Oh Lonesome Neil

My pal Sudsman is the most knowledgeable Neil nut archivist I know, and he put this swell - and essential - Ur-Neil album together (although he wants no credit - "it's all Neil"). Here's what he says about it -

Oh Lonesome Me

“This is a song from our new album, when we record it” says Neil Young in the intro to the song Wonderin’ at the Fillmore East in March 1970, referring to the yet-to-appear second Crazy Horse album after Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. It never happened, of course - just one of Neil’s many unfinished projects.

To recreate it, we start with the Crazy Horse studio session in summer 1969, just after the release of Everybody Knows. Here’s what was recorded (according to Archives Vol. 1):

Oh Lonesome Me
Birds
Everybody's Alone
Wonderin'
I Believe in You
Look at All the Things
Winterlong
Dance Dance Dance

Supposedly Helpless was also played but, due to an error, not recorded. Archives Volume 1 includes many of these tracks - the previously unreleased Everybody’s Alone and Wonderin’, unique stereo mixes of Oh Lonesome Me and I Believe in You not later found on After the Gold Rush, an entirely different mix of Birds that was mistakenly included as the B-side to Only Love Can Break Your Heart, and a different version of Dance Dance Dance from the one recorded two years later with the Stray Gators in the Harvest sessions (it didn’t make that album, either). Look At All The Things has never been released, and Winterlong didn’t appear until Decade, in a 1973 rework intended for the first version of Tonight’s the Night. (A 1970 performance from the Fillmore East would later appear in Archives Volume 1).

Some subsequent archival tracklists from the era list a working title for this lost album as Oh Lonesome Me, which is, I suppose, as good a reference point as any, though they confusingly list a number of tracks that were already featured on Everybody Knows. At any rate, the album never came to be, although Neil Young Archives lists an upcoming Crazy Horse album called Early Daze which will probably bring it back to life.

Then, of course, we have the mysterious alternative tracklist (in Neil’s handwriting) printed on the liner notes for After the Gold Rush:

1 Oh Lonesome Me
2 Wondering
3 Everybody’s Alone
4 Sugar Mountain
5 Sea Of Madness
6 Big Waves
7 Dance Dance Dance
8 Birds
9 I Need Her Love To Get By

Obviously there’s a lot of common ground here, and the start of a nice intermediate album that serves as both the follow-up to EKTIN and the first draft of ATGR. We’ll use Neil’s tracklist from the ATGR liner notes as the basis for the album. First, let’s delete the tracks from both lists that simply don’t exist: Look at All the Things, Big Waves (an early version of Powderfinger), and I Need Her Love to Get By. Though it’s from 1968 and not true to the era, we can keep Sugar Mountain because it was an important B-side in the two previous years and, well, Neil does this kind of thing all the time. While Archives Volume 1 only contains the live performance of Sea of Madness by CSN&Y at Woodstock, the bootleg Holes in the Archives Volume 1 has the never-released studio recording that was almost certainly meant for this 1970 album.

To fill in the missing tracks we can add I Believe in You from the first list since it’s a unique mix from the one on ATGR (as are Oh Lonesome Me and Birds). We can also add the 1970 live version of Winterlong with Crazy Horse. These nine tracks make a pretty short album even for its time, so we can add a couple of very appropriate tracks from the era. Considering After the Gold Rush was essentially Neil combining the talents of Crazy Horse and CSN&Y, we’ll throw in the previously unreleased mix of Helpless that would appear that year on CSN&Y’s Déja Vu. And since this is an album that might have been, we’ll wrap it up with It Might Have Been, a 1970 live track with the Horse recorded in Cincinnati fifteen years before Neil would re-record it with the International Harvesters for A Treasure.

1. Oh Lonesome Me (previously unreleased mix, with Crazy Horse)
2. Wonderin’ (previously unreleased version)
3. Everybody’s Alone (previously unreleased song, with Crazy Horse)
4. Sugar Mountain (live at Canterbury House, 1968)
5. Sea of Madness (studio version, with CSN&Y)
6. I Believe in You (previously unreleased mix, with Crazy Horse)
7. Dance Dance Dance (previously unreleased version, with Crazy Horse)
8. Birds (45 rpm single version, with Crazy Horse)
9. Winterlong (live at Fillmore East, with Crazy Horse)
10. Helpless (previously unreleased mix, with CSN&Y)
11. It Might Have Been (previously unreleased live version, with Crazy Horse) 

 

The cover is IoF© (*hushed golf applause*), the music is Neil's (when he was golden), but the work is all Sudsman's, so a big manly punch on the upper arm from all of us! (And Neil? I know you're a lurker here - you can contact th' Suds thru me - he'll make a better job of keeping your catalog healthy than you. With all respect, dude.)