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Neil Young - Roxy: Tonight's the Night Live (Reprise, 2018)

Another welcome entry in the Neil Young Archive series - back when the Roxy in LA first opened in 1973 they asked Neil Young and his band the Santa Monica Flyers to perform. They were fresh of rehearsing and recording for Tonight's the Night and that material makes up the bulk of this album - excluding, understandably as it was included on TTN more as tribute to the recently-deceased Danny Whitten, "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown" and "Borrowed Tune", one of my favorites but a piano ballad that would've been out of step with the rest of the material here. "Lookout Joe" is also absent (it was performed by the Stray Gators on TTN) but "Walk On" from On the Beach closes the set. Interspersed throughout the set are the banter ("raps") that have become signature to the live entries in the Archive series. The sound quality here is pristine, and Young & Co. are in a jovial mood from the get-go - something of a countenance to the general mood of TTN which is quite the opposite. The band sounds impeccably tight and downright rollicking on these tracks. There isn't too much deviation from the versions on TTN - as they were new songs at the time the band obviously aren't already experimenting with them - so this album doesn't pull back much of a shroud on any hitherto unseen corners of the vast Young archives (lowercase 'a') - but it's still a good solid live record.

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