Nuggets

On Wednesday night, The Gotham Gal and I went to see Shining City at the Manhattan Theater Club. It's a wonderful play and features a commanding broadway debut from Oliver Platt. The soundtrack to the play is old Neil Young songs. As the final curtain call ended, a song came on that I haven't heard in years - Comes A Time.

There was a time, back in college, where my friend and roomate Pete would play Comes A TIme every day. So yesterday morning I put on Comes A Time and went back 25 years.

Comes A Time sits betwen Decade and Rust Never Sleeps in Neil's discography and is often overlooked. But it's a wondferful record. The kind of record that sets a mood from the start and never loses it.

If you want some of that mood or want to go back 25 years, give it a listen.

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Comments

[cooper]

I am such a sap, but seeing that album cover (with that young, awesome pic of Neil Young) almost brought tears to my eyes. I know, ridiculous. But, I completely forgot about that record, even though once it was one of my all time favorites. Seeing it brought up lots of memories of long lost friends' basements, games of quarters (etc.) and deep, ponderous thoughts about saving the world and mysteries of the universe and who we were going to "grow up" to be.

OK too deep for a friday morning, but thanks for the trip down memory lane nonetheless.

[JayR]

My all-time favorite Neil Young album, and certainly the one I relate to most vividly. Neil was probably the most important musician during my teenage years. My mother had passed away late in 1976, and as things got better, I really got into music (or maybe as I got into music, things got better - not sure which). And at that time, I immersed myself in Neil Young more than anyone else - particularly Decade, Best of the Buffalo Springfield and American Stars and Bars. Every night of the summer of 1978, when I was at a summer school program at Harvard (I knew it was as close as I'd ever get to actually going there), my roommate and I listened to the same bootleg tape of a 1970 Neil Young acoustic concert from Carnegie Hall (if anyone has a copy of that tape, please contact me. I'll pay dearly). When I got home that summer, my drivers license had come in the mail, which meant that I could drive my dad's '73 Olds 98 (brown, with a tan vinyl roof) to Ticketmaster at the crack of dawn to buy tickets to see Neil and Crazy Horse at Nassau Coliseum on the Rust Never Sleeps tour (still the loudest show I have ever been to). That's when Comes a Time came out, and I don't think I was ever more excited for an album to come out, maybe because I had played all the other stuff to death.

The album kind of went away quickly. Even though Neil was touring when it came out, it didn't seem he was promoting the album. He only played a couple of songs from it - he was really setting up Rust Never Sleeps, which I guess made a lot of people forget about Comes a Time.

I'm not sure where it ranks among Neil's works artistically, but I love that record and, like you, every time I hear it, I go right back to 1978.