Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s lost album, Human Highway | Hacker News Reader

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s lost album, Human Highway

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96 pointstintinnabula32 comments

One of my favorite CSNY factoids is that Jerry Garcia played the amazing pedal steel guitar part on "Teach your Children"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_Your_Children

That was the first thing I learned to play on the pedal steel guitar.

I've been playing about 6 years now, and I'm stoked that things are opening up here so I can perform a bit.

Right now I am working on Garcia's parts for Dire Wolf.

He's not the best pedal steel player, but he's my favorite.

Yes! An incredible "hippie player" (the derogatory term used by classical steelers for players that took the pedal steel outside of the classic country style). He really has a very unusual style..

He also was the first steel player of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, before leaving his seat to Buddy Cage, which is my favorite pedal steel player :)

Jerry is on Crosby's wonderful 1969 solo LP If Only I Could Remember My Name. The article mentioned Neil's early 70s solo output: Harvest and Goldrush. No mention of the brilliant stuff from Stills: Stills I & II, and two astounding Manassas albums. If you love the Stills tunes on CSN & Deja Vu, the Manassas LPs are a must. Finally, for Stills fans, here's the prototype for Southern Cross [1]: Curtis Brothers with Buckingham & Nicks on Seven League Boots in 75.

[1] https://youtu.be/TNEpFrOWooE

Blows Against the Empire by Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship is another album that's a bit of a lineup of counterculture icons including Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, and many others from among Jefferson Airplane's contemporaries.

And they helped the dead with vocal harmonizing during recording of working man's dead and American Beauty. Cool stuff.

Their vocal harmonies are out of this world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyquqw6GeXk

I'm glad Neil didn't erase the recordings. Sometimes bands have gems that stay in the vault for a long time. I remember reading about Nirvana's "You know you're right" years before it was released. I still remember the excitement I felt when it turned out the recording was real. Audioslave is another band that apparently has some good stuff in their vault. What was going to be the first single off of Revelations was shelved after their drummer decided he didn't like the track - but everyone else apparently loved it. Hopefully one day that sees the light of day.

I feel this. One of my favorite artists, Ray LaMontagne, has entire albums that he has apparently (due to essentially rumors and, at some point, wikipedia) worked hard to completely remove from the internet. They're from his early days and a little different in terms of his style and voice, but I never found anything definite about the reasoning. However, these albums have some of my absolutely favorite material of his, far more than what you can find on even YouTube now and I was fortunate enough to get some of the tracks digitally years ago and hang onto them. Some of them have even been covered more recently and become pretty popular.

So that's what happened to those. I knew I wasn't completely crazy and that I'd heard and/or "bought" some early Ray LaMontagne music, but last year when I was trying to find it the tracks I was thinking of were nowhere to be seen. Just "Trouble."

A guy I knew in high school released seven or eight albums with a co-conspirator and also felt the same way about their early work. Some of it was admittedly a bit rough, but some was also very good. He eventually relented on his opposition to re-leasing any of it, and those early songs have long since made it onto iTunes (and basically every streaming service). So I can definitely understand artists not wanting to see or hear their earliest works, worried that people will hate it and judge them based on who they used to be.

It's interesting that there are many different trajectories for musical artists, the ones that this particular narrative most applies to are the ones that become more polished as they get older but whose creative genius was spent in the early years. And there are quite a few of those. Listen to early recordings of 'The Police' and what they - and Sting - put out later for some nice examples of that. The early stuff was definitely rough, but it has so much energy and originality.

If you're still looking, drop me a line! Those recordings are, in my ears, solid gold :)

If you're interested in CSNY history, I highly recommend checking out the Best Show side podcast, "So Far," which recaps CSNY and related albums year by year.

As someone who was aware of CSNY and knew some of the more popular Neil Young stuff, it's been a great way to explore their catalogs in a somewhat directed manner. https://thebestshow.libsyn.com/so-far-episode-one-19691970

Neil Young made an odd comedy movie with Devo, et al using the same name: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Highway

In 1974. Really surprised this highly relevant fact never made into such an in depth story.

The Into The Black in that movie is blistering...

The Political Beats podcast has an excellent 3 part retrospective of Neil Young's career. Part 3 alone is over 4 hours long. Definitely worth a listen if you are a fan. And despite the name there are no politics. https://www.nationalreview.com/podcasts/political-beats/

I read somewhere that Neil could write a hit song almost everyday. Is there anywhere to hear these tracks that he released? I'm old, it's been so long since I've tried to buy music.

Neil Young Archives. Like Netflix, but for Neil Young.

https://neilyoungarchives.com/timeline?position=14.887570892...

This is worth a submission of its own!

If you want one - my team built it. There’s some stories to be told. (I’m still in the “credits” though another team has since taken over maintenance)

The first version of the archives was a 20 disk interactive Blu-Ray set, that’s where the file-cabinet design first came from. My first meeting with Neil was at his manager place in Calabasas and he rolled up silently in the 1950s Lincoln he converted to electric years ago.

Anyway it was a good meeting but at the end I had to tell him that the design wouldn’t work on mobile and that in fact these days most folks design “mobile first”. His exact words were “fuck mobile” so I sat my ass down and we glued on an app when we had to.

Fun times ;-)

I’ve been subscribed for several years. It’s excellent.

The general approach inspired something I’m working on now on the side.

Awesome. I’d offer any advice but technically this was pretty straightforward. It’s React, Auth0 (see note), Stripe and Contentful with a few Node services to glue the SaaS pieces together.

* So originally we had social auth. We didn’t know how, or if, this would be monetized, but we knew we wanted to force sign up so we used Auth0. When we launched we told to expect 10,000 (maybe) MAU. The weekend we launched we got 250k signed up users. It was all cloud services and we weren’t worried about scale, our one freak out was when we were blowing through our 10k users tier with Auth0 into Enterprise “call us” level on a weekend. Auth0 just let it ride and we dealt with it later.

But Neil passionately despises Facebook and Google so he ended up not wanting to allow social log ins. When he found out 2/3 of our users were on one of those two endpoints he relented. (Of note it was pretty much 1/3 FB, 1/3 Google, 1/3 User/Pass)

He has since removed all Social providers.

Well we’re aligned on the social media front.

I’m working on spinning up a label for managing a personal release, and as part of it want to be able to self host and stream some tracks from releases or singles for free without just linking an easily interceptable mp3 in an audio element. So, mainly inspired from his efforts with Orastream, but of course without infrastructure there.

To save myself rambling further, I’m aiming to release, open sourced under the label, a containerized boilerplate for self hosting a server and client nodes that operate seekable audio streaming (for FLAC at first) and standard artist site content (bio, media, etc). Mainly as an option for artists with a bit of know how but not enough resources for something more robust so that they can operate independently of any other services if they wanted.

From there I’m hoping people would see enough value to contribute and to build on it from there.

I’ll definitely take your cues. While I doubt I’ll struggle any time in my life with Neil’s kind of numbers, maybe someone else would.

Thanks for the insights! That guy has been a hero of mine since I was young. Still is.

Yeah OraStream really isn’t that magical it’s based on a spec (I can’t find it right now) that’s basically just a variation of HLS. Audio only HLS with high bitrate renditions with pretty much any encoder (ffmpeg) should work as a pretty straightforward drop in for what OraStream does. Dash should work as well.

That's more or less the plan! But on a small scale for self-deployment. Thankfully had a little experience with high bitrate streams at Rogers, at least superficially.

Did your team build the player itself as well? The meter for bitrate was a nice touch!

Thanks for sharing. I always wondered why that sure was a little peculiar. .. I'll blame it on Neil!

> There’s some stories to be told.

Do tell!

If you're into box sets, I am absolutely in love with these two sets. I love Neil Young and both of these box sets have more than enough gems to make me very happy. His work with the Squires is particularly interesting (to me) as I'm from Regina, SK so about 6.5 hours west of where he recorded those tracks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Archives_Vol._1_1963%E2%80...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Young_Archives_Volume_II:...

Edit - If you're interested in a listen without such a big investment, both are available on Apple Music. I'm not sure about other platforms as I'm just an Apple Music user. Something something spatial audio grumble grumble...

Deja Vu moved the living crap out of me when I first heard it. Will, in 200 years, people go "eh", like I do when I hear Beethoven now?

Nah, you don’t have to wait 200 years.

On the other hand, I really like both CSNY and Beethoven, so I guess it takes all kinds.

Are you referring to the song or the album? Both are great, but the song is one of my favorite CSN(Y) songs. The outtakes on the 50th anniversary are fun too.

So, where's the link to the album?

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