Tag: Neil Young

Somewhat to my surprise, I only just discovered Neil Young FINALLY released Chrome Dreams a few weeks ago, only 46 years later than planned (and a mere 16 years after Chrome Dreams II)… Neil has a track record, as it were, of recording albums then not releasing them, including Homegrown which he shelved in 1975 in favour of Tonight’s the Night which he’d also shelved two years earlier, but this is probably his best-known example of that tendency. In March 1977 a test pressing was made, and somehow this eventually escaped into the wild and was the basis of various bootlegs from the early 90s onwards, while in the meantime Neil had second thoughts and converted a chunk of it into American Stars ‘n’ Bars (which came out a few months later) and recycled other songs for other albums into the 90s.

Some Steve Hoffman Forum nerd in a thread about the album was iffy about the provenance of the acetate and the tracklisting of same, partly because the album ran some 50+ minutes and he thought that was too long for a 70s Neil record. Surprise surprise, though, Chrome Dreams turns out to be the same as the bootleg after all (albeit the vinyl release is a three-sided double LP)… but the album kind of complicates that matter with its back cover:

Now, one of these things is not like the other, with the album tracklist being on the right and… something else on the left. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I’m guessing it was an alternative proposed tracklist? Noticeable differences include the removal of “Powderfinger” and the addition of “Lotta Love” (which turned up on Comes a Time) and “White Line” (which didn’t turn up on record until Ragged Glory). I just wonder what the point of putting this as the back cover art was.

As for the album itself… I suppose it’s OK? I don’t like it as much as some critics seem to do, and it’s kind of disconcerting hearing some of these songs outside of whatever album they finally appeared on, even though this was their “original” context. None of the songs are new and only two of the actual recordings (alternate versions of “Hold Back the Tears” and “Sedan Delivery”) are previously unreleased. It’s a bit much as it stands, and I think if you cut “Tears” (not as good in this version as the American Stars ‘n’ Bars re-recording) and “Like a Hurricane” (obviously magnificent but kind of out of place here), you not only get a shorter album (about 37 minutes) to make that bloke from the Hoffman forum happy, you get a more cohesive one. But even in that slightly truncated form I just don’t think it’s the hidden masterpiece some are claiming it is.

While browsing Tumblr recently, I sighted this somewhat curious variation of Neil’s once-elusive 1974 classic:

This cassette version reshuffles the running order considerably, for reasons I can only assume were about trying to make the running time of both sides nearer to each other (remember when that mattered with tapes?), otherwise I don’t see the point…

I actually just listened to it in this form to see how it works in practice, and, well, I’m not 100% sure. To be honest I’ve never been thrilled by the placement of “See the Sky About to Rain” as track 2, it feels a bit oddly situated there, but I don’t really know how else you’d redo it, cos side 2 is fine as it is on the original album. In this version, though, “Ambulance Blues” just doesn’t seem right to end side 1, and “Motion Pictures” similarly doesn’t seem like it should end the whole album… Maybe if you took this running order but flipped the two sides? Cos I read, too, that this was Neil’s original plan and so the cassette is actually nearer what he intended… but the version that ended up on the album feels (mostly) like the right one in a way that this cassette doesn’t. Or maybe it’s just familiarity that makes it feel that way. I don’t know. Must say I do like the cover font, though.