In the final days of 2025, the Neil Young Archives team quietly dropped a recording of Neil Young and Crazy Horse‘s Feb. 25, 1970, show at Music Hall in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a “Winter Solstice” gift to the fan community. The tape has circulated for years as a cherished bootleg sourced from the soundboard, but it’s never sounded quite this pristine.
It’s a remarkable 16-song set that includes the debut of “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” which was paired into a medley with “The Old Laughing Lady,” the first performance of “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” and Young’s first known live rendition of Joe London’s “It Might Have Been,” which he eventually recorded for Oceanside/Countryside.
More importantly, this is the very first time that one of his shows with Crazy Horse was captured on tape. They played clubs all across North America in 1969 to promote Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, but this was before Young joined Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and became a household name. Nearly every venue in 1969 promoted him as a former member of Buffalo Springfield, and the good people at the Warehouse in Providence, Rhode Island, billed him as “Mell Young of the Buffalo Springfield.” These were supposedly incredible nights where he forged a bond with Crazy Horse that lasts to this day, but not a second of it was recorded, even on a hissy bootleg.
Young’s life forever changed that summer when Crosby, Stills, and Nash became Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Suddenly, he was playing to capacity crowds at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles and the Fillmore in New York City, as opposed to whoever showed up at La Cave in Cleveland to check out the new band by the Buffalo Springfield guy.
CSNY continued to tour heavily in 1970, but they took a brief break at the start of the year that allowed Young to head back out with Crazy Horse and hit much larger venues than their last go-round. The tour began in Cincinnati, and this time tape was rolling straight from the soundboard. Now that Young had resources and a bit of money, he’d never again allow a tour to simply vanish into the ether like the 1969 Crazy Horse run. (One exception is the famously debauched 1973 Tonight’s the Night UK run, but bootleggers picked up that slack.)The show is worth hearing in its entirety, but “Down by the River” is especially feral and lasts nearly 20 minutes. “Cinnamon Girl” is another must-hear since original Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten is very high in the vocal and guitar mix. Young has played this song with countless other guitar players over the decades, but nobody does it like Whitten.
(In Young’s 2012 memoir Waging Heavy Peace, he expresses regret about mixing down Whitten’s part on the original “Cinnamon Girl” recording. “He was singing the high part, and it came through big time,” he wrote. “I changed it so I sang the high part and put that out. That was a big mistake. I fucked up. I didn’t know who Danny was. He was better than me. I didn’t see it.”)
The Cincinnati show ends with “Cinnamon Girl,” but the crowd refuses to leave and aggressively screams for more. “All I can tell you,” says an unidentified voice onstage. “Far out…Look, wait a minute, please. All I can tell you is that if we do more, we’re risking a chance at not doing it again since contracts are contracts. The contract was for 11:00 pm and the cat has been very lenient in that he’s let us go until now. All I can tell you is that as sure as I’m standing here, if we go more, then we won’t be able to do it again. And as sure as I’m standing here, we’ll do it again.” (According to a recap from a local paper, the show went 90 minutes later than Young was contracted to play.)
This was clearly an audience satisfied with the show, but the reviews were oddly negative. “Refusing to do many of the requests which were shouted from the crowd, [Young] let his egotistical personality shine through by making the crowd wait until he fumbled about with words and loose chords,” wrote Beth Hedger in the University of Kentucky student newspaper The Kentucky Kernel, under the headline “Young Disappoints Fans.” “He carried the bad habit over when Crazy Horse came out. Performing really worthwhile songs like ‘Down by the River’ and ‘Cinnamon Girl,’ he and Crazy Horse pleased the crowd at last. After they left the stage, the audience cheered for more. Finally the management mumbled something about their contact and said they might never come back to Cincinnati. After the lousy show Wednesday, who wants them?”
The following month, Young and Crazy Horse played a series of legendary shows at the Fillmore East with the Steve Miller Blues Band and the Miles Davis Quintet. The tape was officially released in 2006, but it’s a compilation from four different gigs, the acoustic set was totally cut, and “Cinnamon Girl” was also removed for some reason. That left a mere six tracks, less than half the show. To get a much better sense of what a full Neil Young and Crazy Horse show sounded like in the Danny Whitten era, listen to the Cincinnati tape. At some point, it deserves an official release alongside the complete Fillmore recordings.
Aaron Idelson
