Michael Fremer

The Neil Young master tapes for this second box set were sitting in Chris Bellman's mastering suite last winter when I visited and interviewed Bernie Grundman about the Blue Note reissues, some of which were originally digitized at BGM Mastering and some of which were cut to lacquer by Chris.

"Don't want my MP3," Neil Young protests on side two's "Drifting Back (Part 2)".

Young's lifelong obsession with sound quality is well known and of course welcomed around here. He was one of the first musicians to express serious reservations about digital recording and playback. Back in 1993 he appeared on an MTV News piece along with Peter Gabriel and me too. You can watch it here. "We've lost the sound" Neil laments—and that was before the scourge of MP3.

Shakey Pictures Records and Reprise Records announced today The Neil Young Official Bootleg Series, which will commence with an official release of Neil's legendary December 4th, 1970 Carnegie Hall debut show available now for pre-order at The Greedy Hand Store at Neil Young Archives. A bootlegged version of the later midnight show helped make the evening among Neil's most fabled appearances, but according to the press release the earlier show, not captured by bootleggers, was the better one.

According to U.K. music paper NME, Neil Young claimed during a recent interview on Frame, a California radio show, that vinyl is "nothing but a fashion statement."