“It’s about what happens when you start getting high, and you find out that people you thought you knew, you don’t know anymore, because they don’t get high and you do.”
That banter, dripping with irony and accompanied by shrieking scrapes of a piano’s strings, forebodingly introduces the finale of the latest Neil Young archival release, Live at the Cellar Door. “Flying on the Ground is Wrong”, one of Young’s earliest songs, is a typically 60s piece of pharmacological us vs. them, a bittersweet song about how the squares just don’t understand the new mind-expanding potential of drugs. But even if the audience didn’t quite pick up on it on this December night, it’s not exactly a celebration anymore for Young by 1970.
The first line of “The Needle and the Damage Done”, which would start appearing in setlists the next month, is “I caught you knocking at my cellar door.” If the song is in fact referencing the famous, tiny D.C. club, it’s most likely not about these 1970 shows, but rather the 1969 run with Crazy Horse and the worsening heroin addiction of guitarist Danny Whitten. But amidst an accumulation of dark, druggy vibes, this solo acoustic set catches Young in a bleak, hollow mood, rudely awoken from the hippie dream his audience still wants to believe.
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because only seven weeks separated the Cellar Door shows and another Archives release: the superb January 1971 set at Toronto’s Massey Hall Young freed from his vaults six years prior. A full seven of the 13 songs on Live at the Cellar Door also appear on the Massey Hall release, but these two shows still exist on opposing sides of a notable chapter break in Young’s career and life. While Massey Hall looked forward to his commercial peak of Harvest, showcasing then-unheard songs such as “Heart of Gold” in their infancy, Live at the Cellar Door is mostly looking back to his previous two albums, After the Gold Rush and Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, and his late work with Buffalo Springfield.
Between the two shows, Young threw out his back on his ranch, picked up a painkiller habit, and started his turbulent relationship with actress Carrie Snodgrass (as chronicled in “A Man Needs a Maid” on Harvest). So the Massey and Cellar Door releases offer a sort of before-and-after experiment around this busy holiday break, even if the Live Archives chronology is getting so crowded in this era that this latest release had to be jimmied in as Volume 2.5.
But Live at the Cellar Door stands alone as an unexpected glimpse of Neil Young, piano man. Between songs, Young makes a long speech in praise of the venue’s “nine-foot Steinway,” an instrument that provides as much of the accompaniment here as guitar. “I’ve been playing piano for about...almost a year,” he says, and whether that’s a joke or not, his rudimentary keyboard approach mirrors the crude immediacy of his electric guitar work more than his subtle acoustic touch.
On the Buffalo Springfield track “Expecting to Fly”—an elegy to the 60s written before the decade was even finished—Young punctuates the chorus with loud discordant pounds that trail off into the silent club’s darkness. The other piano reinvention, surprisingly, is “Cinnamon Girl”, which even Neil obsessives probably have never heard in this arrangement. “That’s the first time I ever did that one on the piano,” Neil says—and possibly the last time as well.
Paired with the equally gloomy Massey Hall, these sibling live sets show Young peeking over the edge of the 60s into the dark chasm of the next decade. It’s frustrating that the Archives series continues to pace along this precipice instead of taking the plunge into the next rich stretch of Young’s career: More material from the Harvest tour that begat the tormented Time Fades Away? The haunted/stoned Bottom Line show from 74? The short-lived Ducks? But even if it holds the most value for the Neil obsessives interested in the small differences, Live at Cellar Door provides another glimpse at a darkly formative time in his long career.
