If you were going to take just one of Young's gajillion live albums to a desert island, this would be a good pick, since the newly unearthed '73 show encompasses his loud, acoustic and country-rock sides.

If you didn’t know better, you might imagine that Neil Young was making a political statement by choosing now as the time to release “Tuscaloosa,” a live album recorded at the University of Alabama in 1973, which includes as one of its fiery highlights “Alabama,” a sort of sequel to “Southern Man” that helped further piss off Lynyrd Skynyrd back in the day. You do know better, of course, since this archival offering was announced months before the state in question became the flashpoint for another rights debate. But you have to offer some props for the chutzpah on a guy who could write a number that condemnatory and reconciliatory about the area’s recent civil rights history and then go sing it in the belly of the beast, finding out that there was at least an arena’s worth of Southern men and women who did need him around anyhow.
Related Stories

Despite ‘Joker’ Folly and ‘The Penguin’ Success, DC Studios Still Untested

Kamala Harris Cracks Open a Miller High Life With Stephen Colbert on 'The Late Show'
If you’ve been a fellow traveler of Young’s or Bob Dylan’s for any length of time, one of the pleasures of having lived into the 2010s is how dedicated both of rock’s great surviving crypto-loner-legends are to providing their fans with massive musical data dumps. On the same June 7 date that sees Dylan issuing a 14-CD set from his 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Young is offering the rather more affordable 53-minute “Tuscaloosa” — the modesty of which must be seen as relative, since this is a guy who did recently start up a subscription site for his entire archive, and who seems to issue a new live recording from his vault every 20 minutes these days. Having established that there’s no shortage of live Neil in the world, though, there’s something special about “Tuscaloosa.” It’s the singular concert set that comes closest to providing a one-stop sampler of his acoustic, electric and country-rocking-in-between sides — which is to say, the Young live album that might best serve you on a desert island, or on that spaceship evacuating humanity to the cosmos in “After the Gold Rush.” (In space, no one can hear you stream the complete Neil Young Archives, right?)
Popular on Variety
“Tuscaloosa” isn’t even a complete rendering of that Feb. 5, 1973, show; the soundboard recorder apparently wasn’t turned on at the beginning and end, and Neil left out a couple other numbers in the middle because, well, he’s Neil. But the 11 songs that are here feel like a full journey through the potpourri of his classic styles — two solo acoustic songs, followed by four gentle full-band ones in the style of the then recently released “Harvest,” capped by five fully electric ragers. You could argue that this can’t really be a quintessential Young live album if Crazy Horse isn’t the band backing him in all its ragged glory. But if you want the ensemble that can get at his pastoral side as well as capture at least some of Crazy Horse’s full pyro, you’re looking at the long-gone Stray Gators, who not only made 1972’s “Harvest” with him (the source of four songs here) but provided a core lineup on the heavier-hitting “Time Fades Away” and “Tonight’s the Night,” both of which were previewed with two songs apiece for the unsuspecting Tuscaloosa audience. The latter albums were part of what Young called his “ditch” period, which, in getting darker and louder, were intended to get him out of a rut he feared might creep in after having struck gold with “Old Man” and “Heart of Gold.” The Gators marked a critical nexus point between musical eras, when Young was at the peak of his melodic talents, with tastes of the grunge to come.
It’s especially great to hear him with Ben Keith as a guitar foil — even if the guitar is mostly countrified pedal steel, with enough slide guitar in “Lookout Joe” to suggest an Allman-esque Southern-rock twin-lead road not really taken.
The acoustic-leaning classics that appear in the early part of the record have been harvested enough that it’s easy to undervalue their reappearance here. There’s enough of a comfort food factor to seemingly easygoing songs like “Here We Are in the Years” and “Out on the Weekend” that you need the increased volume and borderline-pitchy edge Young puts into his singing to remind you of how uneasy the undercurrents were in his get-back-to-the-land material, hippies in dystopia being a recurring theme in his output from 1969 to 2019. But it’s the lesser-revived songs in the set’s rocking second half that make “Tuscaloosa” an easy buy. The returning-Vietnam-vet song “Lookout Joe” has just enough cheer in its soloing to make the “old times were good times” refrain sound like a pick-me-up, not a bummer. “Time Fades Away” is one of the faster rave-ups in Young’s catalog, and “New Mama,” a song he wrote for Carrie Snodgress after the birth of their son, provides an actual ray of aggressive sunshine. That all these live cuts outshine their studio counterparts is a bonus.
But you come to Neil Young first and foremost for his noisily elegiac songs — don’t you? — and the album-closing “Don’t Be Denied” is an important reclamation of one of his most overlooked tunes. Norah Jones has made it her job in recent years to revive this one, rewriting the lyrics to make it about her own childhood and estranged father, versus Young’s absentee dad. But to hear Young sing it here, as he too rarely has since 1973, you realize it’s one of his core autobiographical songs, tracing the sublimation of early family traumas into art, and how that bittersweetly becomes the stuff of commerce — and it also has one of the most beautiful guitar riffs he ever came up with. The reason it ends “Tuscaloosa” may be that it’s where the tape ran out. But really, it’s a grand enough statement of ambivalent purpose to end any Neil Young show. Great deep tracks, like their more famous singers, can’t be denied … so here’s to keeping the dump coming.
Neil Young & Stray Gators
“Tuscaloosa”
Reprise Records
Read More About:
Jump to CommentsMore from Variety
Grammy Nominations Predictions: Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan and Taylor Swift Will Vie in Top Categories
Hollywood’s Next Superhero: Purpose-Led Branding
Billie Eilish and Finneas Endorse Kamala Harris for President Because ‘We Can’t Let Extremists Control Our Lives, Our Freedoms and Our Future’
Alex Wolff Opens Up About Channeling Leonard Cohen, Going Aggro for Frat Drama ‘The Line’ and Touring With BFF Billie Eilish
What Film Fund From AI Startup Runway Means for Content’s Future
Most Popular
Inside the 'Joker: Folie à Deux' Debacle: Todd Phillips ‘Wanted Nothing to Do’ With DC on the $200 Million Misfire
‘Kaos’ Canceled After One Season at Netflix
‘Menendez Brothers’ Netflix Doc Reveals Erik’s Drawings of His Abuse and Lyle Saying ‘I Would Much Rather Lose the Murder Trial Than Talk About Our…
Kathy Bates Won an Oscar and Her Mom Told Her: ‘You Didn't Discover the Cure for Cancer,’ So ‘I Don't Know What All the Excitement Is About…
Saoirse Ronan Says Losing Luna Lovegood Role in ‘Harry Potter’ Has ‘Stayed With Me Over the Years’: ‘I Was Too Young’ and ‘Knew I Wasn't Going to Get…
‘Joker 2’ Director Says Arthur Fleck Was Never Joker: ‘He's an Unwitting Icon’ and Joker Is ‘This Idea That Gotham People Put on Him…
‘Joker 2’ Axed Scene of Lady Gaga’s Lee Kissing a Woman at the Courthouse Because ‘It Had Dialogue in It’ and ‘Got in the Way’ of a Music…
Andrew Garfield Says Sex Scene With Florence Pugh in ‘We Live in Time’ Went a ‘Little Bit Further’ Than Intended: ‘We Never Heard Cut…
‘Skyfall’ Director Sam Mendes Says James Bond Studio Prefers Filmmakers ‘Who Are More Controllable’: ‘I Would Doubt’ I’d…
Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried to Star in ‘The Housemaid’ Adaptation From Director Paul Feig, Lionsgate
Must Read
- Film
COVER | Sebastian Stan Tells All: Becoming Donald Trump and Starring in 2024’s Most Controversial Movie
By Andrew Wallenstein 3 weeks
- TV
Menendez Family Slams Netflix’s ‘Monsters’ as ‘Grotesque’ and ‘Riddled With Mistruths’: ‘The Character Assassination of Erik and Lyke Is Repulsive…
- TV
‘Yellowstone’ Season 5 Part 2 to Air on CBS After Paramount Network Debut
- TV
50 Cent Sets Diddy Abuse Allegations Docuseries at Netflix: ‘It’s a Complex Narrative Spanning Decades’ (EXCLUSIVE)
- Shopping
‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Sets Digital and Blu-ray/DVD Release Dates
Sign Up for Variety Newsletters
By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy.We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. // This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Variety Confidential
ncG1vNJzZmiukae2psDYZ5qopV9nfXKFjqasrKGTZLumw9JopZ6hnGLGsMHNoGStraOYrq27zqyYZpmcl8KuedGeraKdp2J%2Bc3ySa2pua2ZufA%3D%3D