors Martin or Gibson guitars is due to 'a strong financial incentive'. It's the tool needed to do the job. Period.[/quote']

[CortezTheKiller]

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm excited.

 

In the end, it's Neil's vision... his trip, not ours. This comment on Thrasher's Wheat kinda sums up my feelings now.

I'm fine with him doing the whole blu-ray nonsense. I just think it's bullshit that he doesn't also offer the collection as a CD or vinyl box set.

[Vacant Horizon]

the first installment is to include about 128 songs, 18 of them never released before. There are to be 200 photographs, 160 lyrics manuscripts and more. Among the 90 articles and reviews are some less-than-favorable ones. "There were a lot of choices to be made," Mr. Roberts says. "Neil's choice was to leave the warts on."

 

 

Okay, I think i am finally formulating a less reactionary opinion about the archives. Given the actual content listed above, i am really not excited at all. Just more waiting time for vol. 2 which i hope has more surprises than this. i find buffalo springfield basically unlistenable. just that very reverbed 60s sound is overwhelming. so, that and anything before that is really just necessary to hear once for historical purposes. (and no mynah birds??) alternate takes of the BS stuff is mostly on their box anyhow. along the same lines, alt. takes of songs we've already heard that didn't make the cut for his first album will be interesting to hear once too. the unreleased tracks, like sea of madness, we have already heard, but in terrible quality. so it will be nice to have a pristine version of those 3-5 songs. And, we already have filmore east and massy hall which are great. now i really want river boat and hopefully that will be released on it's own. or i'll just dnload it. JTTP will be worth one watching as will all articles and stuff. the only stuff i really love is info about where when how songs are recorded and written and put on an album. there doesn't seem to be much of that. i would rather have the cds, a dvd of articles etc., and a book written by neil with blurbs about each tune with accompanying lyric sheet shots.

so, am i excited. in a sense, yes, i am glad it seems to be actually coming out now. i am not excited about the content at all. like i said, we have the best parts already, the performance series. mostly, i'm worried neil might change his mind a hundred more times before the motherload, vol. II is released. at least i hope its a motherload. maybe neil doesn't have as much unreleased stuff as we thought and maybe he really has released his best stuff.

 

c

[Calexico]

Ya know, this stuff won't ever get released till he passes on. It's Blu Ray now and next thing it will be a pair of dvd glasses that will feed the Archives directly into your brain....it never ends...

[Analogman]

Neil Young Is Working on a New and Improved ITunes

By Betsy Schiffman EmailJuly 02, 2008 | 10:34:44 AMCategories: iTunes

 

ITunes helped revolutionize digital media distribution but the sound quality still sucks, rocker Neil Young told the Financial Times.

 

Young says he's been working on an "alternative digital platform" which could offer higher-quality downloads. The new platform, he says, can be used for "broader media" purposes.

 

"We're in discussions right now about developing our own media platform based on that," he said. Something record companies can sell their artists' works on. Something that can't be downloaded, something that's got much more depth. It has every media component you could want, and they're all married together in a platform. That means other artists could use it, other record companies could use it and gain the knowledge of our 15-year development curve."

 

Young's complaints echo a similar sentiment from film director David Lynch, who railed against iPhone users who watch movies on their "fucking phone . . . You will never in a trillion years experience the film [on a phone ]. . . Get real."

[Synthesizer Patel]

he's starting to sound like george lucas or something. why on earth is he so bothered about sound quailty? let someone else worry about that - ultimately i'd rather have "after the gold rush" in shitty 128kps than anything he's done in the last 10 or 20 years in some mythical crystal-clear format, but he doesn't seem to be spending a 15 year learning curve trying to sort out that short-coming in his output. the man's gone to piddle.

[Analogman]

T-Bone Burnett came up some new thing also - I suppose this is all well and fine if it gets accepted - but if not, then people will be stuck with something they may not be able to play on anything.

 

 

Link (CODE)

In 2008, it was reported that Burnett "started a new venture called Code, which aims to do for music what THX did for movie-theater sound: set standards that ensure the best possible quality."[4] He is opposed to the trend of brighter and more compressed processing, sufficiently so that he essentially retired from the music business in 1995-96 and took up an opportunity to work in theater with Sam Shepard, leading to his work on several films.[5] Code involves the simultaneous release of multiple sound formats, thus avoiding much of the processing which happens when sound is converted from one format to another. Burnett produced John Mellencamp's album Life, Death, Love and Freedom, which will be the first Code album when it is released on July 15, 2008.[4]

[Vacant Horizon]

he's starting to sound like george lucas or something. why on earth is he so bothered about sound quailty? let someone else worry about that - ultimately i'd rather have "after the gold rush" in shitty 128kps than anything he's done in the last 10 or 20 years in some mythical crystal-clear format, but he doesn't seem to be spending a 15 year learning curve trying to sort out that short-coming in his output. the man's gone to piddle.

 

 

well, i am a huge neil young fan. love everything and actually think that his last 3 albums have been excellent. i do think neil is spreading himself a bit thin with all his projects like linkvolt, archives, touring, writing, the 'new itunes'...but it's gotta be the artists that get their asses in gear and start caring about how their record sounds b/c record companies could give a shit. neil has a specific sound in mind and he gets it on his records. this is like wilco and magnolia electric who have a specific sound in mind. it just blows my mind how artists have no clue about production and sound. i mean, bruce springsteen is a good example. does he even listen to his records after recording them. the production is atrocious! you can't blame the big pop stars and nu rockers. they are just part of the machine, but i just wish more artists cared about their production. with this, 256 is as good as it needs to be and we already have that at amazon. no need for anymore innovation. i agree with the mythical format. it's elusive!

 

quick story, i am friends with a fairly well known singer/songwriter here in the south east and he confessed to me that he never thought about the 'drum sound' on his albums until his 5th album. that blew my mind!!

c

 

T-Bone Burnett came up some new thing also - I suppose this is all well and fine if it gets accepted - but if not, then people will be stuck with something they may not be able to play on anything.

 

 

Link (CODE)

 

 

why waste this New Sound on John Melloncamp. God help us!!

[Analogman]

Well, I think Burnett is the new Rubin - in that, he is resurrecting carriers - sort-of. He had big success with the O Brother deal and now, the Robert Plant album, and now I suppose John is trying to get some of that going on. He is also going to be working with Pete and Roger on some new Who project.