SENIOR executives at the Warner Records label raised a collective eyebrow when Neil Young said that he wanted his latest Archives boxset to consist of no fewer than 22 discs.

It was, by any reckoning, an audacious plan: 17 audio CDs covering the period from 1976 to 1987, coupled with five Blu-Ray DVDs containing 11 full-length films and concert footage. When you consider that that period coincided with Young's unhappy 1980s spell at Geffen Records, which saw its boss, David Geffen, sue him for making 'unrepresentative' records ... well, you can understand the reaction of the people at Warners'.

But Young got his way, as he nearly always does. And Archives III goes on sale on September 6 via Reprise Records.

Interviewed in the latest issue of Uncut magazine, Robin Hurley, Senior Vice-President, A&R, at Warner Records, says he took a deep breath when he first heard of Young's intent.

"It certainly raised eyebrows across the company", he said. "But, no, there was never any doubt Archives III would come out exactly the way Neil wanted it to come out. We could all agree that Neil is one of the very few artists who've earned the right to do whatever they like. And as soon as I heard the tracks they were putting together, I completely understood why it had to be exactly what Neil intended. It had to be that vast. These was so much ground to cover, so much music that had to be included".

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Archives III comes in two versions: a 17-CD one, and a deluxe US set, limited to just 5,000 copies, that contains all 22 discs, including the five Blu-Rays. The 17 CDs include the unreleased albums Oceanside Countryside, Johnny's Island and Summer Songs. 

A flavour of the sheer extent of the deluxe US offering comes in these lines from the Warners' press release: "The 198 total musical tracks include 121 previously unreleased versions of live, studio, mixes, or edits, and 15 previously unreleased songs, available here for the first time ever. 62 tracks have been available on various recordings. The Blu-Rays include 128 tracks, over 14 hours of film. The box also includes a 176-page book and a poster. With over 28 hours of total content, you could drive from New York to Denver, listening the entire time, and still have hours left to enjoy when you arrive!"

David Fricke, reviewing the package in the new edition of Mojo, puts it more succinctly: "Writing about it is like trying to catalogue and analyse a newly-opened Egyptian tomb. Archives III is more legacy than most artists muster in a lifetime".

Young, of course, has already mined his personal archives to remarkable effect. The first volume of Archives,  which came out in 2009, covered the period from 1963 to 1972 in three formats: a 10-disc deluxe edition in either Blu-ray or DVD, and an eight-disc CD box.

Volume Two emerged in late 2020 and covers what is, for many diehard Young fans, their favourite period – the years in which he released such classic albums as On The Beach, Tonight’s The Night and Zuma. It also contained a CD of live recordings made by Young and his long-term cohorts, Crazy Horse, at London's Hammersmith Odeon and Tokyo's Nippon Budokan Hall during their tour in 1976.

In addition to these extensive box-sets, Young has also steadily released a series of archive recordings. 'Lost' Young albums such as Toast, Homegrown and Chrome Dreams have all finally seen the light of day; there have also been standalone issues of recordings of solo concerts (the earliest of which dates back to 1968) and of shows he performed with Crazy Horse or the Santa Monica Flyers. There was a boxset commemorating the 50th anniversary of his 1972 album, Harvest, the landmark early album of his that gave us A Man Needs a Maid, Heart of Gold, Alabama, and The Needle and the Damage Done.

He continues to write and record, and has lately been touring the US with Crazy Horse. He is already setting his sights on a fourth volume of Archives, which will potentially go up to 2024. He may be 78 but he is resolutely refusing to slow down, just as his friend Bob Dylan, 83, is still touring and still making music.

The first two audio discs in Archives III are entitled Across the Water, and feature recordings from the Hammersmith Odeon and Budokan in 1976, during which Young and Crazy Horse blew away their nightly audiences with such classic Young songs as Down by the River, Like A Hurricane and Cortez the Killer.

As critic Allan Jones writes in his Uncut review of Archives III, these songs became central to Young’s concert repertoire in the years ahead, but these particular recordings “are from the days before they became familiar set-pieces. Everything felt newly-minted, freshly-bottled lightning”.

There’s a companion Blu-Ray in the deluxe US edition with live footage from both venues as well as clips of Young busking outside Glasgow’s Central Station prior to a gig at the city’s Apollo Centre on April 2. This footage can be viewed today on YouTube.

Much of the material on the 17 CDs will already be familiar to fans. Allan Jones points out that most of the tracks of seven of the CDs are lifted from such albums as Hawks & Doves, Re-ac-tor, Rust Never Sleeps, Live Rust, Hitchhiker, Songs for Judy and The Last Waltz. He adds, for good measure, that it’s not hard to see why some of the previously unreleased tracks have never found a home.

Before Young became the revered 'Godfather of Grunge' in the Nineties, he had tested the patience of many of his fans – and that of David Geffen – when he recorded five albums for the Geffen label between 1983 and 1987.  The rockabilly pastiche Everybody's Rockin, the synthesizer-driven Trans, Old Ways, Landing on Water, and Life were all variable in quality; the results were often flaccid and uninspiring, and only one of the five albums entered the Top 20. More than a few people wondered if Young, who after all had produced so many magnificent albums in the Seventies, had lost his way. 

But as Young's biographer Sylvie Simmons has written, Geffen had had the bad luck to sign Young as the musician entered a period of personal, political, domestic and musical turmoil, At home, he had been experimenting with synthesizers to try to help his disabled, non-oral son.

In his review Allan Jones recounts that few people were aware of the circumstances that inspired Trans, the emotional impact on Young of his children Zeke and Ben, both of whom were born with a rare, non-hereditary form of cerebral palsy, with Ben a non-verbal paraplegic. As Jones says, "there was suddenly a lot of grief, resentment and anger" for Young to deal with. 

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Though Archives III focuses on Young in the 1980s, it still has so much to commend it. To take a few examples: the 1976 Crazy Horse concerts, a 1977 recording of Young singing new songs with Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson at Ronstadt's Malibu home, and acoustic Young performances at a San Francisco venue, the Boarding House, in May 1978. The DVD footage also yields many unexpected delights.

On Facebook, some fans are eagerly looking forward to Archives III. Others are more sceptical, such as the fan who writes: “Neil is great but this amount of money for only 15 never-before-released songs? So many older artists are filling up expensive releases with alternate versions, outtakes and 'remastered' tracks. This is not Neil's motivation, but for many it seems to be a money grab. I may change my mind, but how often would I play these CDs once I bought them?”

It's a fair question. Despite the considerable price-tag – HMV, for example, are doing pre-orders for the 17-CD set at £249.99 (the 22-disc retails for $449.98 on Young's website) – many fans who have followed Young's career for decades will doubtless splash out on it. For them, it's not about being a completist. The fact is that Neil Young remains one of the most fascinating of rock stars, one who has always gone his own way and who follows his musical impulses, wherever they may lead him.

We remember the pleasure he has given us over the decades; the hypnotically great songs, the stone-cold classic albums, his blistering guitar work, that high and unmistakable voice, the great gigs – whether it was the Apollo in '76, the SECC in '93, the OVO Hydro in 2016, the epic Hyde Park show with Bob Dylan in 2019. It's hard not to admire his restless sense of adventure, his endless creativity, his cussedness, his fearlessness, and the inspiration he has given to so many younger musicians.

He has, ultimately, been true to the attitude he expressed in one of his best-known lines, that it's better to burn out than to fade away. As he once reflected in a TV interview: "Jimi Hendrix burned out. Bang - he was gone. Kurt Cobain: bang,  gone. And that's the way everybody remembers them. And that's what rock and roll is all about - that edge, the peak, the thing. So, you look at that and you go, Well, maybe it is better to just burn out than it is to fade away, for rock and roll".

https://neilyoungarchives.com/