Ragged Glory Review

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(More customer reviews)With Neil Young's 1989 solo effort Freedom, I like many others was warming up to his music again, after the numerous and sometimes alienating stylistic changes he was making in the 1980's. On Freedom, I tended to favor the harder cuts on the album such as "Don't Cry" "Rocking In The Free World" his driving cover of "On Broadway". At the same time I was heavily listening to some of his work with Crazy Horse; Live Rust and Rust Never Sleeps. All though this I was thinking, "Why doesn't he just make another kick-a**, all electric album from beginning to end?" "And at the same time why not just get back together With Crazy Horse?"
Well less than a year later in 1990, both prayers were answered. Neil Young finally reunited With Crazy horse for Ragged Glory. And the music matched my expectations and anticipation. I was totally blown away with their resulting effort. Raw, honest, intense and most importantly, excellent songs. Truckloads of guitars and solos. Short, terse rockers are mixed with their trademark eight to ten minute jams and loads of feedback in the right places. Most importantly this album matches all of his 70's work, with and without Crazy Horse.
Ragged Glory is also the essential album to listen to on a long country drive, disturbing the cattle and the small towns on the way! The leadoff track on the CD "Country Home" is obviously well-suited for the aforementioned type of drive. "White Line" has an excellent driving riff and is a very concise song, almost ending prematurely, kind of like Stone Temple Pilots "Interstate Love Song" four years later.

"F*!#in' UP" is my favorite track on Ragged Glory. It is the most aggressive song on the album lyrically and musically. It's an understatement, but this song kicks serious a**. The title itself prevented it from major airplay, but changing or editing that would be a grave injustice. "Over And Over" has a killer melody, a great chorus and the guitars keep on rocking.
"Love to Burn" is a ten-minute long opus that seriously rocks. It will hold your attention the entire duration and at the same time may cause to you look deep inside yourself on what you want and need out of love and out of life.
The bouncy "Farmer John" snaps you out of that, I think of a comely, natural, well built county girl almost every time I listen to it. "Mansion on the Hill" is the track that garnered the most radio airplay at the time. The second ten-minute opus is "Love And Only Love".
The only downer is "Mother Earth" I respect the message Neil is trying to make with this track, but it is completely subpar and totally out of place on the CD, unfortunately, it practically rescues the CD from near perfection. It is a totally expendible track.
This album may have prepared me somewhat for 1991-92 grunge explosion. I was beginning to gravitate towards rawer, grungier rock at the time, not to replace the more polished hard rock or progressive rock that I was listening to but to compliment it. While Neil Young's "Godfather Of Grunge" title is obvious and a little overused now, Ragged Glory helped me welcome the sounds of Nirvana, Soundgarden & Pearl Jam with open arms.


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No Description Available.Genre: Popular MusicMedia Format: Compact DiskRating: Release Date: 11-SEP-1990

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Live Rust Review

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(More customer reviews)Imagine, if you will, that Capitol Records chose years ago to put out the Beatles' "White Album" on compact disk when the format was in its infancy, and for whatever reason decided not to invest the funds to put out a double CD, instead choosing to cram the entire thing onto one CD, and advertising it as a "specially low-priced single disk." But in doing so, they found that the whole thing wouldn't fit onto a standard disk, so they hacked about a minute or so out of "Revolution #9" (thinking nobody would notice), eliminated or shortened the silence between songs (if any), and nickel-and-diming the album until it fit just under the time limitations of a single disk. Then pretend that Beatles fans were too blinded by their fanaticism for the album to objectively criticize, let alone realize, the absolute horror of this corporate hatchet job. If this fictitious story sounds too weird for you, then now you know how I feel seeing five-star review after review here, when Warner-Reprise has performed the ultimate sin right under all our noses.
I only recently started amassing a CD collection of Neil, preferring to stick to the vinyl. I figured there will eventually be a remaster job of these albums, although with Neil you never know, and I could wait until then. But I broke down and went ahead and bought "Live Rust" on CD, which is one of my absolute top 10 favorite albums of all time. Knowing the guitar majesty of "Cortez the Killer" on this album better than I know my own date of birth, and having heard it countless times note-for-note, I immediately fast-forwarded to that track and waited for my world to be sonically blown to bits by the digital clarity of the CD, which happened indeed. For about four minutes.
And then I stopped cold. I stared out the window. I was frozen, playing air guitar to notes that were no longer coming out of the speaker, singing guitar parts in my head that weren't happening. "Am I getting that progressed into Alzheimer's already?" I thought, or is this some sort of a defective joke? Well, my Neil fan faithful, I'm here to tell you: the actual track of "Cortez" is approximately a minute and a half shorter than not only the vinyl version, but a minute and a half shorter than THE TIME GUARANTEED TO ME ON THE CD INSERT by good ol' Warner-Reprise. And where did this extra 90 seconds come from? well, it was right there in the LEAD GUITAR parts of the song, right prior to the "hate was just a legend" lyric. They have AXED a huge section of Neil's guitar lead, digitized it out to save space, and done God-knows-what to the rest of the album to give us a low, low price.
I frantically fast-forwarded the track to the end and compared the ending times on my CD player to the one on the CD cover. I was right. And I was disgusted. Then I started REALLY losing it: who was responsible for this? And why in the living name of God could any self-respecting Neil fan put up with the absolute desecration of one of the greatest recorded versions of one of his most jaw-droppingly gnarly songs?
I for one took the CD back. It took me a while to explain to the clerk why, but he chalked it up to a bad mistake on WB's part. Personally, I think their strange urgency in reissuing four of his least-selling albums "remastered with the original cover art" on CD is unusually nice, but I would much rather have a full-blown remastered version of "Live Rust" than anything else in his catalog. Especially now that I know about this hatchet job that sits on the shelf indefinitely, with no plans to improve on it. And Reprise, while you're at the task of putting that 90 seconds of guitar bliss back into "Cortez" that you so thoughtfully took out, go ahead and put out some other songs from that tour that weren't on the original CD to restore my faith in corporate America, because this is more of a disgrace than Watergate, "read my lips", and Monica's dress put together. Get the President on the horn.

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Japanese reissue pressing features 16 tracks. Reprise. 2005.--This text refers to an alternate Audio CD edition.

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