Nearly 20 years have passed since Neil Young first began talking about his long-running Archives project. Like Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and handful of others, Young was known to have amassed a treasure trove of unreleased material that even included entire studio albums. These recordings remained in the vaults not necessarily because they were of inferior quality, but rather because Young’s capricious nature often sent him in new directions before a particular project was completed. To look backwards, or to rest on his accomplishments, was never Young’s way.
It’s therefore no surprise that the Archives project was slow to launch, but launch it finally did earlier just a few weeks ago. Covering the years 1963 through 1972, Archives Vol. 1 ranges from Young’s apprentice work with his high school band, the Squires, through his years with Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and the making of early his solo classic, Harvest.
Available in DVD, Blu-ray, and plain old CD formats, the 10-disc set (eleven, in the case of the Blu-ray version) also includes enough video and other vintage materials to keep Young fans immersed in its riches for months.
That said, the Vol. 1 set is merely the first installment in a series that promises to get only better. During the ‘80s, especially, Young’s interest in video and film making, and his eclectic spirit, led him down some unlikely paths. In the following interview, conducted as Young was still formulating ideas for the Archives series, the veteran rocker addresses these topics. He also gives us an idea of what to expect as the Archives project moves forward.
What’s been the most surprising thing you’ve come upon in looking back at your work for the Archives project? Are there lots of great songs that went unreleased?
There are some of those, and it was very surprising to discover how good they were. There are very rich veins that occasionally show up, where there might be four or five songs that are great, that aren’t released on anything. That’s always fascinating. There’s never enough for a full album, and there’s usually a sign there that explains why they weren’t used. It might be that I changed radically in the middle of something, and just abandoned what I was doing – but there are some really interesting pieces of music in there.
In the '80s you did quite a bit of work that people felt was eclectic. Did that period yield an especially large amount of unreleased material?
There’s one particular period – a period with the Blue Notes – that’s especially interesting. There are five or six songs from that period that were done, and they’re the originals – they’re not copies. The ones that came out later are different versions of those songs, but the original ones are in a group. A couple of the songs are more than fifteen minutes long. There are all kinds of lyrics there, and stories, that go on and on. And then there are other songs that showed up on later albums, but these are the originals – things that haven’t been heard before.
"Originals" in the sense of demos?
No, they’re actual masters that weren’t used.
You’ve been collecting reviews and TV appearances and videos and so forth as part of the project. In what ways will you utilize that material, in conjunction with the songs?
That depends how things work from a chronological standpoint. There’ll be DVDs that come with every set. The DVDs are the main thing. Sometimes you might just be looking at a tape turning or something like that, while you’re listening to hi-res stereo – something that sounds much better than a CD. In fact the Archives may end up just being a DVD collection, where you might have [a bunch of] songs with not much picture, but then you come to something that has a video that goes along with it, all on a DVD.
You had high hopes for music video as an art form in the early days of MTV, but then of course things went awry.
Yeah. And then it became a commercial endeavor, completely. That’s when I became really disappointed. Around the time of [the 1983 album] Trans is when I was trying to make my first videos. I had a whole story that went with all the songs on Trans, and I was trying to get that made. I never could get the funding to do that. The record company wouldn’t give me the money. If I had thought about it – and if I’d been ready for it, at the time – I would have just shot it myself, and probably could have done it cheap enough so that I could’ve gotten it done. So there was a development period there. And then, you know, we hired some people – some outside directors – to do some videos. Some of them turned out pretty well, and some of them were just okay, and some of them weren’t very good. We went through that history, and we have all of those in the Archives, where you can see the development of that, and how one thing leads to another.
Some atrocious videos were made back then, but at least people making them were willing to take chances.
Yeah. But commercial videos are really just that – they’re commercials. They’re not very expressive. Plus, the older I get and the less fashionable I look, the less sense there seems in my doing a video. It’s really just an advertisement for the record, and it’s never going to get played, because I don’t fit in with the fashionable set. It would be a waste of time and money, because they won’t play anything that’s artistic. They won’t play anything that doesn’t have a lot of tits and ass in it, or anything that’s not what they think they want video to be.
Working on the Archives project must have triggered some interesting memories. To some extent are you able to look back at your work – your albums – and see them as signposts for things that were going on in your life at the particular time they were made?
Yes, I can. But that's just a by-product. It’s the same way for a listener who has ways of remembering certain things they did, by listening to certain music.
You’ve always been forward-looking. You once said that in order to play your old songs, you have to have new songs to play as well.
Absolutely. If I’m going to do a show, I won’t just go out and do a set of old songs. The new songs make me believe in myself, that I’m still doing something relevant, and that I’m expressing the way I feel today, rather than trying to recreate how I felt yesterday. The new songs give me a reason to be there.