Easily Toronto's equivalent, if not outright one-upsmanship of Minnesota's native son and folk legend Bob Dylan, Neil Young is in that whole different class of artist who can boast a following that spans nearly five decades and several generation's worth of musical craftsmanship. Arguably, much of his catalog falls into an overly expansive sector of the rock and roll landscape to reasonably classify it as one thing or another as Young took an independent, if not erratic approach to realizing his musical inspirations ranging from country and folk to hard rock and experimental electronica. Because of his broad range of musical interests, Neil Young falls heavily into the category of acquired taste. Young's lightly polished, high register singing style is not for everyone. Some listeners may first encounter Young's distinctive voice and declare it to be an insurmountable stumbling block when trying to access the full breadth of his work. But if the ear is allowed the chance to adapt to the lilting nature of Young's shaky falsetto, the unimpeachable evidence of his other worldliness becomes difficult to deny. Young's delicately crafted songs, with their intricate guitar and piano work, coupled with his frank, narrative approach to lyrics and songwriting in general was never designed for the purpose of commercial success, but served first and foremost as the most direct means in which the artist could keep a sort of public musical diary for interested strangers to thumb through.
In the past, I've never really been a big fan of the live album. There are a number of live albums in my collection, but the majority of them are fairly common, must-haves and I've never really been knocked out by semi-exclusive recordings captured live. Recordings from this monster venue or that historic auditorium always seemed to fall somewhat flat because no matter how rich the original recording or clean the re-re-remastering, the final cut can never fully summon the anticipation and emotional energy of what it was like to have been a member of the audience, crammed into a threadbare seat of a smoky arena or sprawled out in the cool grass at the park. Performance-rich recordings like Sinatra At The Sands or The Who's epic record, Live At Leeds benefit from being turned up loud in order to simulate the overall magnitude of the presentation, but without having been At Folsom Prison when Johnny Cash unknowingly recorded a now legendary set, or in the darkened studio when Nirvana sat down to record the restrained and now hauntingly eerie Unplugged In New York in 1994, any live effort is going to fall victim to it's audio limitations and inevitably lose a certain degree of scope.
Neil Young's Live At Massy Hall 1971 is the sort of exceptional live recording that comes as close as possible to putting the listener at the event. Through Live At Massey Hall we are transported to the foot of the stage of an intimate Toronto theater as Neil Young humbly presents a series of songs, several of which would eventually appear on his landmark 1972 album Harvest and would further solidify the already solid foundation of his work, and are captured here for the very first time. Touring without any accompaniment, Young arrives on stage to gentle applause, illustrating the warmth and intimacy of the 2,753 seat theater, and immediately strikes the perfect balance between his instruments and surroundings. Alone with a guitar and piano, Young sets forth, filling the room just below the rim with utter clarity as his home-town audience absorbs the performance in grateful silence. Recorded before the bulk of Young's hard rockin', sub-sonic collaborations with backing band Crazy Horse, which helped inspire the birth of the hard-hitting but short lived grunge rock movement of the early 1990's, here Young displays the versatility of his work as he weaves together an acoustic set list of sad, sometimes personal songs, reflective of, if not directly addressing the changes resulting from the end of the 60's and the hard realities suddenly present at the other side of the previous decade's counterculture of free love and reckless drug use. Young often pauses to engage the audience, acknowledging momentarily the slipped disc he'd suffered earlier in the year and explaining certain motivations behind some of the new songs he shares. The result is a simple and succinct presentation of a man way ahead of the songwriting curve, at the first of many peaks in a stellar career that was, in January of 1971, just beginning to gain traction.
Following the recording, Live At Massey Hall was oddly relegated to the archives, existing only as a bootleg and circulating sparingly throughout only well connected audiophile communities. It was rumored that the seldom seen original recording had at one time changed hands for nearly $20,000.00 before it's official release to the public in 2007, almost forty years after it was recorded. Undoubtedly worth every last penny at the time, this material, in this format, has grown better with time and appreciated several hundred fold since.
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