My favorite Neil Young album is the first.  Which is why I streamed this.

I started off with the second, "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere".  Bought it around the same time as "Deja Vu".  I needed more.  I loved "Cinnamon Girl", but the killer was "Down By The River".  I was hooked.  I turned everybody on to it.  And purchased "After The Gold Rush" the day it came out, the first week of my freshman year of college.

Funny how "Southern Man" has become the most famous track off that album.  Maybe because of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s retort.  But it was never my favorite.  I enjoyed it, but my favorites were on the second side.  To this day, "Don’t Let It Bring You Down" might still be my favorite Neil Young track. It wasn’t made for radio, but for your dorm room, your bedroom upstairs in your parents’ house.  It was a personal listening experience.  Light years from today’s bumping ass club world.

Two tracks later came the other personal favorite…  "When You Dance I Can Really Love".  How many times did I dance to this track with my fantasy girlfriend.  That’s what music does.  It gives you hope.  That better times are coming.

Then Neil Young blew up with "Harvest".  It was hard to believe he could become any bigger, but "Heart Of Gold" was played incessantly on the radio, casual fans liked him so much he had to alienate them, by playing loud, electric rock on his cleanup tour.  Unrecorded numbers to boot.

Nobody takes those kinds of chances.  No one dares his audience to listen.  Not anyone who’s got an audience.  And that’s why we still listen to Neil Young.  He seems to be doing it for himself.

I read about Neil’s debut.  How it was recalled and reissued with a slightly different cover with a new mix before most people even knew who he was. But I didn’t truly discover it until the summer of ’72, on the beach with my older sister and her boyfriend.  He had a tape of favorites playing in the background.  I loved hearing Zappa’s "Peaches En Regalia", but I didn’t recognize the waltzing country instrumental.  When he said it was Neil Young, I almost plotzed.

You see we couldn’t afford all the music we wanted, we couldn’t hear everything in the seventies, the twenty first century is a golden age of listening, with everything available, for free even, to the old purveyors’ chagrin.  But when I finally started to spin Neil’s debut at people’s houses when I found it in their collections, the track that truly stunned me was the follow-up to the opener, the cut after "The Emperor Of Wyoming", "The Loner".  It just FEELS right!  As if your body was a baseball glove, and the song fit right into its pocket.

Even better is "I’ve Been Waiting For You"…FOR SUCH A LONG TIME!  Oh, that fuzzy guitar intro…  Isn’t that just what life is about?  Waiting?  You get older and you start to give up hope.  But then you hear the right song and…

The closer I knew.  Heard it in a dorm room one dark Sunday night.  "The Last Trip To Tulsa".

The first album is not the best.  I’m sticking with "After The Gold Rush" as the ultimate, but the first is so intimate.  You don’t hear the audience at all. It’s like a mad Canadian scientist has concocted it in his basement.  And you’ve been allowed to descend the rickety wooden steps to hear it.

The first two archival albums are great, but "Massey Hall" was recorded when Neil had already made it, and upon the recording of "Fillmore East", insiders already knew of his talent.  Whereas when "Canterbury House" was recorded, Neil Young was a nobody.

He’d been absent the Buffalo Springfield the two times I’d seen them, but this seemed about intra-band warfare, and hadn’t Stephen sung the hit anyway?

The band had broken up.  Faded away.  "Retrospective" didn’t become a hit until CSN broke through and the audience wanted more.

So, Neil records an album and goes out on a club tour SOLO!

That’s one of the marvelous elements of the "Canterbury House" recordings.  He’s playing all those riffs on his acoustic.  All the nuances.  "The Loner" sounds like "The Loner", it doesn’t need a band to flesh it out.

But as good as the music is, it’s the raps that truly entrance.

You see I’ve been to this gig.  Not this specific one.  But at the Bitter End, clubs all over America.  You were a fan of an act, you lived for an act, and you schlepped down to hear them along with a hundred other souls.  Maybe two hundred.  You got there hours early, just to sit up front.  You hung on every word.  It wasn’t the same rap in every city.  This was a one off.  Made just for you.

Listening to "Canterbury House" I was jetted back decades.  There was no Webcast, you had to be there.  And after the show, you went home and played the album(s) for days.  Told everybody about your secret, even though they were clueless.

Neil talks about getting a check and buying a Bentley.  Today’s Neil Young wouldn’t be so bourgeois.  But this was before he’d made it.  When he still wanted to make it.  When he wasn’t the elder statesman, but he needed the success.  He’s honest, uncalculated.  And even a bit boring.  But we never minded.  We were interested in everything the act had to say.

I don’t know if this scene can be replicated.  There’s no money in club shows.  The act wants to tell everybody about the gig.  Broadcast it.  The audience can’t own it.

But you can only have success when the audience owns you.  You can’t be owned by the radio station, certainly not television, definitely not the corporation.  The fan has to be number one.  You’ve got to make decisions with the fan in mind.  You can’t break that bond.

Used to be easy.  The opportunities to sell out were almost nonexistent.  But today, the businessmen tell you you’ve got to play the game, that you can’t make it if you don’t.  So you do.  And your potential fans play video games, music is seen as sauce, not as the main course, the carb, not the necessary protein.

Maybe you should fire up a doobie, get behind the wheel and take your car for a spin around midnight.  You could go alone, but even if you’ve got a buddy, you won’t speak.  The music will be enough.  "The Last Trip To Tulsa" will set your mind free.  You may not understand the lyrics, but your mind will contemplate the absurdity of life.

Life is absurd.  The longer you live, the less it makes sense.  We depend on the artists to point this out.  No one fifteen whose act was concocted by cynical oldsters can deliver this message.  Which is why the mainstream is in trouble.  You see there really is no mainstream.

Back when this recording was made, labels wouldn’t authorize live product, they didn’t want to confuse the listener, they didn’t want anything substandard, not perfect, in release.  Now, everything gets out.  People want the stuff with the warts.  Because it’s honest, they can relate to it.

Stream this album here: Live At Canterbury House 1968

You really only need to listen once.  But, if you do, you’ll know exactly the way it was, and the way it needs to be.