Neil Young - Phoenix Festival
Long Marston, Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK
July 19, 1996
Liberated Bootleg from:
Long Marston, Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK
July 19, 1996
Liberated Bootleg from:
FM Source @320
**Original Notes**
Blistering heat. Expensive lager. Drivers inching their cars up dirt tracks toward men with walkie-talkies who will tell them that they're at the wrong entrance. Ah, the festival experience! At the Phoenix Festival, held near Stratford-upon-Avon last weekend, you sometimes felt that it couldn't have got worse if Margherite Pracatan had been wheeled on as a special guest. And then she was. She tickled her keyboard and rolled her "r"s. She opened with "I Will Survive". You didn't think you would.
The previous night, it had been up to Neil Young and Crazy Horse to give us something to remember about the Phoenix other than the smell of the toilets. And they managed it, largely by doing what the world at large is strongly urged to do, and giving the songs from their witless new album Broken Arrow a wide berth.
Friday was singalongaNeil night, a greatest hits selection which proved that familiarity need not be synonymous with predictability. Young tore at the songs like he was ripping the head off a wildebeest with his bare hands; his playing was savage and relentless, and you found his absorption infectious (when he got caught up in "Like a Hurricane", he had the blissfully distant look of a man who should be eating pureed food with plastic cutlery in a day-room somewhere).
He had his flashes of introspection, too, or in current parlance, his unplugged moments, when he took a breather, took up an acoustic guitar for "The Needle and the Damage Done", and took your breath away. You're still inclined to question the validity of any guitar solo which lasts longer than a trip to the beer tent and back. But Young lit up the sky, and the weekend, with something curiously absent from most of the festival's other acts: passion. And he didn't need to launch fireworks into the Stratford sky to do it.
Phoenix Festival UK Part 1
01. My My Hey hey
02. Cinnamon Girl
03. Heart of Gold
04. Like a Hurricane (edited)
05. Rockin in the Free World
{Farm Aid August '96}
06. My My Hey Hey
07. Helpless (w/ David Crosby)
08. Pocahontas
Phoenix Festival UK Part 2
09. Big Time
10. Sedan delivery
11. Music Arcade
12. Like a Hurricane (uncut--18+ minutes!)
