Neil Young will return in March with his new studio album A Letter Home, but what are fans to do until then? As Slate points out, a crowd-sourced concert film of Young’s recent stint at New York’s Carnegie Hall has made its way online.
Using video captured by four different fans and audio recorded with mics set up in the mezzanine level, Tony Adams pieced together footage of Young’s January 7th performance into a 2-hour concert film. The setlist stretched 30 songs and included Young solo classics such as “Heart of Gold” and “Harvest Moon”, Buffalo Springfield songs, and covers of Phil Ochs and Bert Jansch, which could end up finding their way onto his upcoming album.
The Wall Street Journal caught up with Adams, who revealed more details about the project:
On Tuesday, Mr. Adams uploaded to YouTube a video of the entire two-hour show, which he had stitched together from footage captured by fellow concertgoers seated around the theater. Most of the video was shot by Mr. Adams, a video producer from Williamsburg, Mass., on a compact Canon camera perched on the railing in front of his $150 mezzanine seat (102, Row AA). All the videos were edited to match a single audio recording made at the concert, which Mr. Adams downloaded from an anonymous source on an online-sharing site…
AdvertisementAt home, he found fan-made videos of songs he was missing or wanted to supplement, then sent the users messages through YouTube asking their permission to borrow them. Then he wove the various clips into his own with editing software, making do with some glitches. During an anecdote by Mr. Young about a guitar with a bullet hole in it, the image is blurry and an on-screen message reads, “Stay tuned…video will return shortly.”
It’s worth noting that Young did not approve the recording and has previously chastized bootleg as “incredibly rude toward both the audience and the artist.” However, Adams told The Wall Street Journal that he has no plans to profit off the film. Rather, he put it together for the fans who could not attend Young’s sold-out Carnegie Hall residency, which is already being hearlded as featuring some of his greatest performances.
