Neil Young fans waited decades for his fabled Decade II project, later renamed Archives and finally released this year as the start-- or, technically, the continuation-- of the singer's long-simmering and fitfully realized reissue program. Reasonable people can quibble over the set's presentation and the relative redundancy of much of its contents, but it's hard to imagine anyone having a problem with how the set positioned Young within a definitive chronological context. Archives may be too awkward to be definitive, but no question they worked well as a portrait of a quixotic artist as a young man.
For the Young faithful, the belated set seems to have gotten those rusty gears moving again. What was next? Will the second volume of the Archives encapsulate Young's formidable mid-1970s stretch? Would Time Fades Away finally appear on CD? Would any of Young's infamous live sets of that era show up? Rumors swirled. Well, Young threw one of his trademark wrenches in the works: What came next was Dreamin' Man, an unexpected jump to Young's 1992 Harvest Moon period-- itself an unexpected detour following the raging Crazy Horse reunion Ragged Glory. Dreamin' Man, deemed the Neil Young Archives Performance Series #12, captures Young solo, performing the entirety of Harvest Moon shortly before the album's release, albeit in a different order and compiled from multiple dates.
Wait, back up. Or actually, fast forward. Neil Young Archives Performance Series #12? The Archive "performance series" releases began in 2006 with Live at the Fillmore East aka Volume 2, and continued in 2007 with Live at Massey Hall (Volume 3). Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968 (Volume 0) and Live at the Riverboat 1969 (Volume 1) appeared in the Archives boxed set this year (along with the previously issued installments). So what happened to the others? It must be in the fine print somewhere that Young didn't need to release this stuff chronologically.
Alas, compared to the treasure trove of releases Young's compiled in the past few years, Dreamin' Man is a real letdown. With its patchwork (and, as of press time, unknown) 1992 sources, the set's neither particularly representative of Young live nor particularly different from the pleasant Harvest Moon album itself (cheering and lack of backing vocals, strings and session hands aside). Young's voice is in fine fragile form on "Such a Woman" and "From Hank to Hendrix", and not that the original versions of the album's tracks were ever larded up with embellishments, but it's always nice to hear Young this stripped down.
Yet these versions adhere so closely to the studio versions, there's really little reason beyond completist impulse to pick them up again in this form. Dreamin' Man runs a mere five minutes longer than its original counterpart. Heck, the epic "Natural Beauty" was presented live on Harvest Moon to begin with. Then there's the possibility that Dreamin' Man, like its Performance Series predecessors, will just end up on a future Archives boxed set somewhere down the line anyway. There's no reason to believe it won't be, but after the amount of time and effort put into delivering Archives, wait for that boxed set at your peril.
