Time Fades Away

History

Though the "Love In Mind" track dates from a 1971 solo tour all other songs on the album are from a tour in early 1973 that featured an acoustic set with Young followed by an electric set with backing band the Stray Gators. Longtime collaborator and former Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten had been set to join the Gators as a second guitarist but was sent home after it became evident that he was in no condition to embark on a rigorous tour. He died shortly after from a fatal combination of Valium and alcohol.

The tour followed the release of Young's Harvest. Audiences did not always react positively to the new songs premiered; neither were they fond of the Gators' raucous and heavily electrified live sound. Young lambasted band members' performances following concerts and scheduled soundchecks often cancelled on short notice. Such behavior frustrated drummer Kenneth Buttrey who quit the tour and was immediately replaced by former Turtles/CSNY/Jefferson Airplane percussionist Johnny Barbata, who plays on all of the recordings on the album, except Journey Through The Past, Love In Mind, and The Bridge.

Other band members performed erratically: according to producer Elliot Mazer, Jack Nitzsche would often spew obscenities into his switched-off vocal microphone, while pedal steel/dobro player Ben Keith was so inebriated at one soundcheck that he could not recall the key of "Don't Be Denied", a key song in the tour's core setlist. Following the loss of a pickup on his signature Old Black (a heavily modified Gibson Les Paul), Young switched to a Gibson Flying V; according to Young, the guitar "wouldn't stay in tune" and had other problems. Perhaps that's why Jimmy McDonough said it was "the worst guitar playing of [Young's] career".

Alcohol abuse and strained singing would lead Young to develop a throat infection in the final days of the tour. Called in to supplement the harmonies and add some extra guitar were David Crosby and Graham Nash. Clashes continued, with Nitzsche complaining that he couldn't hear himself playing because Crosby's 12-string electric guitar overpowered the sound mix. After sixty-two concerts over three months, the tour ended in Salt Lake City on April 3, 1973.

Recording

Time Fades Away was recorded directly from the soundboard to 16-track and mixed simultaneous to LP cutting using the Quad-Eight Compumix.

There were no 2 track masters ever made of this record. The master discs were cut directly from the 16 track masters through the Compumix system. A mix was recorded to a second 16 track machine--we had 2 that would run perfectly together--to feed the variable pitch system of the lathe--but was discarded when we were through. I was the mastering engineer who cut the masters.

While no master tape was created in the traditional sense, stereo tapes were in fact created while cutting to enable future remastering.

Release

Time Fades Away was released on October 15, 1973. The album reached #22 on the Billboard Charts, and quickly achieved gold status, selling over 1 million copies in both the US and UK. It was issued on vinyl, cassette and 8 track.

The album's title track was briefly released as a single, with the B-side of "Last Trip To Tulsa", a live version of the song also taken from the Time Fades Away tour and unavailable anywhere else.

Reception

Upon its release, Time Fades Away received positive reviews from Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and Robert Christgau of The Village Voice. In more recent years, it has been rated highly by AllMusic, sputnikmusic, and Blurt Online.

R.E.M. has cited Time Fades Away as a source of inspiration for New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

On December 31, 2013, Widespread Panic played the following three songs from Time Fades Away: "Journey Through The Past", "Don't Be Denied", and "Time Fades Away" at a concert in Atlanta.

Young's appraisal

Neil Young commented on Time Fades Away in the original, unreleased liner notes for his 1977 triple-album compilation Decade:

Time Fades Away. No songs from this album are included here. It was recorded on my biggest tour ever, 65 [sic] shows in 90 days. Money hassles among everyone concerned ruined this tour and record for me but I released it anyway so you folks could see what could happen if you lose it for a while. I was becoming more interested in an audio verite approach than satisfying the public demands for a repetition of Harvest.

In 1987, Young told an interviewer that Time Fades Away was "the worst record I ever made – but as a documentary of what was happening to me, it was a great record. I was onstage and I was playing all these songs that nobody had heard before, recording them, and I didn't have the right band. It was just an uncomfortable tour. I felt like a product, and I had this band of all-star musicians that couldn't even look at each other."

Young has rarely played songs from Time Fades Away live. "Don't Be Denied" was included in the 1974 CSN&Y tour. In July 2008, he performed the record's title track at a concert in Oberhausen, Germany.

Aborted compact disc reissue and Time Fades Away II

Along with the soundtrack to Journey Through the Past, Time Fades Away remains the only officially released Neil Young album unavailable on compact disc. Young has often cited his unfavorable memories of the tour as the main reason that the record has not been reissued. There is a movement among Young's fans to release the album.

In the mid-1990s, plans were made to release the album on CD using the HDCD encoding; several test pressings were made, and a release date of November 7, 1995 was announced. However, the CD release was shelved for unknown reasons. In early 2007, Young's management reiterated that there were no plans to release the album on CD. Pristine vinyl copies are still available in used stores and on eBay, often with the fold-out liner notes still intact; some CDs from the 1995 test pressings exist, and copies of these CDs are circulated as bootlegs. Additionally, some fans have made CDs from the more readily available vinyl copies.

In October 2009, Young told Guitar World that a disc titled Time Fades Away II will be included in the second volume of the Archives box set series, noting: "It's interesting because [Time Fades Away II] has a different drummer than what was on that album. Kenny Buttrey was in there for the first half, and Johnny Barbata came in for the second. It's a completely different thing, with completely different songs."

In 2014, Young released a limited edition box set of vinyl records that includes the original Time Fades Away along with On the Beach, Tonight's the Night, and Zuma. In December of that year, Young's first 14 albums, including Time Fades Away, were released as high-resolution downloads via the Pono digital music service and Qobuz.

Track listing

All songs written by Neil Young.

Personnel

† Neil Young credited as Joe Yankee