With his Official Bootleg Series,
Neil Young reclaims performances that have been circulating as unofficial audience tapes or low-quality bootlegs for decades, cleaning up audio from the best possible sources and recapturing moments that had beforehand been covered in a muted haze.
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion 1971 is a crisp, studio-quality rendering of a solo set
Young performed in Los Angeles on February first, 1971. Before this official release, the show was one of
Neil's more bootlegged, surfacing under multiple titles like Young Man's Fancy or I'm Happy That Y'all Came Down, since 1971. Much like the spellbinding
Carnegie Hall 1970,
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion 1971 finds
Young alone with a guitar (or occasionally at the piano) running through material from the recently released
After the Gold Rush, and sprinkling in a few tunes yet to be released on record. Soon-to-be classics like
Harvest's "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold" show up, and he doesn't have the lyrics completely finished for "A Man Needs a Maid." As with the
Carnegie Hall set list, there's a strong performance of "See the Sky About to Rain," which wouldn't see commercial release for a few more years. The similarities in song selection to the
Carnegie Hall show make sense, as this gig happened only a few months later. Here, however,
Neil sounds more relaxed in a less high-pressure venue. He mumbles casually through song introductions and approaches the tunes playfully, as if pondering the possibilities of his songwriting in real time. At one point he even tells the audience not to waste their energy applauding between every song. "You can just clap real loud at the end, and it'll be cool," he smirks. That laid-back attitude encapsulates the feel of
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, capturing a master songwriter in the middle of an early phase of brilliance, but in a moment where he sounds especially comfortable and at home on-stage. Less obsessive fans might not see the necessity in seeking out more than one live recording from a window of time when a lot of
Young's shows were fairly similar.
Young completists will of course need to hear the clarity of this recording, and will appreciate the subtle nuances in every joke, slight variation in delivery, and minor shift in presentation that separate this show from any other. ~ Fred Thomas