Neil Young - Live At The Cellar Door (Album Review)
Thursday, 12 December 2013
Written by Huw Baines
Stripped to its bare bones, ‘Live At The Cellar Door’, the latest entry in Neil Young’s 'Archive' series, may seem fairly inconsequential. It shares over half its tracklist with ‘Live At Massey Hall’ and was recorded a matter of weeks earlier during a short residency at the intimate Washington DC club late in 1970.
It’s a good thing, then, that there’s flesh on those bones. Beneath a warm, unintrusive tape hiss, Young is on magical form here. Dabbling in old and new - Buffalo Springfield classics rub shoulders with songs that later made their way on to ‘Harvest’ - he is withdrawn, pensive and, at times, disarmingly goofy.
Flitting between acoustic guitar and a "nine foot Steinway", Young dips into Tell Me Why, Only Love Can Break Your Heart and the title track from ‘After The Gold Rush’ - released a few months earlier - before re-working Cinnamon Girl (“That’s the first time I ever did that one on the piano”) and Flying On The Ground Is Wrong, which is given a long introduction over discordant piano strings.
“It’s about dope,” he drawls between laughs. “It’s mostly just grass and, uh, it's about what happens when you start getting high, and you find out that people you thought you knew, you don’t know anymore, ‘cause they don’t get high and you do. Your girlfriend, she doesn’t understand. Your life is crazy.”
Throughout, Young is intriguingly stuck between stations; the ‘60s are done with and he’s striking into fertile creative ground after the initial dissolution of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. This record, then, is an evocation of time and place that doesn’t easily fit into a category. It’s part of a broader tapestry, both in terms of his career and also his recent unveiling of archive material, and it’s fascinating, engaging and somewhat timeless in its simplicity.
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