CRAZY HORSE - S/T 1971

Members of this band had already released an album in 1968 as The Rockets, and had appeared on record twice with Young as Crazy Horse.

The core trio from the Rockets, Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot, and Ralph Molina, provided instrumental backing for Young's 1969 album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and performed on some songs from Young's 1970 album After the Gold Rush. During sessions for the latter, they met guitar prodigy Nils Lofgren, and producer/keyboardist Jack Nitzsche of Phil Spector's Wrecking Crew and Rolling Stones fame, also on hand in supportive roles. They meshed, and Crazy Horse expanded into a quartet to back up Young for a short tour in early 1970, and then into a quintet with Lofgren for this album, picking up a contract with Reprise Records after the exposure garnered from Gold Rush.

For the recording of this album in the fall of 1970, they recruited fretboard virtuoso Ry Cooder, who had worked previously with Nitzsche on sessions for the Stones, adding his talents to three tracks. The album contains strong compositions from four principal writers, the fourth being Young, the band covering his "Dance Dance Dance," which had yet to see an official version by Young himself. Songwriter Randy Newman had already performed "Gone Dead Train" on the soundtrack for the 1970 cult film Performance by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, the Lofgren-penned "Beggar's Day" was covered by Scottish rock band Nazareth on their 1975 best-selling album Hair of the Dog, and a live version of "Downtown," by Whitten and Young, would appear on Young's Tonight's the Night album of 1975. On Neil Young's 2007 vault release Live At the Fillmore East 1970, the song is credited to Whitten alone. The spirit of Whitten hovered over the tour of the same name from 1973, the remaining quartet from this album backing Young on a notoriously bleak round of concerts in the wake of Whitten's death from an overdose in late 1972.

A pity, for Whitten's songs on this album indicated a promising talent. In particular, the ballad "I Don't Want to Talk About It" received a number of cover versions from a variety of artists, among them Rita Coolidge, Everything But the Girl on their Idlewild album of 1988, and Rod Stewart, who had a big hit with the song in the U.K., taken from his 1975 album Atlantic Crossing.

The album was re-released for compact disc on March 22, 1994, as part of the Warner Brothers archive series, produced for compact disc by Lee Herschberg, the engineer on the first pop album recorded completely in the digital medium, Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop from 1979. Crazy Horse appeared in its entirety as part of Rhino Handmade's Scratchy compilation from 2005, which also included outtakes from the sessions for this album. That compilation is no longer in print.

Tracks :


1. "Gone Dead Train" (Nitzsche, Titelman) – 4:06
2. "Dance Dance Dance" (Neil Young) – 2:10
3. "Look at All the Things" (Whitten) – 3:13
4. "Beggar's Day" (Lofgren) – 4:28
5. "I Don't Want to Talk About It" (Whitten) – 5:18
6. "Downtown" (Whitten, Young) – 3:14
7. "Carolay" (Nitzsche, Titelman) – 2:52
8. "Dirty, Dirty" (Whitten) – 3:31
9. "Nobody" (Lofgren) – 2:35
10. "I'll Get By" (Whitten) – 3:08
11. "Crow Jane Lady" (Nitzsche) – 4:24

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