Neil Young & Crazy Horse
H.O.R.D.E. Festival
Great Woods
Mansfield, Massachusetts
August 8, 1997

With great thanks to the taper, Stefan, for so kindly answering my query on
this show, and also thanks to aintnowall from the Rust List for sending his
ffps for me to independently verify my copy, I feel with very good assurance
that this copy of the show is indeed a clone of the master recording, and that the
lineage listed below is correct.

This is Stefan's beautiful audience recording a very powerful performance of
Neil Young with Crazy Horse from the 1997 H.O.R.D.E. tour. Stefan's comments from his original
info file are included directly below, with timings added, and additional notes appended.
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This is one of my favorite Neil Young shows, and also one of the best shows I've
attended in my 28 years of concert-going. In particular, the RITFW is stunning.

I recorded the show on my Sony D8 from the 6th row (one of the Rust Rows, thanks
to Lookout Mama), and I think the sound is very good indeed.

rec: Core Sound Binaurals (6th row center section) > Sony D8 (DAT)
CD master: Sony PCM300 > optical > Tascam CDRW700
extract: CDR > EAC (secure) > Flac Frontend level 6

Disc 1:
1. cut//WBCN radio phone-in with Neil (July 30, 1997) [5:58.55]
2. Hey Hey, My My [7:28.13]
3. Crime in the City [7:30.09]
4. Hippie Dream (plus coda)[13:59.61]
5. Big Time [10:12.02]
6. From Hank to Hendrix (solo)[5:53.48]
7. The Needle and the Damage Done (solo)[2:28.43]
8. Ohio (solo)[5:27.66]

Total Time Disc 1: [58:58.72]

Disc 2:
1. Throw Your Hatred Down [7:31.52]
2. Powderfinger [7:02.68]
3. Tonight's the Night [9:49.59]
4. Sedan Delivery [10:01.23]
5. Rockin' in the Free World [16:04.19]

Total Time Disc 2: [50:29.71]

Total Time: [109:28.68]

Enjoy!
Stefan
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Additional Notes (guygee):
- Track timing above from shntool v2.03 len output from Trader's Little Helper V0.9.3 (Build 56):
http://thor.prohosting.com/roh0205/ Date: March 18, 2006. shntool len file included.
- Flac tags edited to include track and show info
- Original folder name: Neil Young 1997-08-08 (FLAC)
- Filenames were changed to more etree-like convention:
See file "Neil Young 1997-08-08 (FLAC)(oldnames)-ffp.txt" for original filenames.

---

Original fanboy review posted to the Rust list on August 9, 1997:

Friday night's Great Woods show was nothing short of stellar. As
has already been said, Neil was in an intense mood. A man possessed. At
9:30pm the band launched into HHMM, and within a couple of minutes Neil
was unleashing solos that cut like a hot knife through flesh. The
intensity increased with Crime in the City. What an incredible version of
this incredible song. Neil was wild with Old Black and almost frantic to
get the words out. I was immediately caught up in the energy and so
fortunate to be close to the stage.

The band paused for 30 seconds or so to recover from the previous
15 blistering minutes. Leo in the seat in front of me called out for
Ordinary People, then Surfer Joe, before the Horse grunged their way into
Hippie Dream. I guess when this song started I was worried that the Horse
were heading into cruise control--I wanted something faster. But then the
song ended and the coda began, 6-7 minutes or so of improvisational
jamming that was reminiscent of the Dead Man soundtrack. I'm not a
musician but I could appreciate what was happening on stage between Neil
and the band who were huddled together over by Billy's amp. It was like we
were being treated to a rehearsal at the ranch--Neil and the Horse were
oblivious to the thousands watching them. It was a special moment that
took the evening almost into Dead territory.

Next up was Big Time. For me the show lost a little momentum here.
It was similar to the 1996 tour renditions of this song, whereas other
songs played on the 1996 tour seem to have been ratcheted up a notch or
two for HORDE. However, Neil was again unleashing some wicked solos--as he
did all night. Another pause while the band left to watch as Neil headed
for the lone mic stand with acoustic and harp. As expected, he began the
solo set with From Hank to Hendrix, a beautiful rendition. Then onto
Needle and Ohio, the latter prefaced by a story that perhaps set the theme
of the evening: oppression of ordinary people by faceless authority.
"Thank you (tunes guitar). When I first started in music... when I first
started in music Boston was kind of a folk town. There was a real big
coffeehouse scene, a lot of singer songwriters here. A lot of them could
tune a hell of a lot better than me too. And then there was ah... folk
rock. I was in a band back then called Buffalo Springfield--we were in
kind of a folk rock band. Then that ah... that lasted for a while. We
really were folkies at heart when we started. When something happens you
know folk music has kind of a story about it--before you had any newscasts
or CNN or some guy coming down to lay down a little groove and embellish
it and move on to the next town. This is an old story but it's a folk
story. It's kind of a timeless story because the same things're going on
today, just in different ways. Anyway, I'm going to do this for the four
kids in Ohio here. Things got out of hand and the National Guard came in
and these kids were demonstrating against the war. Standing on their
college campus there holding up their signs on top of this big hill,
grassy hill, and things weren't looking so good." He's probably done this
before, but three times he rapped the guitar body with his knuckle to
create some rifle or cannon shot-like sounds that really added to the
pathos of the song. I waited for the fourth "shot" but perhaps missed it.

Leo was flipping out when the Horse galloped into Throw Your
Hatred Down, waving his NEL YNG xeroxed license plate over his head. It
was a great place for me to be standing because Leo caught Neil's eye
several times during the night, and definitely played while staring right
at him, and me being directly behind Leo made it look like he was playing
just to me. TYHD was just what the show needed--a booster shot that
brought it back up to intensity we had during Crime in the City. Was it
during this song that Neil mimed machine gun fire with Old Black? Did
anyone videotape this show??

Another brief pause, then Powderfinger. More wrenching yet precise
solos--Neil was on fire with the guitar all night long. Segue into a 9
minute Tonight's the Night, nothing could've been better. The beginning
was stripped down with only the bare essentials apparent, then built up
and backed down, teasing the audience with what was to come--a full
frontal assault after Neil's answer to the statement "tonight's the night"
with a sotto voce "yes it is, yes it is." Indeed it was. TTN fully
unleashed, we rocked, until Neil stopped us short with the next lines of
the song and then launched into a Hendrix-like solo unlike anything I'd
heard so far that night, soaring and gorgeous. Stop again, and Neil sang
in such a shakey shakey voice. The rust rows were transfixed. Segue into
Sedan Delivery. Impossible to describe the places TTN and this song took
me so I won't try. "No one knows Billy! No one knows." Neil kept screaming
Billy's name.

That was our allotted 90 minutes so I thought there'd be no encore. I
would've been satisfied a few dozen times over without one. After a couple
of minutes the band came back arms over each others shoulders to take a
bow. Neil was beaming. Of course they wanted to play more, and so they
did--and we were treated to a RITFW of historical proportions. If Neil had
attacked Old Black before, it was nothing compared to this tour de force.
Neil pulled out all the stops. THIS was the song with the machine gun
miming, not TYHD. He was possessed. During this gigantic solo it seemed
he'd run out of things to do so he ambled over to his amplifier and sat on
top of it to continue the solo! It was an incredible moment. A couple of
times the song appeared to be end, but no, it continued relentlessly. The
Horse did not want to stop playing. By now the house lights had been on
for about five minutes, what looked like some Great Woods stiffs were
assembled on the stage looking bewildered, and the band played on.
Finally, after 13 minutes of RITFW, Neil ripped the strings, kissed Old
Black and laid her on the stage in front of his amp. Then, while Poncho
(or was it Billy?) did the same and whipped the strings with the lead,
Neil went to the foot switches in front of his monitor and stomped on one,
then another. He glared at the pedals while stomping, then raised his head
to the mic to almost beg "people on the street, red white and blue...
people shuffling on their feet" (long pause, foot stomp) "people sleeping
in their shoes." Unbelievable.