A Treasure

A Treasure is the first entry to put the spotlight on a less celebrated stretch of his career. As such, this choppy compilation of Harvesters tour highlights allows us to reassess some of Young's 80s output outside its contentious context.

Warts, ugly cousins, blazes of greatness and all, however, A Treasure makes a perfect snapshot of this ornery, shapeshifting moment. [Jul 2011, p.98]

"Amber Jean" is a lovely tribute to his newborn daughter, while "Grey Riders" is a lost epic that suggests Crazy Horse with a twang infusion. The oldies shine too: "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong" sounds as if it originated with the Flying Burrito Brothers instead of Buffalo Springfield.

While Old Ways was something of an oddity in Young's catalog, A Treasure is more than enough to change your view of Young's country period.

Featuring concert recordings from his 1984-5 tour, this shows that even while his studio releases were adrift in genre-hopping chaos, Neil Young could always cut the mustard with a crack band behind him.

Yes, it's a live album, but not "this is what he's been doing recently." If anything, this feels more like a vault release of a new band with familiar faces. Above all, you can feel the exuberance that comes from playing raw, unbridled live music, and there are few from that generation who excel at this better than Neil Young.

A Treasure is a snapshot of an era when Young's then-label, Geffen, went to war with him for not representing himself in a commercially viable way.

Older songs such as Young's "Are You Ready for the Country?" and Buffalo Springfield's "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong" sound made for this setting of shorter, tighter robust song arrangements. "Southern Pacific" and "Motor City" are nice revivals from "Re-ac-tor." But it's the batch of previously unreleased material that justifies the album's title.

With support from Geffen Records waning, Young retaliated with a crack country outfit in the International Harvesters and dug his boots into the outlaw sound with conviction.

A Treasure is full of little disclosures like that, deeply personal without being confessional, engaging without trying to be, and revelatory because of his small observations and his uncommon insight into ordinary detail.

The music hasn't changed, but times have-and for that, the bard deserves an apology from the legions of doubters who thought he lost his marbles because, as this live record confirms, the man truly remains ahead of the curve.

What makes this album a must for Young aficionados is that the Harvesters are likely the most musically accomplished band the singer ever assembled. Thibodeaux's fiddle and Keith's steel-guitar complement Young's craggy guitar; there's an evident virtuosity, but it never comes off as slick.