Neil Young & Crazy Horse – THE RANCH REHEARSALS CD

Despite being born a Canadian citizen – between 1960 and 1966 he lived with his mother in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which he calls his ‘hometown’ and where his music career began –   from 1967 Neil Young lived outside Canada, until he returned in 2020. After becoming successful, he bought properties in California, one of which, in Malibu, burned to the ground in the 2018 Woolsey Fire.In 1970. Young purchased Broken Arrow Ranch (which he named after the Buffalo Springfield song) , a property of about 1,000 acres near La Honda, California (population 979 at the 2020 census) for US$350,000 (US$2.7 million in 2023 dollars); the property was subsequently expanded to thousands of acres. Neil Young very quickly installed a studio at the ranch, where more than 20 records have been made to date, despite his longtime producer and friend, David Briggs (who died in 1995) hating making recordings here, deriding the hermetic refuge as a “velvet cage.” The first Young album recorded at the Ranch was 1972’s Harvest, featuring the song ‘Old Man’, written about the resident caretaker, Louis Avila at the time of the purchase,Almost twenty years later, in April 1990, Neil Young and Crazy Horse began the sessions for what would become Neil’s 20th studio album, Ragged Glory. The band played a set of songs twice a day for a couple of weeks (never repeating the same songs in a set), then went back, listened and chose the best takes. According to Young, this approach “took analysis out of the game during the sessions, allowing the Horse to not think”. The finished record was released in September ’90, reviews were strong and the album was considered Young’s best since 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps. A few different takes of tracks from Ragged Glory were later released on the digital-only, expanded version of the album which came out in 2023, however, this new CD now presents eight takes of the final album’s tracks, all recorded at Broken Arrow ranch during June and July 1990, which have never previously been released and remain exclusive to this new CD title.