Neil Young Archives, Vol. III: 1976-1987: Journeys Through The Past

The mammoth 17-CD box set documents a hero's journey through the wilderness of middle age.

Neil Young could've swiped an old Lou Reed album title for his ongoing Neil Young Archives project: each volume makes it clear that the singer/songwriter spent his life growing up in public.

Maybe it's the sheer weight of Neil Young Archives, Vol. III: 1976-1987—it spans a whopping 17 CDs, just one disc shy of the combined length of the previous two boxes; there's also a deluxe edition containing 5 Blu Rays, all containing films, including his midnight movie Human Highway—but this box set feels like a considerable journey through the past, one that documents Young grappling with the uncertainties of middle age. Essentially, the twelve years covered on this set amount to Young's second act, the period he spent wandering in the wilderness before re-emerging at the end of the 1980s as the grizzled old hippie hailed as the godfather of grunge.

Those subsequent years, which will allegedly be chronicled on a fourth and final box in Neil Young Archives that runs from 1988 all the way to the present, are often fascinating in their own right but they do tend to find Young cycling through his personas. He'll reunite with Crazy Horse when he wants to feel the deliverance of noise, then retreat to softer, sweeter territory to bask in a harvest moon. Neil Young Archives, Vol. III chronicles Neil creating these identities, along with odd excursions into punk, rockabilly and yacht rock—the latter arrives in the form of Johnny's Island, the blissfully breezy album he abandoned in favor for the uneasy Trans—voyages that left a mark even if he rarely revisited this particular territory again.

Many of his explorations have become part of Young's legend, chief among them Geffen's decision to sue Neil for delivering records that were "musically uncharacteristic." Neil Young Archives, Vol. III largely puts the lie to this statement. Each left turn seems telegraphed somewhere within the past; the disquiet simmers during the quieter moments, always threatening to reach a roiling boil. The one possible exception is the material lifted from Everybody's Rockin', the retro-rockabilly platter Young delivered in 1983 when Geffen demanded that the album after the electro excursion Trans be a "rock & roll" record. 

Young chose not to include "Wonderin'," an old ditty from 1970 that he refurbished with slicked-back sides for Everybody's Rockin', but perhaps he should have. Its presence would've underscored one of the main charms of the Archives project: Young has a hard time letting things go. That's literally true of Neil Young Archives as a whole, which finds a hoarder sharing his vast treasure to an eager audience, but it also applies to his artistic process, especially as depicted on Neil Young Archives, Vol. III. He will keep songs in reserve, either excavating an old recording when he's in need or resurrecting a tune in hopes of finally capturing its inherent magic. 

Neil's instincts didn't necessarily serve him well, at least as assembling the initial records were concerned. He abandoned projects, leaving behind completed albums which he'd then cherry-pick for the patchwork efforts that brought his first run at Reprise to a close in the early 1980s. The benefit of the large canvass of Neil Young Archives, Vol. III is that it gives space to let songs linger without the context of the original long-players; he'll offer excerpts from ragged records or let tunes exist at their moment of creation, not release. He followed a similar playbook on the previous Archives boxes but Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Tonight's The Night could feel oddly incomplete with a few songs excised from inclusion. Many of the albums during this period don't have a single-session origin; Rust Never Sleeps is cobbled together from live acoustic performances and Crazy Horse unleashed in the studio. This means hearing the core tunes from his songbook float through the course of the 17 discs provides a stabilizing force, helping to appreciate how far Young traveled before heading back home. 

The repetition isn't limited to the songs. A fair number of the major excavations on Neil Young Archives, Vol. III have already been issued as individual titles, including such legendary scrapped albums Homegrown and Chrome Dreams, plus the first official glimpse of the Ducks, the excellent bar band Neil Young led alongside Moby Grape's Bob Mosley for a few weeks in 1977. Neil Young Archives, Vol. III expands on a couple of these passages—a roaring unheard original "Cryin' Eyes" inexplicably didn't make the Ducks release High Flyin' last year—but generally the unreleased material on the box adds texture and nuance to a known narrative, often in quite welcome ways. That's especially true of the 1977 disc called Snapshot in Time, which captures a moment where Neil Young plays new songs for an audience of Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson, who offer impromptu harmonies and laugh at his lyrical turns. It's absolutely lovely as is anything involving Larson; the set also features a concert by the two singers, also from 1977, where the pair retain their intimate bond with a larger supporting band. 

One of the striking things about Neil Young Archives, Vol. III is how the featured concerts illustrate how different collaborators conjure different emotions from Young. Larson elicits sweetness, the International Harvesters of the mid-'80s brings out palpable joy, a jolting contrast to the hardened glint of Crazy Horse in their 1984 incarnation on Touch the Night. Just a few years earlier, their untrammeled rumble seemed tied into a zeitgeist, but here they're kicking against the pricks, attempting to adapt to Reagan's America.

By the time the box comes to a close with Summer Songs, a pretty daydream of an album written, recorded and forgotten in 1987, that tension largely has dissipated. There's a feeling of understated optimism, as if Young senses he's in control of his gift and understands where his audience lies. That's how it would play out: Freedom and Ragged Glory restored his reputation and wide audience. Knowing how things turn out does give the music on Neil Young Archives, Vol. III the distinct structure of a middle act. Those acts, of course, are where the heart of a story lies: that's where all the drama and character reveal themselves. It's often more absorbing than either the beginning or the end of a story.