Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Are You Ready?



Neil Young - Live at Bicentennial Park, Miami, Florida (11/12/77) Part 1
Neil Young - Live at Bicentennial Park, Miami, Florida (11/12/77) Part 2

If I could live in a world that's nothing but the echoes and reverberations from Neil Young's guitar, floating in the spaces between and around and inside of the notes and the noise, disembodied and gloriously auditory forever and ever, I would. That's pretty much my personal paradise.

Hell, half the time I think I'm there already. If you can find me a religion that promises personal afterlives adapted specifically to the user's desires, I'll join up because I'm ready. Gimme that new time religion!

A couple years after I bought my first bootleg at Madison's long-gone Paradise Records (the classic Falling Spikes LP boot of the VU), a friend at another record store made me a Neil boot tape from various LPs and even a rare CD source that he'd paid megabucks to get from Europe. I guess that was my first experience of the trading world, though I had nothing to give him in return. He even made a great wraparound cover for the cassette on his dot-matrix printer (which I later bought from him, I just remembered) and Mac, with a pixelated pic of Neil.

My Smart Wife and I logged hundreds of miles in her "cherry" Nissan pickup listening to this boot. A friend sang "Comes a Time" at our wedding. Wanna guess what The Boy's middle name is?

See, we're kinda obsessed with Neil at the Monkey House.

Odd that I haven't shared any of my Neil boots with ya'all yet. I've got hundreds of them and this is one of the oddest. It's a birthday party for Neil and even includes audience sing-alongs. Maybe not the best recording ever but very listenable with a great performance. It's a fascinating show with a funky setlist including some obscure tunes as well as being a totally classic audience-style bootleg with hollers and hoots galore. You can hear conversations at times from around the taper or maybe by the taper himself. This one is totally endearing if you are a Neil fan.

If you are, enjoy. If you aren't, why not?

Buy Neil's shit.

CORRECTION: If you've already downloaded this show, my apologies. It's missing the first track and another track had diginoise. Both are in the first part. You can get the missing bit and the corrected bit here. Let me know if you find problems in this post or any other post and I'll do my dang-diddley-doodley-est to fix them. Love and kisses from the 'Monkey.

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Now playing: Naked Prey - The Story Never Ends
via FoxyTunes

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Man I'm digging this!! Thanks!! Graduated high school in 77. And yes Neil is God. Thanks for a great blog, musically and politically!!

gomonkeygo said...

Thanks, Kevin - I'm gonna do more Neil eventually. I have some new stuff to do first though and then further shows by artists I've already posted. Everybody loves those Feelies!

Java John said...

Can't wait to hear it....hope it's better than the copy of this show I already have...but if not it's kool.

THIS show was this first time I saw Neil in Concert! It was also the first show that I found on-line that I had attended.

I was seventeen at the time, going to S. Miami High, already a huge Neil fan for several years. The year before he quit the Still/Young band tour, so we only got to see Stills in Miami (opening act: Lynyrd Skynyrd)...the week prior to this Neil Young gig, CSN played in South Florida too!

It was an amazing weekend. 3 days of music for free to commemorate the passing of Lynyrd Skynyrd members (in a plane crash on Oct. 20th 1997 - two night after we saw them in Miami) hence the Skynyrd riffs in Neil's "Alabama" here.


Neil Young (with Nicolette Larson singing by his side), Mark Farner, Lake, and a dozen other bands. Hosted by Dr. Hook and the Medicine show guys, the show closed with the Outlaws - the famous live version of "Green Grass and High Tides" comes from this weekend!


Well, I could go on and on...

WOW. How I wish Neil would release this one!

Java John said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

I was there. Terrific show also with the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. Met the late great Nicolette Larson too. Cool!

gomonkeygo said...

Thanks for the great comments - wish I could have been there, but I was like eleven years old, guys. My mom wouldn't have let me go. She didn't let me see Kiss in '76, either. Damn. I really wanted to see Kiss, too. I had the Kiss Army patch and everything.