Neil Young - Last Dance (1972)

Neil Young released Harvest, his fourth studio album, in February 1972 through Reprise Records. Its release marked a commercial breakthrough for Young, who for the first time saw more considerable commercial success, with the record spawning a massive hit in "Heart of Gold" and going on to become the best-selling album of 1972 in the United States. Due to his newly found stardom, a tour in support of the album was planned for the early months of 1973, where he would be backed by the Stray Gators, augmented by Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten. However, during rehearsals for the tour in late 1972, it soon became clear Whitten was too unreliable and unable to function, due to his drug abuse and alcoholism, and he was fired in early November. A few days after, on the 18th, he was found dead of an apparent overdose in his Los Angeles hotel room. Young, who was a very close friend of his and had tried to delay his firing as much as possible, felt he was responsible for the guitarists' death, and felt much guilt over it. With that, it seemed that a dark cloud hung over the approaching tour, with the combination of personal turmoil and the daunting task of playing sold-out Arenas for months on end taking its toll on him and his band. The fact that drummer Kenney Buttrey demanded a higher salary to compensate for lost studio work and the rest of the band followed suit certainly didn't help matters, and strained considerably the relations between NY and the Gators.

With the prolific streak that had begun in 1969 nowhere near finished, Neil was still writing many songs throughout this period, many of which were much darker both in tone and in arrangement when compared to Harvest, even though he maintained the same backing band. With a solo acoustic session in mid-November 1972 and a band session at Broken Arrow Ranch in December, about nine songs were recorded, with the highlights being some of the best of his career. With those songs on the can, he even had the time to draft a preliminary tracklist and give the album a working title, Last Dance, before embarking on the tour. The tour itself was rather challenging, with Young drinking heavily and performing in an erratic manner, and audiences failing to connect with his newer, heavier material. More importantly, Stray Gators drummer Kenney Buttrey was replaced mid-tour, as NY wasn't happy with his playing and clashed constantly with him. With a new drummer and the addition of Crosby and Nash on backing vocals, the final shows of the tour served as the basis for Time Fades Away, which featured live recordings of some of the new material recorded in late 1972, alongside some Harvest outtakes and other new material written on the road. With that, all those studio recordings were shelved indefinitely, with some of them finally surfacing in 2020 with the release of his Archives Vol. 2 box set.

With that, today's post answers the question: what if Neil Young had gone ahead and released the Last Dance album, as he originally planned? And to answer that, we need to set up some ground rules. First, I will follow his original tracklisting for the album as closely as possible, only removing one song that wasn't recorded during the sessions and was actually a Harvest outtake, and substituting it with one that was from the sessions but for some reason wasn't included in that preliminary tracklist, keeping the rest of the track sequence intact. Obviously, we will try to use studio versions of the songs as frequently as possible, seeing as that was NY's intention for this project. However, in some cases, those studio versions are not available to us, in which case we're able to substitute them with live versions, but only those from the TFA tour, obviously. Different studio versions from later periods exist for some of the songs in this album, but we will try to keep our choices confined to the late 1972 sessions and early 1973 Time Fades Away tour, in order to produce an album that's as cohesive as possible. That would also imply in this album being released shortly after the tour ended in April 1973, which would open up space for Tonight's the Night getting released late in the year as well. With all of that in mind, let's have a look at what I came up with for this unreleased 1972 studio album:

Time Fades Away (Archives Vol. 2)

New Mama (Tuscaloosa)

Come Along and Say You Will (Archives Vol. 2)

The Bridge (Archives Vol. 2)

Don't Be Denied (Time Fades Away)

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Lookout Joe (Tonight's the Night)

Long Walk Home (Archives Vol. 2)

Last Dance (Time Fades Away)

Goodbye Christians on the Shore (Archives Vol. 2)

Bonus tracks:

Journey Through the Past (Archives Vol. 1)

Come Along and Say You Will (Archives Vol. 2 Outtake)

Monday Morning (Archives Vol. 2)

Download link:
Neil Young - Last Dance (1972)

Tim Drummond, Jack Nitzsche, Neil, Kenny Buttrey, and Ben Keith, September 1971

We start off the proceedings with the former title track "Time Fades Away", as recorded at the Broken Arrow Ranch on December 15, 1972. Apart from using a different drummer and having a jumpier rhythm, this version differs from the one on TFA by having a guitar solo instead of a harmonica solo, which honestly fits much better. No studio recordings of the electric version of "New Mama" are available to us, even though we know the song was recorded on the same day as "Time Fades Away", so this live version from Tuscaloosa will have to do. Considering it features Buttrey on drums, this is probably pretty close to that studio version anyway, so there really isn't a problem. The studio version of "Come Along and Say You Will" from the December band session, and "The Bridge" from the November solo session come next, with the former easily being one of my favorite NY songs. How wasn't it included in the original album? Another case of Neil being Neil and keeping his best material in the vault. Finally, "Don't Be Denied" from Time Fades Away closes out side one. It suffers from the same problem as "New Mama", as it was recorded in December but that version has not yet surfaced. A version of it with Buttrey on drums exists, as released on Tuscaloosa, but it is honestly sub-par, with the TFA take being the definitive version, and the version we use here.

Side two opens with "Lookout Joe", from Tonight's the Night. A studio take from the same 12/15/72 session as all other band tracks, it was the first song from these sessions to get an official release, even though it was on the wrong album. In Neil's original tracklist, track two on side two was "Journey Through the Past", a Harvest outtake he revived for the tour. However, seeing as it wasn't recorded for the album, we replace it with "Letter from 'Nam", here retitled to "Long Walk Home", as it would later be released. I honestly don't see why this number wouldn't be included on the album, as it's one of the strongest numbers from the sessions. Another song that was recorded in December '72 but has only been released as a live performance is "Last Dance", included here on the version released on Time Fades Away. Seen as it's the only high-quality version of the band arrangement that's circulating, we don't have much of a choice, which unfortunately means we're dealing with a version of the song with John Barbata on drums and with vocal help by Crosby and Nash, though it still fits in better than the acoustic version released on Archives Vol. 2. The album ends with the magnificent "Goodbye Christians on the Shore", a song most of us hadn't even heard of, let alone heard, before release on Archives Vol. 2. A great unreleased song is a more than appropriate end to a great unreleased album, I think.

Clocking in at almost 39 minutes with a slightly longer side two, Last Dance would be as much of a radical departure from the Harvest sound as Time Fades Away ended up being, but it's honestly the superior album out of the two. For one, it features all the songs he wrote in '72, while TFA only features about half of them. We gain immensely by finally being able to hear songs as great as "Come Along and Say You Will" and "Goodbye Christians on the Shore", as well as benefiting from gaining context for songs like "Lookout Joe", which honestly always felt out of place on Tonight's the Night. As much as this is an improvement, the one thing that doesn't change is that releasing this material just after Harvest is plain commercial suicide, which is the reason I won't bother picking a single from this, as I usually do. As for the cover, I picked an image of Neil and the Stray Gators rehearsing at his barn on Broken Arrow Ranch sometime in 1971/72. I thought it was a good photo, and since most of the LP had been recorded there, it fit in nicely. All it needed was the album title and some color, and voila. With the belated release of Archives Vol. 2, fans have had glimpses into different paths, alternate scenarios that might've happened had he simply chosen differently, and today we've managed to glimpse into one, where Neil could've made one of his best albums had time not kept fading away.

Sources:

Neil Young - Archives Vol. 2

Neil Young - Time Fades Away

Neil Young - Tuscaloosa

Neil Young - Tonight's the Night