Apr 8, 2020
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Canadian Beer
#moosehead #alexander keiths #lager
Shakey Sundays #72:
Oceanside Countryside, Part 3
Neil Young felt the same way about releasing great new records in the mid-to-late 70's as Napoleon supposedly did about petting kitty cats 160 years earlier: both men avoiding doing so at all costs.
I don't know which of them was more nuts: Bonaparte, who tooled around Elba plotting revenge and keeping a wary eye out for marauding feline terror, or Shakey, who tooled around a zillion different studios from Florida to Hawaii to England and back again in his creative heydey, laying down hour after hour of lovely tape and then studiously not releasing any of it.
(Just in case you think I'm making crap up, here's my count: Young could have easily issued Homegrown as a double record, added a second disc to Zuma, and put out a double album worth of Chrome Dreams plus single discs of Hitchhiker, Odeon Budokan, and Oceanside Countryside, all to universal acclaim, all between 1975 and 1977. That is eight albums worth of music he shelved in three years. And that is ridiculous.)
At least Old Boney was consistent: when Napoleon died on Saint Helena in 1821 it was without a black cat in sight. Neil, meanwhile, put off issuing Oceanside Countryside for nearly 50 years and then did the Napoleon equivalent of cuddling up with Buttons, Misty or Garfield: he then immediately issued two totally different versions of it.
That's right folks: if you got weird and purchased Archives 3 and the stand alone vinyl version of Oceanside Countryside you wound up with two entirely different records with the same name. We're talking different run orders and the initial existence, then complete absence, of Neil's utterly superfluous "raps" which essentially consist of him reading you his own liner notes on the off chance that you're an ailurophob who fears a cat might be ready to lurch out at you from within them.
None of this is too earth shaking, I admit. But there's a third difference to be found between the two versions which is both puzzling and illuminating. So let's talk about it!
To begin, let's listen to Neil's first elegant solo pass at Peace of Mind. Without Nicolette Larson, Ben Keith and the whole football team worth of autoharp wielding Nashville types who appear on the song's Comes a Time iteration, one can hear Neil alone, layering up stately piano, some sharp guitar work, a surging Stringman and even a slurred and somewhat stumbling surprise bonus verse.
I dig it. The song, which usually bores the hell out of me, has fresh legs here and even a little edge. If you like this version as well, and want to get your hands on it, go find $400 and a CD player because, you guessed it, the song appears on the Archives edition of Oceanside Countryside and not on the vinyl.
And that's just weird.
If I roll up to Neil's door tomorrow morning with a six pack of Moosehead lager, some of his official Homegrown rolling papers and a demand that he explain why the hell Peace of Mind got shafted off of my vinyl copy of the record, he'll surely kill the power on his six barns worth of model trains, ask Daryl to delay dinner, and give me his complete attention while explaining that:
Including the song would have swelled the record's vinyl run time onto a second piece of wax, (which is ridiculous: there's more than enough space for the song on either side of the relatively brief record) or...
Peace of Mind simply doesn't work with either this Ocean or Country theme (which is also ridiculous: Pocahontas is about the Astrodome, Native Americans and aliens, not about the countryside, and it made the cut) but he still wanted to share the song in isolation within his Archives project, or...
That he's saving the song for inclusion on the record's upcoming third, Gary Larson inspired, iteration entitled Oceanside Countryside Farside.
If he makes that final argument I will crack open another Moosehead, offer him one as well, and absolutely accept his thinking. After all, he ain't Napoleon. He's Neil Young.
Moosehead's Presidential Pack contains 1,461 beers. That's one every day for four years.
drunk and listeniing to a great continuum track on 8tracks. fuck yeah 8tracks!!!
Canadian beer does taste like water, but 3/4 or a pitcher will make you tipssy enouph to enjoy montreal!
off to pizza pizza in a few :)