Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
![UR013: "The Young-plugged Saga, Part Two" w/ Jon Vesey (Neil Young & MTV Unplugged) [1990, 1992, 1993] image](https://media.zencastr.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=54,quality=85/image-files/66ea0b235fcf51d2c9a0b7cd/43cbefc3-777c-4d93-9915-92abd82876d2.jpg)
UR013: "The Young-plugged Saga, Part Two" w/ Jon Vesey (Neil Young & MTV Unplugged) [1990, 1992, 1993]
78 Plays24 days ago
We continue pulling back the curtain on “The Young-Plugged Saga” to discuss Neil Young’s three appearances on MTV Unplugged – a branded concert video in 1990, his unaired episode in 1992, and his broadcast/album in 1993. Part Two features an interview with MTV Unplugged editor Jon Vesey.
If you dig the show, want to share your own Unplugged memories, ask a question, request a show topic, or connect with the pod for any reason, there are a couple ways you can get in touch:
- You can email me at unpluggedrevisited@gmail.com,
- You can reach out on Bluesky at @willhodge.bsky.social,
- You can leave a voicemail (that’ll maybe get played on the show) by dialing 234-REVISIT (234-738-4748)
Recommended![UR014: Mark Bryan (Hootie and the Blowfish) [1996 MTV Unplugged] image](https://media.zencastr.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=112,quality=85/image-files/66ea0b235fcf51d2c9a0b7cd/43cbefc3-777c-4d93-9915-92abd82876d2.jpg)
Transcript
Introduction and Neil Young Focus
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Unplugged. Unplugged. Unplugged. Welcome to Unplugged. Unplugged. Unplugged.
00:00:11
Speaker
Unplugged. Revisited. Greetings and salutations. Welcome back to Unplugged Revisited, the podcast that celebrates, critiques, and dives deep into the last three and a half decades of MTB Unplugged.
00:00:23
Speaker
I'm your host, music journalist, pop culture anthropologist, and Unplugged obsessive, Will Hodge. I'd like to welcome you all to part two of the Unplugged saga, my ongoing deep dive into the twisting, turning, often mythologized and less often accurate story behind Neil Young's three appearances on MTV Unplugged.
Neil Young's Unplugged Appearances Overview
00:00:42
Speaker
His anomalous early season one concert video masquerading as an Unplugged from 1990, his fabled and foibled unaired episode from 92, and his celebrated third times a charm broadcast and album from 93. In the world, only strength doesn't mean nothing.
00:01:08
Speaker
If by chance this is your first episode and you haven't yet listened to part one from a couple weeks ago, well, technically that's okay. I didn't break half the story up over each episode. This is not a continuation as much as an amplification.
00:01:21
Speaker
But I do encourage you to check out part one because you'll get all up to speed on the intersection between where Neil was at in his career and where Unplugged was at in its run each of the three times they crossed paths.
00:01:33
Speaker
You'll also get my interview with longtime Unplugged producer, director, showrunner, and flamekeeper Alex Coletti, who shepherded the program throughout its entire culture-impacting 90s run and gave us some incredible behind-the-scenes stories.
00:01:46
Speaker
Plus, you'll get a few bonus Neil Young cover songs performed by other artists during their Unplugged episodes, including Roxette, Joe
Vinyl Giveaway and Contest Details
00:01:54
Speaker
Walsh, and Dr. John, and Queensryche.
00:01:56
Speaker
So, if you want us to briefly pause things right here so you can go back and catch up on part one before heading into part two with us today, well, we'll be more than happy to wait on you.
00:02:11
Speaker
Okay, welcome back. On to part two we go. Come on Pete, let's keep rocking in the free world. For today's Young Plugged Saga Part 2 rejoinder, I'm going to follow a similar flow as the last episode.
00:02:22
Speaker
I'll first be digging into the nuts and bolts specifics of Neil's three unplugged episodes, the set list, locations, players, show vibes, all of that. Then I'll be interviewing John Vesey, who edited almost 50 unplugged episodes during its 90s heyday, including both Neil's unaired 92 performance and also his 93 broadcasts.
00:02:42
Speaker
Plus, I'll be playing even more Neil covers from other artists' episodes of Unplugged. But before we fully immerse ourselves into part two of the Wild and Wooly Young Plug saga, let me take care of a couple quick announcements.
00:02:55
Speaker
Announcement one. If you listened to the last episode or follow my socials, you know that we're partnering with the fine folks over at Killphonic to run a vinyl giveaway contest for a limited edition Daisy White vinyl pressing of the forthcoming tribute record Heart of Gold, The Songs of Neil Young, Volume 1, featuring some truly awesome unplugged alumni like Fiona Apple, Courtney Barnett, Brandi Carlile, Mumford & Sons, and Eddie Vedder, which you can sample right here doing Neil's 1972 classic The Needle and the Damage Done.
00:03:26
Speaker
I caught you knocking on my cellar door. love you, baby. Can I have some more? Oh, damn it's fun.
00:03:39
Speaker
All you have to do to enter the contest is send me an email, unpluggedrevisited at gmail.com, telling me one thing you like about Neil Young's Unplugged, your favorite song, a memory of watching it, anything.
00:03:51
Speaker
And make sure to put the phrase heart of gold vinyl giveaway in the subject line. As a bonus, if you want to increase your odds of winning, you can also rate and review the podcast wherever you're streaming it and attach a screenshot of that to your email.
00:04:04
Speaker
That will double your chances by putting your name in the pot twice. The Heart of Gold Tribute Record is being released on April 25th, and if you'd like to make sure you get a copy before it sells out, you can still pre-order it on their site right now at store.killphonicrights.com.
Kurt Cobain Exhibit and UK Visit
00:04:20
Speaker
Announcement 2 I got a really interesting press release this week that London's Royal College of Music is putting on an extremely cool looking exhibit this summer called Kurt Cobain Unplugged, which is going to be anchored around Kurt's equally iconic Martin D-18E acoustic guitar and his famous olive green mohair cardigan, two items that have been absolutely perma-seared into the collective pop cultural consciousness thanks to the massive impact of Nirvana's legendary Unplugged episode and album.
00:04:58
Speaker
Being a Nirvana fan since I was like 11, I was so excited to see that this is happening. The exhibit is a pretty huge deal as it will not only be the first time Kurt's unplugged guitar will be on display in the UK, but it's also the first time ever that his guitar and sweater will be displayed together. The exhibit is being co-curated by the Royal College of Music's Gabriele Rossi-Rognani and renowned music journalist Alan DiPerna, whose work you may have read in places like Rolling Stone and Billboard. or if like me you were a teenager learning to play guitar in the 90s, you probably read a couple dozen or so of his pieces in the hallowed pages of Guitar World magazine.
00:05:35
Speaker
Kurt Cobain Unplugged will be running from June 3rd to November 18th, and bookings will start opening up on April 30th, so plan accordingly to make sure you don't miss out before it starts filling up.
00:05:46
Speaker
Checking my audience map, I apparently have a couple hundred listeners scattered throughout the UK, so, you know, I'd be proper chuffed if any of you blokes have a spare bedroom, and I promise I'll tidy the loo and whip you up a full English in the morning.
00:05:58
Speaker
Hit me up, mates. But seriously, more to come on this, so, ah you know, just stay tuned.
Deep Dive into Neil Young's 1990 Episode
00:06:05
Speaker
Alrighty, that should do it for this week's announcements. We're about to start drilling down into Neil's three Unplugged performances, but first, here's one of those Neil covers from another Artist's Unplugged episode.
00:06:16
Speaker
You know I like to rep the international unplugs whenever I can, so here's Brazilian alt-rockers Legião Urbano and their 92 Unplugged for MTV Brazil performing a street-corner, busker-vibed, English-language cover of Neil's On The Way Home, originally from the death throes of his Buffalo Springfield days.
00:06:34
Speaker
When the dream came I held my breath with my eyes closed
00:06:43
Speaker
Permit me a small digression to recommend the Legia Urbana Unplugged for a quick second, especially since it got an album release in 99 and is pretty easy to find on streaming services.
00:06:54
Speaker
Even if you have zero reference points for their own mid-80s to mid-90s catalog, for their Unplugged they actually whipped up a small handful of covers that sounded really incredible through their acoustic trio filter.
00:07:05
Speaker
Not only did they blend Neil's On The Way Home straight into Public Image Limited's mid-80s anti-apartheid anthem, Rise, I could be wrong I could be right But they also covered Joni Mitchell's blue album closer, The Last Time I Saw Richard, and my personal favorite, The Jesus and Mary Chain's 1989 alt-rock all-timer, Head On.
00:07:31
Speaker
As soon as get my head round you I come around catching sparks of you get an electric charge from you That second-hand living just won't do Man, I absolutely love that original, and the Pixies version, and this acoustic trio unplugged cover.
00:07:49
Speaker
Speaking of, what do you say
Challenges of the 1992 Unplugged Episode
00:07:51
Speaker
we head on into the Young Plug Saga Part 2?
00:07:56
Speaker
Neo Unplugged number 1, 1990. nineteen ninety s The first Neil Young Unplugged, air quotes implied, was broadcast during the last week of February 1990, which was extremely early in the show's run.
00:08:08
Speaker
It ran the week after the Joe Walsh Dr. John Unplugged, which was technically episode number four, after the pilot, and the last air of the initial quartet of shows that was filmed during that mid-December 89 session.
00:08:21
Speaker
The following week was the Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Satriani episode, where Satch wisely followed SRV's 12-string barn burner by playing his first song on a banjo. Even though the embryonic Unplugged was still in the midst of unrolling just its first half-dozen episodes, it had already set the soon-to-be signature template of artist or band playing in a small television studio surrounded by an intimate audience.
00:08:44
Speaker
This first Neil Unplugged, on the other hand, was literally just a conventionally filmed concert video that had a couple unplugged on-screen graphics and an opening intro from Unplugged host Jules Shear.
00:08:56
Speaker
Hi, welcome to MTV Unplugged. I'm Jules Shear. Tonight we have a very special performance by Neil Young, taped exclusively for our show. I hope you enjoy it.
00:09:06
Speaker
Here's Neil Young. As far as the actual episode, it featured Neil playing six acoustic numbers that were pulled from three separate gigs at two different locations. An outdoor gig at Jones Beach Theater in Wontaw, New York on June 24th, 1989, and two nights at the Palladium in New York on September 5th and 1989.
00:09:26
Speaker
Five of the six songs were Neil completely solo, and the other featured longtime Neil collaborators Ben Keith, who had played with Neil since 1972's Harvest, and Frank Pancho San Pedro, who joined Crazy Horse after the death of Danny Witten and first appeared with Neil on one seventy five Zuma.
00:09:43
Speaker
The six songs were evenly split between his most recent album, 1989's Freedom, and three older favorites from his solo and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young catalogs. The three songs from Freedom, which were all being performed in concert prior to the album's October 89 release, were the episode opener, Crime in the City 60-0 Part 1, which was just Neil on acoustic and harmonica.
00:10:06
Speaker
Too Far Gone, which was the only non-solo track, as it featured Ben on Slide Dobro and Poncho on Mandolin. And then a really cool version of Rockin' in the Free World that found Neil masterfully reframing the electric muscle of the album version into an equally menacing solo acoustic number that closed out the episode.
00:10:26
Speaker
Keep on rockin' in the free world
00:10:39
Speaker
The three non-Freedom songs were This Notes For You from his 1988 album of the same name, with this solo acoustic and harmonica version serving as an inverted sonic cousin to the bar band with horns version on the original album.
00:10:53
Speaker
After the gold rush, naturally featuring Neil on piano with his sponsored-by-nobody beer bottle time-stamping the take to this outspoken anti-sponsorship era. and a chilling version of his 1970 CSNY protest anthem, Ohio, that he dedicated to the students killed during the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing that had just occurred less than two weeks prior to that particular performance.
00:11:17
Speaker
There's a song for the students killed in summer.
00:11:30
Speaker
While it was a nice 30-minute episode of late 80s acoustic Neil, it was certainly nowhere near the capital U Unplugged vibe, most notably during some of the Jones Beach theater numbers, as not only was Neil towering over the barely visible audience, but also the wind blowing through his hair made the outdoor gig stand in stark contrast to the intimate TV studio vibe Unplugged had been fostering.
00:11:53
Speaker
If you want to see this first Neil Unplugged for yourself, you've actually got two options. You can catch it in its original form, as it's currently streaming on Paramount+, plus with all of the Unplugged graphics, opening theme song, and Jules intro intact.
00:12:07
Speaker
Or you can pick up a vintage copy of the Freedom Alive acoustic concert, VHS, or Laserdisc that Neil released shortly after that Unplugged aired, which featured all six songs, plus a bonus seventh song not in the original broadcast.
00:12:21
Speaker
and zero unplugged branding on the box or the actual film print. All in all, it's quite an odd little unplugged anomaly, and I was honestly kind of shocked to see it included in the recent unplugged archival upload to Paramount+. plus I'm really glad that this was the only time that Unplugged did something like this, and if you want to hear a little more about the behind-the-scenes machinations that brought it about, Alex talks a little more about it during our interview in Part 1.
00:12:46
Speaker
Okay, on to the equally storied second entry. Neil Unplugged number two, 1992. ninety ninety two Now we're getting into proper Neil Young doesn't unplug territory, though this one is also, infamously, not without its peculiarities.
00:13:01
Speaker
So, in the fall of 1992, Neil released his celebrated Harvest Moon album, and coming off the back of some incredibly raucous, amp-sizzling albums with Crazy Horse, 1990's Ragged Glory, 1991's live album Weld, and its unruly sound collage companion Arc.
00:13:19
Speaker
The gently strummed acoustics and chilled out croon of Harvest Moon made Neil an ideal candidate for the growing acoustic music reimagining phenomenon that Unplugged was cultivated.
00:13:38
Speaker
In part one, I spent some time situating Harvest Moon within Neil's ever-evolving creative art, so I won't retread that here. But it's at least important to note that the band Neil brought with him to the Ed Sullivan Theater in mid-December 92 to film his Unplugged episode was the exact band he had just recorded the Harvest Moon album with.
00:13:58
Speaker
The group was collectively known amongst fans as the Stray Gators and included multiple individuals who had also recorded and performed with Neil in the early 70s on his Harvest and Time Fades Away albums, including Tim Drummond on bass, Kenny Buttrey, aka Oscar Butterworth, on drums, and Ben Keith on pedal steel and dobro.
00:14:17
Speaker
Ben, as you'll remember from earlier in this very episode, also appeared on the song Too Far Gone from Neil's first Unplugged. Neil's Harvest Moon and subsequent Unplugged Band also featured legendary Muscle Shoals keyboardist Spooner Oldham on piano and pump organ, as well as Nicolette Larsen and Astrid Young, Neil's half-sister, on background vocals.
00:14:38
Speaker
So, for the December 16, 1992 taping at the Ed Sullivan Theater, the same filming sessions that gave us the Katie Lang and Arrested Development Unplugged episodes Neil was counting on his Harvest Moon instrumental quartet and vocal duo to deliver a dynamic set of new album numbers, back catalog favorites, and a few surprise gems.
00:14:59
Speaker
Now, as you heard in last episode's interview with Alex Colletti, and soon we'll hear in this episode's interview with John Veazey, there are multiple reasons why this Unplugged ended up not meeting Neil's standards and ultimately did not make it to broadcast.
00:15:13
Speaker
There are even more accounts and theories in countless articles, books, and decades-old word-of-mouth retellings. So for now, at this particular point in the episode, let's just lay out and dissect the actual setlist of songs that were played and replayed between all of the hubbub that may or may not have occurred leading up to and after the actual performance.
00:15:33
Speaker
And I should note up top that I usually season these sections with quite a few reference clips, but the only bootleg I currently have of this performance is a low fidelity audience recording. I mean, you can practically hear the pocket lint all over this smuggled in fan recorder.
00:15:47
Speaker
I fear it might detract from your listening experience more than uplifted. But who knows, we'll see if I can clean it up enough to sparingly drop in one or two quick nuggets during editing. During the December 92 Ed Sullivan Theater unplugged taping, Neil and his band played 16 different songs across almost 30 different takes.
00:16:06
Speaker
Again, this move of redoing songs was not an uncommon practice during unplugged tapings. It's why the Nirvana Unplugged gets so much credit for just being all one-take versions. But Neil's December 92 unplugged taping may have been a bit more on the extra end of the multi-take spectrum.
00:16:23
Speaker
Regardless, the takeaway is that Neil wasn't happy with the band's performance, and as the night wore on and the continued retakes started really piling up, things just continued to snowball and, well, we all know how the story ends on this one.
00:16:35
Speaker
For now, at least. But in looking at the 16 songs Neil chose to attempt during the Ed Sullivan unplugged taping, they essentially can be broken down into three categories. New songs from Harvest Moon, back catalog favorites, and special rarities.
00:16:50
Speaker
Half of the night songs, eight in total, were from Neil's recently released Harvest Moon record, which only had ten songs on it to begin with, so he ended up playing almost the whole album that night.
00:17:00
Speaker
These new songs also proved to be some of the ones that got the most retakes during the taping. The 92 unplugged Harvest Moon tracks were From Hank to Hendrix and War of Man, which both got three takes each.
00:17:13
Speaker
Unknown Legend and Harvest Moon, which got two attempts each, and You and Me, One of These Days, Dreamin' Man, and Old King, which were all done in just one take, and the latter of which featured Neil on Banjo.
00:17:26
Speaker
Okay, let's see if here might be a good spot for a quick hit of Neil's 92 Unplugged. Again, truth in advertising, this is from a crummy, low-fidelity audience recording that might have been surreptitiously captured while John McClane-style crawling through the air vents.
00:17:41
Speaker
But I did try my best to zhuzh it up just a little to make it somewhat palatable. Here's Neil on banjo doing Old King from his 92 unplugged taping at the Ed Sullivan Theater. had a dog in his mean whisper.
00:17:55
Speaker
told the dog about They're control.
00:18:07
Speaker
For the night's back catalog cuts, Neil really seemed to take a shine to his late 60s, early 70s period, pulling out The Last Trip to Tulsa from his 1968 self-titled debut solo album, Down by the River from his legendary second album, which was his first with Crazy Horse, 1969's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush from his third album, 1970's After the Gold Rush, though this unplugged version featured Neil on pump organ instead of piano.
00:18:35
Speaker
and two album cuts from his 1972 mainstream classic, Harvest, the songs Old Man and Are You Ready for the Country, which, if you're keeping track at home, also got two takes.
00:18:45
Speaker
For the night's special rarities, and again, I know the term rarities amongst Neil fans can be pretty subjective, so, you know, everybody be cool. He kicked the whole show off playing banjo for two takes of Love is a Rose, a song that Neil initially intended to be on his 1974 album Homegrown, which ended up getting shelved and wouldn't officially be released until 2020. It first saw the light of day as a top five country hit for Linda Ronstadt in 75, and then Neil released his version for the first time on his 1977 triple LP compilation called Decade.
00:19:18
Speaker
Another curious deep track he pulled out that night was Silver and Gold, a song he wrote during that fraught early 80s period of Geffen releases, the whole backstory of which I got into in my last episode.
00:19:29
Speaker
It was first released on his 1985 country album Old Ways and was then re-recorded many times over the years, including serving as the title track to an acoustic album he released in 2000.
00:19:40
Speaker
Perhaps unintentionally nodding to how many different ways he recorded Silver and Gold over the years until he was happy with it, he and the band attempted it three times during his 92 Unplugged taping.
00:19:51
Speaker
And then he also performed Comes the Time from his 78 album of the same name, which makes perfect sense. Having Nicolette Larson on stage with him meant that he had quite a few different 70s gems he could have chosen to pull from, and those two created such an incredibly soulful third voice any time they sang together.
00:20:08
Speaker
Okay, at the risk of getting greedy, I'll drop in just one more 92 Unplugged snippet from that lo-fi bootleg. Here's a tiny bit of Neil and Nicolette doing comes a time, you know, as heard through holding a cup up to the wall of the room next door.
00:20:41
Speaker
Okay, as we all well remember, this show never made broadcast because Neil didn't like the band's performance. But before moving on to Neil's third Unplugged, I wanted to add a couple interesting points to the story timeline.
00:20:53
Speaker
First, as I mentioned in the last episode, I was interviewing the legendary remote recording trailblazer David Hewitt a couple years ago, and I took the opportunity to ask him a couple questions about this night.
00:21:05
Speaker
Not only had he been working with Neil and recording his live shows since the late 70s, but David's remote recording trucks also handled the audio for a lot of MTV Unplugged, including some of its most memorable episodes, Mariah Carey, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Babyface, and many others.
00:21:21
Speaker
I thought it might be fun to play a little clip of that old interview to hear David indulge my curiosities about this show. And especially in contrast to some of the other vantage points from Alex in the last episode and John in this episode, it's kind of fun to hear which people were made aware at which points that Neil had plans to bury this performance and try it again later.
00:21:41
Speaker
As you're about to hear, David was made aware pretty much before Neil's last notes had even finished reverberating in the Ed Sullivan rafters. So much like the bootleg clips, forgive the audio on this one.
00:21:52
Speaker
It's from an old handheld recorder that I use on interviews for print pieces, and 99 times out of 100, I'm the only person that ever listens back for reference as I'm writing an article. But I thought this was another fun behind-the-scenes addition to the Young Plug saga, so here's a few minutes of David Hewitt recollecting that post-show craziness.
00:22:10
Speaker
Yeah, I was the engineer on the first one, and there's an interesting story. It took him forever to get him to agree to do an Unplugged. And when he finally did agree, he put together a fairly unusual grouping of musicians. It wasn't Crazy Horse, you know, it was really ah more of Unplugged, you know, some of his favorite older players that had a lot to bring to the party. But what happened is, you know, Neil is a very exacting producer. He knows exactly what he wants but he he also
00:22:41
Speaker
will bring a mix of you know song and music and personnel and so on that aren't necessarily the hits and well rehearsed and all that kind of thing. So there's always a little bit of creative tension going on there and a lot of that is deliberate because he wants that kind of feel you know he wants it to be live, he wants it to be spontaneous. Well, it didn't quite work out the way Neil wanted it.
00:23:03
Speaker
he was He wasn't happy with the way a it came out, and I can no longer remember where the the issues were. You know, to me, it sounded great. i you I loved it. But as soon as that finished,
00:23:14
Speaker
I can't remember whether whether it was Elliot. I don't think it was his manager. I think it was ah an underling of with management it comes from running into a remote truck and says, don't let those tapes out. Neil neil says he'll he'll pay for it. He'll take care of all it. He says, do not release those tapes. Neil says, do not release them. And he runs out. And I'm going yeah dick chris TV is the client. You know, they're paying for it. They booked me. It's not Neil booking us and paying for it. And I'm going, oh, shit.
00:23:45
Speaker
You know, now I'm, oh, boy. And of course, the, you know, almost immediately, the shows were over, here comes the production people to get the tapes. And I'm saying, look, Neil will not release it. What do you mean? you know, we're paying for it. And I said, listen, man, don't know that I told it's a producer but basically that was it he was going to have to go talk to neil Yeah, yeah.
Success of Neil Young's 1993 Episode
00:24:13
Speaker
so they you know it all worked out and they and they let me go but neil ended up covering it all you know he yeah he was good for it he paid all the bills yeah yeah then then they went and did it again in l a So as David confirmed, despite demands by Neal's camp to hand over the tapes that night, they were still delivered to MTV.
00:24:30
Speaker
And as you'll hear John confirm here in a bit, were actually worked on, edited together for a couple weeks, and sent off to Neal for approval. I was also able to secondarily verify that things were essentially moving full steam ahead on MTV's side by doing a little digging in some old newspaper archives.
00:24:47
Speaker
where I found multiple papers from the first week of 1993 promoting the Season 4 premiere of Unplugged featuring Neil. Here's a quick example from the January 3rd, 1993 edition of Albany, New York's Times Union paper. Neil Young, one of rock and roll's most innovative and eclectic artists, took his acoustic guitar in harmonica to the Ed Sullivan Theater on December 16th to tape an appearance for MTV Unplugged.
00:25:11
Speaker
Young's acoustic performance for MTV Unplugged will debut on MTV on Wednesday, January 6th from 10 to 11 p.m., with repeats on Saturday, January 9th at 8 p.m., and Sunday, January 10th at 4 p.m. and 10 p.m.
00:25:25
Speaker
Little did they know, however, that Neil had other plans. Neil Unplugged number 3, 1993 ninety ninety three So yes, after declining to approve the edit, paying for the production cost out of his own pocket, and agreeing to a rescheduled Take-Two Unplugged redo, Neil and the band traveled out to Los Angeles in early February 1993 to join Dennis Leary, Rod Stewart, and the Uptown Records roster of Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, Father MC, Christopher Williams, and Heavy D and the Boys for MTV to film four new Unplugged episodes in just a couple days.
00:25:59
Speaker
Despite his dissatisfaction with the previous Unplugged performance, Neil brought along the exact same band for this re-taping, with one significantly major addition. He asked another of his longtime collaborators, Niels Lofgren, to not only sit in with the band, but to also serve as an unofficial band leader and musical director to get them into sonic shape.
00:26:19
Speaker
Lofgren, of course, had not only been working with Neil since the early 1970s, first appearing on Neil's 1970 After the Gold Rush album, but he also would have been familiar to unplugged viewers as he had played a prominent role in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band from the 1984 Born in the USA era up through Springsteen's E Street Dismantling in 1989.
00:26:41
Speaker
Along with having Lofgren in tow, who was able to both sync with Neil in a way few others could while also taking the bandleader responsibility off his shoulders, Neil was additionally inspired to tweak the setlist and flow of the show a little bit.
00:26:55
Speaker
This time around, he rolled out a few more songs, almost 20 different ones depending on how you count them, covered a broader range of his catalog, attempted far fewer retakes, and split the set between completely solo numbers and full band variations.
00:27:10
Speaker
Similar to the last set, let's break down this set list by categories. New songs from Harvest Moon, back catalog favorites, and special rarities. As far as Harvest Moon songs, unlike the Ed Sullivan show, this LA taping featured far fewer of the new album cuts, and notably none of his solo songs in the first half of the set were from Harvest Moon.
00:27:31
Speaker
But of those that were, Neil and the band played unknown legend... from Hank to Hendrix, which featured Lofgren deftly switching over to accordion, and the title track, which featured the first, and so far only, unplugged appearance of someone playing a broom.
00:27:47
Speaker
I kid you not, Neil had Larry Craig mic'd up and spotlit on a side stage for the gently rhythmic sweeps of his run-of-the-mill, standard-issue corn broom.
00:28:08
Speaker
They also played two other Harvest Moon songs during the taping that didn't make the broadcast or album, Dreamin' Man and Two Attempts of War of Man. Of his back catalog favorites, Neil spiced up the grouping a bit more this time around and interpreted most of them through his signature solo acoustic and harmonica filter.
00:28:27
Speaker
The solo guitar tracks include The Old Laughing Lady from his 68 debut, which kicked off the broadcast and album. The Needle and the Damaged Dun from 72's Harvest, World on a String from 75's Tonight's The Night, and a stirring 12-string version of Pocahontas from 79's Russ Never Sleeps.
00:28:54
Speaker
the icy sky at night. During this opening solo set, he also played a few bars of Tonight's The Night on piano before changing his mind and switching over to pump organ for a deeply haunting version of Like a Hurricane, one of the night's absolute showstoppers.
00:29:23
Speaker
Many of his other back catalog favorites were done off-skate style with Neils, the band, and the stellar vocal duo of Nicolette and Astrid pitching in flawlessly. These tracks included Long May You Run from Neils' 1976 collaborative album with Stephen Stills, Look Out For My Love from 78's Comes A Time,
00:29:42
Speaker
A version of Winter Long from 77's Decade, which didn't make the broadcast or album, and a really killer quartet version of Helpless from the CSNY record Deja Vu, featuring only Neil on piano, Niels on accordion, and Nicolette and Astrid on background vocals.
00:30:00
Speaker
Helpless, helpless, help
00:30:11
Speaker
And then there's the special rarities numbers, which is really what I think is the most magical part of Neil's third Unplugged. Of the four songs I'm slotting in this group, the one that many Neil fans seem to gravitate towards is his solo piano version of Stringman, a song that was originally intended to be on one of his unreleased mid-70s albums called Chrome Dreams, which did eventually come out in 2023.
00:30:34
Speaker
But circa 93, this song was still wrapped in mystery, and the studio version was only available via hand-me-down bootlegs. But the other special rarities from that night, the ones that my ears tend to lean into the most, are a trio of songs associated with his much maligned 1983 electro-experimentation album, Trans.
00:30:55
Speaker
For this unplugged redo, Neil apparently found renewed inspiration, at least according to some of his own interviews, by refashioning some of the more synthesizer and vocoder-heavy Trans songs into newly stripped-back acoustic variants.
00:31:09
Speaker
He included one of them, Mr. Soul, in his opening solo set and employed just his acoustic guitar and harmonica to continue the sonic evolution of this old Buffalo Springfield second album opener from 1967, which sounded like this.
00:31:29
Speaker
Through the early 80s synthetic pulse of the trans version, which sounded like this.
00:31:43
Speaker
and into the windswept ghostly shimmer of this unplugged version.
00:31:58
Speaker
The other two acoustic trans tracks appeared back to back to kick off the full band set. First up was Sample & Hold, which sadly, heartbreakingly, didn't make the broadcast or album.
00:32:10
Speaker
But because it's one of my hands-down favorite trans tracks, here's a snippet of the 83 original. I need a yogurt and sample at home.
00:32:25
Speaker
And a lo-fi bootleg of the 93 Unplugged version that is just begging for a proper release. We need you to sample a home, but not the lonely, you desire.
00:32:43
Speaker
The other one is Transformer Man, which did make the broadcast an album and features some swanky auto-harp ornamentation from Neils and dreamy background vocals from Nicolette and Astrid.
00:32:54
Speaker
Transformer
00:33:08
Speaker
So, third time's a charm, right? This is the Neil Unplugged that makes it to air that March. Quickly, mind you, like within less than a month after it was filmed. It's the Neil Unplugged that gets the album released that June.
00:33:20
Speaker
And it's the Neil Unplugged that, at least in my opinion, gave 90s teenagers like me some much appreciated, pardon my Latin, in media res, cultural context with which to latch on to his enigmatic, poetic, melodic, and wonderfully unruly musical ethos. so that we could more easily ingest all of Neil's forthcoming alt-rock-adjacent awesomeness, playing with Pearl Jam at the 93 VMAs, releasing the Kurt Cobain's Spectred Sleeps With Angels record in 94, recording the Mirrorball album with Pearl Jam in 95, etc., etc., that was soon to follow after his Unplugged.
00:33:56
Speaker
Maybe I'm putting too fine a point on that, but I think the logic holds, especially for the overly skeptical, MTV-fixated, alt-rock-obsessed teenagers of the 1990s. I think Neil was able to authentically infiltrate the too-cool-for-school Gen X lunch table in a way that many of his 60s and 70s musical peers never did, and I'm of the mind that his Unplugged played a, not exclusive, but substantially important role in all of that.
00:34:22
Speaker
Okay, I believe we have adequately disassembled and fine-toothed combed Neil's three Unplugged appearances, and this feels like a good spot to transition into my chat with MTV Unplugged editor John Veazey to hear his take on the whole experience.
00:34:36
Speaker
But first, speaking of Pearl Jam, Let's spend one more unplugged cover of a Neil Young song. While I teased it last episode with Queensryche, here's Pearl Jam also doing Rockin' in the Free World from their God-tier unplugged outing that was broadcast in 1992, sadly without this song, included on DVD with the 2009 reissue of 10, also sadly without this song,
00:34:59
Speaker
and finally released as a proper standalone album in 2019. Again, thrice over, sadly, without this song. But at least you can count on your Friendly Neighborhood podcast to give you a taste of it here.
Interview with Editor John Veazey
00:35:10
Speaker
Got of the people, there's youth to birth, got love to die,
00:35:23
Speaker
Okay, let's get into my Unplugged Revisited chat with John Veazey. Which, quick side note, I forgot to say up top my sincerest apologies to John for mispronouncing his last name in my last episode.
00:35:35
Speaker
Alright, here's my Unplugged Revisited chat with John Veazey. I'm excited to be sitting here with Emmy-nominated Peabody Award-winning editor John Veazey, who, along with working on incredible projects with legendary directors like Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, and the great Beth McCarthy Miller, also edited almost 50 episodes of MTV Unplugged between 1990 and the Unplugged 2.0 reboot of the two thousand He's been gracious enough to join the show today to share his memories of the two Neil Young episodes he worked on, the unaired 92 show and the 93 broadcast and album we've all come to know and love.
00:36:12
Speaker
John, thank you so much for being here to talk Unplugged with me. My pleasure. one of One of my favorite topics. That's always good. Okay, so before diving into Unplugged and specifically the two Neil Young episodes that you worked on, I wanted to first ask you to tell us about your journey, even getting to MTV, and what some of your non-Unplugged projects and experiences were like at the network during its 80s to 90s heyday.
00:36:36
Speaker
Sure. Well, I went to Emerson College in Boston, and I was lucky to be there at a time with a bunch of musicians and a bunch of comedians. Dennis Leary was there, and Mario Cantone was a good pal I just add dinner with. And um Doug Herzog, who became the eventually the program director and and the, I guess, president of MTV, was the original news director.
00:37:00
Speaker
And there were a lot there was a whole sort of Emerson-MTV cross-pollination happening i I got back to New York in like 82, and I pretty quickly got a job at a place called Unitel that had the MTV stages.
00:37:16
Speaker
So the VJ segments were shot there, and began editing career at Unitel and then moved over.
00:37:26
Speaker
I was doing a lot of the early music MTV Music News. I did the first year in rock. um And then I was doing music videos for, I don't know, Paul Simon, and Bonnie Raitt, Motley Crue, Metallica. Nice.
00:37:41
Speaker
Queensryche, all these bands. They might be giants. And then eventually i i wound up at a place called Charlex, which was famous for doing the Cars ah You Might Think video. It was a It was mostly a commercial house, but it was very high special effects. But in between the fun projects like the Cars video and the Saturday Night Live open, we would mostly do commercials.
00:38:03
Speaker
um So I kind of got tired of that and missing the entertainment stuff. And I went over to Broadway Video, which is Lorne Michaels' post house. Jeff Ross, who just produced the Academy Awards and is Conan O'Brien's longtime producer, was there as an in-house producer doing specials mostly for HBO.
00:38:25
Speaker
We Deaf Comedy Jam. yeah ah We did John Leguizamo's one-man shows. First one, Mamba Mouth, was directed by Tommy Schlamme, who went on to do The West Wing.
00:38:37
Speaker
ah We were also doing Oprah Winfrey had these behind the scenes shows that would come before the Academy Awards that would have, you know, people like Michael Bolton and Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn and Dustin Hoffman on like an interview show. Mm um So I was doing all of those shows kind of through the first two seasons of Unplugged.
00:38:59
Speaker
So that led me right up to 92, 93. In 93, I became like a VP of Broadway Videos, is the director of offline, and we built new edit facilities.
00:39:11
Speaker
To talk about Unplugged, you certainly know a little bit about the technical side of TV. So in a nutshell, you know film editors cut film. And if you have three shots and you want to remove one, you just put them together.
00:39:23
Speaker
In video, it's linear and you have to put down one at a time on the tape. And it was very technical and very few editors work for themselves because it was like working at Electric Ladyland or the power station or the hit factory, one of these big recording studios. It was like over a million dollars worth gear with scopes and waveforms and all that kind of stuff. So at Broadway Video, to do offline, you would do three quarter inch tape to tape, which was very not very accurate. And then you'd go into an online room. So I did both offline and online, but I was mostly an online editor.
00:39:58
Speaker
And so Unplugged started off very simply where very few cameras were ISOed. So you really couldn't edit the show from scratch. They just didn't record all the material. The audio was recorded in stereo directly to the tape. There was really no post mix.
00:40:17
Speaker
It was a very simple show, especially that first season. So I was dude, I did a couple shows I did. I remember I did the Allman Brothers show, which was great because they were like, you know, my childhood favorite band. So I got and and I went to some tapings and they did a couple of the hair metal bands. I can't remember it was like Poisoner Rat or somebody like that.
00:40:38
Speaker
ah But again, there wasn't a whole lot of editing early on. And then the show kind of, you know, exploded. with probably McCartney was really where it started to kind of take off.
00:40:50
Speaker
And I think it was the not unplugged, the plugged Bruce Springsteen show was the first one where they really did a full edit of it on a nonlinear computer-based edit system.
00:41:04
Speaker
Yeah. So this sort of coincide right when I was opening up these new facilities of Broadway video that had nonlinear editing. So all of a sudden the light bulb sort of lit in Alex's head that like, oh, wow, now we can really like. And they were already by that point starting. I think all the Allman Brothers was the first time they brought in 24 track. Hmm. So by this point, they were starting to do the 24 tracks and the first kind of records had sort of started to come out.
00:41:33
Speaker
The Eric Clapton won you everybody knew it was a hit, but the Clapton thing had not really exploded yet. So at that point, Alex came and said, you know I've got a whole new run.
00:41:44
Speaker
i knew Alex because a good buddy of mine also from Emerson College shared an office with him, a guy named Jim Smith, who was the longtime editor of Survivor. for many years. okay Did like 15 seasons of Survivor and he shared desk with this new kid that had come over from WNEW who was out.
00:42:05
Speaker
So I knew Alex, you know, socially and, you know, go to parties and see him and knew him. I was opening up these new suites and I'd already done a couple of episodes on tape to tape, but we were like, you know, let's do a deep dive. So that Neil Young run with Neil Young's show, the Katie Lang show and the Arrested Development show, that was really the first run where we did like a deep dive on the edits.
00:42:31
Speaker
oh um Again, on the technical side, what that means is that all the footage you need to input into a computer and you need to create like, believe what we did at that point was we took one inch tapes and made three quarter inch tapes and then digitized the three quarter inch tapes into the computer system. So there was like a whole there's a whole process to get it into the system. yeah I think one of the things you and I, when we were talking, ah was that um that that first Neil Young show, the Ed Sullivan show, was absolutely edited. i mean, it it was probably two weeks of work ah or more went into putting that show. And it was a finished show that was online and exists somewhere in the vaults.
00:43:13
Speaker
Oh, my goodness. So it's very much very much not a lost episode. Yeah. It's a hidden episode.
Editing Challenges and Myths of the 1992 Episode
00:43:21
Speaker
Right. There's a difference. There's lost and then there's a locked down until the right people sign off. Yeah.
00:43:27
Speaker
That's amazing. I love that you're already kind of hitting a little bit on the technical standpoint. I wondered if you could just kind of like quickly explain to us the overall creative responsibilities of an editor, as well as how the day-to-day ins and outs played out on a project like Unplugged.
00:43:42
Speaker
How much time do you spend doing work on your own versus being like with the production team collaborating? In the early days, the edit for an episode was probably no more than ah couple hours.
00:43:54
Speaker
They would come in very often. It would be an evening session because it was cheaper to work, you know, seven to midnight, seven to two in the morning. You'd come in, you'd put the reels up, and it was mostly just to bring the show to time. Which might mean omitting a song and tightening up the show. it might be putting on the credits, putting on the um the song titles, that kind of stuff, and shipping it off to go to air.
00:44:21
Speaker
um All those song titles were always written out by Alex Coletti. And then in the edit room, we'd put them under a little camera and we'd key them on. So the handwritten song titles are Alex's. Oh, that's amazing. Alex's great handwriting is the real look.
00:44:38
Speaker
That's awesome. But then once we got into a heavier post, it could be several days. You know, these shows were directed live mostly by Milt Lage and Beth McCarthy Miller, but also Joe Perota. And then there were handful of other people. But during that sort of key period, you know, 93 to 2002, those were the main directors.
00:44:59
Speaker
And as we got into like Neil Young, we would unravel the whole thing. We really could recreate the show from scratch because by the time we got to there, we had almost every camera ISOed.
00:45:11
Speaker
Or we would have what they called switch switched ISOs. So you'd have somebody in the truck who would switch between two cameras. So you had one tape that would switch back and forth, but only between two cameras.
00:45:23
Speaker
Oh, okay. But in general, you know the key part of the edit was if you missed something. ah There's a guitar solo and they get there late or they cut to a camera and it's shaky or the dolly doesn't work because the general setup would be they would run a dolly in the front of the stage, possibly back a couple rows or possibly in front of the first row.
00:45:44
Speaker
Then there'd be a crane that would swoop down over the stage. And then they'd probably have a camera just on sticks somewhere in the center of the audience to get like a closeup of whoever the singer was.
00:45:55
Speaker
And then you'd have two or three guys roaming around behind the drums, behind the keyboards to the sides, trying to stay out of the way. And eventually as we got into like the 93, 94, 95 seasons,
00:46:09
Speaker
We probably had six or eight cameras that were all ISOed. So that would all go into the system. And there definitely was a hierarchy system. There was always a key show like Neil Young was what, you know, allowed us to do Katie Lang and Arrested Development.
00:46:24
Speaker
You would have a marquee show like Rod Stewart, and then you'd book other bands around them that maybe wouldn't justify doing a whole whole shoot. very Very rarely did they set up for one episode. Hmm.
00:46:36
Speaker
And so the big artist or the band that me and Alex and Beth were really into would tend to get a little more time because we we really liked that episode. We really liked that band because there'd always be a split between kind of like legacy bands and then who was really hot at the time.
00:46:53
Speaker
yeah um So there'd be a band like Stone Temple Pilots or Sheryl Crow, who were brand new. You know, they only had like an album Many of them turned out to have really great careers. I mean, that's one of my, not regrets, but some people we caught really early. Stone Temple Pilots, we caught really early.
00:47:10
Speaker
And you know if we had caught them three years later, you know they would have had that whole catalog of songs. So that's a little bit of the wish list. but Yeah. Some of those episodes back then, like the Stone Temple Pilots one, were still just running 30-minute episodes too. Like some artists got an hour, some got 30. I think STP and also Sting are two of the ones where I'm just like, man, how is this just a 30-minute episode? Yeah.
00:47:34
Speaker
Once we got into like 94, we would cut 30 minute and hour long episodes sometimes of certain bands. So you might debut an hour long show and it would air for like the first week. And then they'd put a 30 minute show into kind of like the regular rotation. Yeah, that makes sense. And then as we went on the DVDs, the behind the scenes, and we would pull individual sauce.
00:48:00
Speaker
You know, we would do like an episode like Neil Young. And then it would kind of drift on for a couple weeks of work for me because then it would be like, okay, we're going to pull these songs to put into rotation and we just need to clean them up and put them on a separate master so they can roll them in along with the other music videos. So would go into the regular regular rotation on mtv Well, I was curious, most of your work, like you said, is post-production doing the editing. How many times did you also attend the tapings? And do you have any personal, like, in-the-room standout memories from just being a music fan?
00:48:35
Speaker
I have a lot. Yeah. I mean, i would, we we used to have a joke. I can't remember what article came out, but there was an article. i think one of the PR people for um Broadway video had said, my excuse to leave work and go to a taping would be that I was there for creative consultation.
00:48:53
Speaker
There was nothing, I mean, ah probably once in 15 years, Alex might've asked me a question that was relative to something, but mostly would be sitting on top of a garbage can having a beer backstage, you know, with Dave Grohl or somebody. and And Alex would go by and go, oh, you're doing your creative consulting again, huh?
00:49:12
Speaker
But I would go to as many shows, you know, the ones that were at the Ed Sullivan Theater, the ones that were at the Sony Studios, the ones that were out at Brooklyn Academy Music at BAM. I think I started off, I i saw the um when the Black Crows, when they were walking around drunk at eight in the morning. I was at the Allman Brothers, and a lot of them got shot in the West Coast, and I would not go to those.
00:49:35
Speaker
But you know Dylan was amazing. That was two nights. And that was just incredible. The Nirvana episode oh yeah was an amazing, amazing experience.
00:49:45
Speaker
We could do a whole podcast on that. That was an episode that was, there was a lot of tension in the air. I guess the thing about seeing shows is that some bands would come out like they were playing Madison Square Garden. They'd come out on stage, they'd sit down, they'd do a song, they'd banter between songs, they'd go from one song to the next, they'd be very interactive with the audience, and then they'd get up, take a bow, and they'd leave, and that'd be it.
00:50:12
Speaker
Other people would deal with it like a taping. like they were in a recording studio. So if somebody made a mistake, they'd stop in the middle of a song. They would redo a song where they would come back at the end of their set and redo half the set. so each taping was a little different. It really had to do with the with the artist. oh Nirvana didn't redo any songs, but Kiss redid songs over and over and over again to the point where like the audience was trying to leave. right ah Lenny Kravitz, which I still think is maybe my favorite episode. Lenny Kravitz just came out. He had the gospel choir. He had um Cindy Blackman, Santana, and They were just amazing.
00:50:54
Speaker
And those last two songs, when Cindy Blackman goes to double time drum roll, and they and they go into the gospel choir thing, and they they go out right out with the credits. I mean, that was just... And he got up and gave a bow, walked off stage, and Alex said, you want to do any any songs over? And he's like, no, I did my set. like that was That was my set. We're good. Right, right.
00:51:14
Speaker
Well, let's go ahead and get into some Neil Young Unplugged Mythos. First off, I know you didn't work on it, but have you seen that 1990 not exactly unplugged Neil Young concert video that was curiously aired? I have seen it.
00:51:28
Speaker
What are your thoughts on that one? You know, it's a good show. It's it's a good early 90s Neil Young show. You know, for me, I think that both the two unplugs were a better setting. It's with a band and it's in ah in a closed place. I believe that was shot at Jones Beach. It's from a few different concerts. Yeah, one of them is outdoors at Jones Beach. And you're like, yeah, that's interesting.
00:51:52
Speaker
So I have seen it. It was one of those odd things that aired in the first two seasons. I mean, it's so funny when we talk about seasons with Unplugged. It never, ever felt like a season.
00:52:05
Speaker
You know, there were times where it was like they kind of got their act together and it was like every Friday night in March, you know, we're going to have a new show or something. But in general, it would be like always kind of going on life support. It was like, oh.
00:52:18
Speaker
You know, they haven't done it unplugged in a while. It's been six months. It's been eight months. And then the phone would ring and Alex would be like, okay, we're we're going, getting we're getting five bands. We're going to do five shows. And then, you know, for the next month, they would be, we'd be in the room putting them together. Mm-hmm.
00:52:34
Speaker
So it doesn't quite feel like seasons to me, but I know that people have organized or tried to organize them as seasons. Right. Some of them not very successfully, because even if you get on Paramount Plus right now, when you click on season one, there's ah like the 2005 Alicia Keys episode. There's like the 99 Atlantis. And you're like, OK, maybe maybe a little cleanup could be done. But yeah.
00:52:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Moving into the more conventional Neil Young Unplugged. So the December 92 Sullivan Theater taping that never aired. I was curious if you remember how far in advance you would be made aware of which specific artists were going to be doing an Unplugged. Like when did when did y'all know that you'd be doing an episode with Neil?
00:53:16
Speaker
It would be not more than a couple weeks, maybe a month. It's hard to say. maybe i Maybe I heard in the end of summer, fall of 93 that we were going to be doing, it would have been 92, that we were going to be doing the Unplugged shows. I know that you know I was very busy with this new facility and we just finished, I think we just finished a season of Def Jam.
00:53:39
Speaker
And so Alex was the next guy that came in. So the Ed Sullivan Theater had been owned by Reeves Teletape, which was a big New York City video company that that had stages and trucks and all that kind of stuff. Legendary, like back into like the 50s.
00:53:55
Speaker
So they owned the Ed Sullivan Theater and people could rent it out, I think, I think Aerosmith Unplugged had been shot there and some other ones. Yeah. I was also at that time in 92, 93, David Letterman had been part with Jay Leno with the whole Late Night Wars.
00:54:14
Speaker
So I actually, being at Broadway Video, I had to edit together Conan O'Brien's audition tapes. Wow. For Lauren. Wow. ah So I put together, was working with Jeff Ross and put together the audition tapes. And then I was doing promos for CBS for David Letterman going over there. And then I was doing promos for Conan, who was going to debut on NBC.
00:54:38
Speaker
So all this is happening and the theater is being sold to CBS so that David Letterman can go in. So the last two things that were shot at the Ed Sullivan Theater were the Paul McCartney electric, ah what was it called, Up Close, I think was a special.
00:54:53
Speaker
And then they came in to do the Neil Young taping. So we probably knew a couple weeks before. I don't know whether they booked the theater for two weeks and they left gear there in between the Paul McCartney and the arrested Neil Young, Katie Lang period or not. or i mean, it was both Jewel Gallon.
00:55:12
Speaker
Yeah. sort of executive producing both shows. I did not go to the Paul McCartney taping, um but I did go to all three of the ah Neil Young and Arrested and Katie Lyon.
00:55:25
Speaker
So that was the following week. that's That's how that whole thing happened. Which is, I assume you're going to ask me about some of the ah some of the urban legends about the missing Neil Young. Yeah, yeah. that that's ah It's funny. In all of my research and just remembering from being a teenager at that time, all the stories that came out, ones that have shown up in books and magazine interviews and all that.
00:55:47
Speaker
I was curious about that infamous Neil's gone moment. You know, he's left the stage. Despite the various versions that are out there of when that actually took place, it occurred during rehearsal, correct? Not the main show. Some people have tried to say it happened during the main show.
00:56:02
Speaker
Well, ah the two things I would say just before as we dive into this into this urban legend swimming pool. First off, it is a TV show, not a concert.
00:56:13
Speaker
It is a taping for a TV show. The second and more important thing is we're talking about Neil Young. Right. Neil Young, the guy who famously quit the Buffalo Springfield like the week before Monterey Park, the guy that didn't want to be filmed at Woodstock, the guy that didn't want to be filmed at Altamont, the guy who, is you know, had legendary battles with David Geffen and with Spotify and everybody else.
00:56:39
Speaker
So, you know, Neil is a guy who who is particular and The main part of the urban legend of did he walk out, did he this, was he pissed off? It had to do with the way that they taped shows and did shows.
00:56:54
Speaker
You always had multiple shows that had to be shot over a two or three day period on a soundstage. And that usually meant that there was more than one taping in a day.
00:57:06
Speaker
And where the initial problems come with the Neil Young Ed Sullivan Theater episode are the fact that in the morning they did the sound check for Neil Young, but he was the big marquee show. so that So it was a Christmas, Thanksgiving time, end of year, nighttime show in New York at the Ed Sullivan Theater. And in between the morning sound check and the eight o'clock show, they shot Katie Lang.
00:57:37
Speaker
And nobody ever told Neil Young that his entire soundcheck and stage was going to be broken down for a taping. Wow. So when he walked out of the soundcheck sometime in the late morning, middle of the day, and he thought he was just coming back that night to do his show, we shot the Katie Lang episode, which went great.
00:58:00
Speaker
ah But when Neil walked back in, they were resetting up his gear and he was like, what's going on? We did sound check this morning and everybody was like, well, yeah. And then we shot Katie Lang and he could not understand how from notes and gaffers tape on the floor and, um, the bunch of professionals could get it back the way it was in the morning.
00:58:26
Speaker
So Neil was in a really bad mood and his, his initial storming out, was before they let the audience in. He walked out the stage door, the famous door that you've seen in a million David Letterman skits. He walked out the door on 54th Street, 53rd Street, and vanished. It was snowing that night, and he just left.
00:58:49
Speaker
And on the other side, around the corner, on Broadway, was is a line around the corner of the audience waiting to get in, standing in the snow. Ooh.
00:59:00
Speaker
So the taping didn't start well. And everything that happened after that was a byproduct of Neil being upset about the soundcheck.
00:59:10
Speaker
I do remember that that first taping and from looking at notes and reading things that he did stop and start and redo a lot of songs.
00:59:21
Speaker
Yeah. Which again, It being a taping, this is not uncommon. I was looking, you know, there's all this retrospective of the Eric Clapton one because they've they've repackaged it, re-released it. It's on Paramount+. It's wonderful.
00:59:37
Speaker
You know who also redid half of his show? ericlap Eric Clapton. Eric Clapton redid about half of his set. um So it wasn't uncommon. Mm-hmm. There was a break in the middle of the taping where Neil got up, but that wasn't the part I think that the whole story's come from.
00:59:54
Speaker
The part that the story's come from is that sometime around 7, 7.30, they let the audience in yeah The audience were all covered in snow. They got in, they got comfortable. There's always a lot of industry people and hangers on and MTV people, label people and everybody milled about.
01:00:13
Speaker
And then they started to wait for the show and Neil Young was not there. And so i don't think he got on stage until about nine. Hmm. And I do know from the edit at the time that there was a point when Alex and Bob Small and Jim Burns went to Neil's manager and were like, where's Neil?
01:00:36
Speaker
And it was like, I don't know where Neil is. Neil is Neil. And they're like, well, you think he's coming back? And they were like, I don't know if he's coming back. And ah sometime, you know, right before nine o'clock, there was a bang on the door and it was
Reflections on 1993 Episode and Favorite Memories
01:00:54
Speaker
Neil. And he had on one of those big sort of, not a cowboy hat, but one of those sort of flat rimmed hats. Yeah.
01:01:00
Speaker
and a big shearling coat, and he was covered in snow, and he literally walked right onto the stage from the back door. And he sat down and and started playing Love is a Rose. right After this sort of big tension of like, is there going to be a show or not? All of a sudden, Neil showed up and the show began.
01:01:18
Speaker
I don't remember this being this big dramatic thing. I remember him being Grumpy Neil, which anybody who's seen a lot of Neil and interviews and stuff, you know, you sometimes you get the Grumpy Neil.
01:01:30
Speaker
He didn't seem to be in a particularly great mood, but I didn't, you know, I think you told me that Dave Hewitt said that there was, that there was some talk about trying to get the tapes out of the truck.
01:01:41
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I interviewed him a couple of years ago. He explained that almost as soon as the show was done and and Neil walked off that someone from Neil's camp came to the truck and was like, you got to give us the tapes. He's not happy. And David was like, who's worked with Neil on a ton of projects. So he was intimate with these people too, which might've also been why they went to the truck to try to get the tapes. But he was like, Hey, sorry, like I understand, but MTV is the client, not Neil right now. So um yeah, he didn't turn them over, but apparently there was a big hubbub in the truck to try to even get the tapes before MTV got them.
01:02:16
Speaker
So, you know, I had never heard that story until recently, because from my perspective, all I know is that the tapes all showed up. And like I told you, it needed to be, you need to have copies first made. They might've made the copies on the truck. Sometimes you would run copies at the same time if it had just, time of day time code, but I don't think so. I think it got probably sent to Broadway Video. They made the duplication, then it got input into the edit system.
01:02:42
Speaker
And then we probably started that Monday to start editing the show. I remember starting with Neil Young because I think we finished it right before we broke for Christmas.
01:02:54
Speaker
And it wasn't until we came back after Christmas that we heard, Neil doesn't like the show. And he wants to redo it, which initially, you know, basically what we heard first was that he wanted to come back and retape it, which was um kind of amusing because David Letterman had moved into the Ed Sullivan Theater. and MTV didn't own those kind of stages. So it was like, you know, there's no there's no coming back. We have to really have to recreate this whole thing from scratch with the lighting and the crew and everything. Yeah.
01:03:26
Speaker
And the other thing that I remember, the whole thing of it of him you know not wanting to air the show that also was somewhat surprising was that I always remember we got one crazy note back from Neil's people, which leads to another urban legend thing, which is you know in between the Ed Sullivan and the Universal Studios show, they're almost completely different set lists. I mean, he didn't just come back and redo the show.
01:03:52
Speaker
But I also think he didn't have the same band. I'm not sure Nils Lofgren was in New York. Yeah. And I'm not sure that Tim Drummond was the bassist on both episodes. Oh, okay.
01:04:06
Speaker
Because the crazy note that we got over the years, we got lots of crazy notes. But the crazy note we got about Neil Young, a note from management that said, oh, just so you know, the bass player does not have a work visa. He's Canadian.
01:04:23
Speaker
And so you can't show him in the show, which was crazy because he was basically sitting right behind Neil Young. So there was no way to edit the show and like never see one of the key guys in the band.
01:04:36
Speaker
So, yeah, it was a total surprise to us when we heard after Christmas that you know he wanted to redo it. And then you know then they they reshot them in February in L.A. That's so funny. Alex, he had the same story, but in in his recollection, it was the drummer.
01:04:51
Speaker
You know, that could be. It could have been the drummer. But it's funny. Alex had the same thing where he's like, that's not physically possible. He's he's on stage with him, you know? The craziest note we ever got was with George Michael. So George Michael was kind of shot in the round with cameras kind of going almost completely around the stage. And we got a note from his management.
01:05:11
Speaker
Just so you know, George Michael's good side is his right side. And so you should always show, use the camera angle with his right side. We're like, then maybe you didn't want to shoot it in the round. Because there ah kind of is no right and left side. The camera is kind of moving around all the time. I heard there was also some fun with Tony Bennett too, being used to performing in the round that you're just like, oh, there's his back again. There's his back again.
01:05:35
Speaker
Yeah. Well, the the funniest, so Jeb Bryant, who did a lot of Mariah Carey stuff, he directed the Duran Duran on the show.
01:05:46
Speaker
And if you watch the duran Duran Unplugged very carefully, you will see that instruments change because ah they had these brightly colored instruments and they didn't use the same instruments on the same songs. And Jeb wanted to cut between takes.
01:06:03
Speaker
So it not only is one of those episodes that's complicated, completely unplugged is also the only episode that clearly it looks like it's been edited. Right. Because, you know, there's the basis. Yeah. John Taylor. like John Taylor. Yeah. So, so his base keeps going from like red to blue, like in between verses. In the same song. That's amazing. In the same song. Yeah. yeah You should look at it. I'm sure it's there somewhere. That's perfect.
01:06:29
Speaker
So moving into this quickly rescheduled take two that takes place in February, less than two months later, now in Los Angeles, now in a filming session with Rod Stewart and Dennis Leary. What are your memories of how the Unplugged crew was approaching things going into that one? Were they like more nervous or more like optimistic? Like, hey, maybe this will be all good. No worries.
01:06:51
Speaker
You know, I can't speak for them. I didn't go to the LA tapings. The funny thing was that Dennis Leary was a college mate and Adam Roth and Chris Phillips, who were his guitar player and bassist and were his backing band and helped write Asshole and all of the early stuff.
01:07:10
Speaker
They were my band in college. Really? And so the Dennis Leary Unplugged was a really funny thing because, um you know, like editing an unplugged and it's basically your old band.
01:07:24
Speaker
ah And then, you know, the Rod Stewart one is just Ron Wood. It was just such a thing that, you know, Not that I didn't care about the Neil Young, but I was so excited about the Rod Stewart one at this point. I'd already done a Neil Young show. yeah So I think it would have, I mean, they would have done the show just to get Rod Stewart and Ron Wood. That was such a get because it was, you know they were starting to, they were getting into the guest artists thing. And that was like the ultimate guest artist, like put the faces back together.
01:07:52
Speaker
So I don't know that there was any extra. I mean, my recollection was that we liked the Ed Sullivan show better. Wow. That was always the vibe that I got from everybody, Beth and Alex and everybody. Like we did the other show because we learned to do another show.
01:08:09
Speaker
But at the end of the day, the finished episode doesn't see the grumpiness. It doesn't see the doing the songs over. doesn't see taking a break in the middle to go backstage. It just sees the final performances. Yeah, yeah.
01:08:22
Speaker
It's a very different set list. It's a very different number of songs. um I mean, I think the l LA show had um more songs from more albums. yeah um Whereas the first show was a lot of... 69 to 77 kind of stuff and and a lot of things that had a lot of obscurities i think it had 16 what did look i looked at it said 16 songs off eight albums were at the ed sullivan show and then in in universal he did 18 songs off of 12 albums so i mean it was ah it was a longer set in la and it was off of
01:09:00
Speaker
more records but uh you know there were a bunch of songs that never saw air that he did only in new york that never never were done and never made it onto the record so um I think we kind of felt like the the New York show. Now, maybe some of that was that we we were like, yeah, come on, we did a good show you the first time. that yeah, there's you know that's a total cool kids table to actually even know what happened at the New York show because everybody everybody talks about and very few people got to see it, much less work on it. So you've probably actually seen it more than anyone doing the editing of it.
01:09:35
Speaker
Probably so. Yeah. So once you got the tapes back for this one, for the l L.A. show, were there any substantial differences you remember in his like performance or countenance or anything that made editing that l L.A. episode any more difficult or easier than the New York episode?
01:09:52
Speaker
No, I mean, even when they did shows in the same place, there would always be a certain amount of production design, lighting changes that they would do. So it had a different look and feel to, I mean, the Ed Sullivan Theater is like a theater, but they shot it close.
01:10:09
Speaker
So the shows that are shot at the Ed Sullivan Theater, it's not like they look like it's a big, wide theater. Same thing in Universal. It was always done to be very intimate. So, I mean, it has a slightly different look.
01:10:21
Speaker
But as far as harder, easier, I don't think, you know, by the time February came around, the the Clapton record had been out for a little while. And I think we were feeling a little, we were so in our oats a little We felt like we had a cool thing going.
01:10:36
Speaker
i think we were pretty confident that this one was going to get on air. Yeah. One of the things that I do like about the l LA set list, there were a couple cool songs that didn't make the broadcast or the album. Most notably to me, I really liked the acoustic trans songs that he did. So sampling old, knowing that that's out there somewhere. Did you have to edit together every single song? Like is every song that he did in LA, is there a finished product of that out there somewhere? Or were there ones that they told you like, oh, don't worry about X, Y, and Z?
01:11:06
Speaker
I'm fairly certain that somewhere every song he performed is... i mean, when they walk off the set and it comes to me, I have what they call line cut.
01:11:17
Speaker
Beth McCarthy Miller is sitting in a truck or sitting in a control room, directing the cameras, telling them what to do. And then she is in the control room, just like it was the Super Bowl, saying, take this camera, take that camera. And So there's a line cut of the whole show that, you know, would be infinitely watchable yeah to anybody.
01:11:37
Speaker
So that certainly exists. I am fairly certain that we did a line cut of the entire performance, especially somebody like Neil Young. We probably went through and cleaned up everything because if you skipped over a song, if you didn't do sample and hold, and then at the last minute, they're like, they want it in the show. of have to go back to square one. So the process was typically clean up the entire performance, just sort of from an archival point of view, to have it on tape and then put together the air show.
01:12:08
Speaker
Very cool. Well, um before my last question, are there any other unplugged stories or experiences, Neil or otherwise, that you find yourself flashing back to fondly um or with cold shutters, perhaps, that that really sort of encapsulate your time working on the show?
01:12:25
Speaker
You know, they fall the shows fall into a couple of categories. you know they They're like the big, the Dylans, the Neil Youngs, the Allman Brothers, the shows that were like bands that when I first became a rock and roll fan and first started playing guitar, you know that I worked on. And then of course, the ones I didn't work on like Clapton or Elton John or something.
01:12:45
Speaker
You know, Tony Bennett, my father was a huge Tony Bennett fan. So I just remember there were times where the edit room was a lot of fun. We always had guitars around. So by the end of a performance, like, you know, Alex and I would know how to play. We could sit in with the band. We'd know every song. By by the end of the edit, we would order a lot of real good food.
01:13:04
Speaker
Beth was a sweetheart. She was living in Hoboken at that time, too. ah edited her audition tape for Saturday Night Live. and Then she's gone on to do all these wonderful things. Then the other shows that were really memorable were the bands that were of the moment. So like Lenny Kravitz, Sheryl Crow, Soul Asylum, Alanis Morissette, Oasis, which Oasis is another one that like the just the legendary stories. And, you know, we we worked really hard to cut in as many shots as we could of Liam smoking and drinking up in the balcony.
01:13:36
Speaker
But I think Soul Asylum was one of those ones where like Alex and I and Beth, it was like on constant rotation. I mean, I think we were still listening to CDs on Walkman, it was like in constant rotation and they were a band of the moment.
01:13:52
Speaker
I had a childhood crush on Lulu from seeing her and to serve with love. And so, you know, that was an awesome episode stone temple pilots, you know that was sort of in the period where like the living room period with Sheryl Crow on the couch and, and with the Scott Weiland in the rocking chair, you know, sort of did the living room thing for a while, you know, lots, lots of great, great episodes. The whole episode was, was again, was one of those ones where it was like, she was the biggest thing on the planet at that moment.
01:14:20
Speaker
And probably the only time she played with a harp on stage with her too, because that that little ensemble they had playing with them, I was like, this is amazing. Yeah, but it was fun. And you know and then you know once we got into like 97, it really became like,
01:14:34
Speaker
it was always on life support. It kind of like the show would go away. And then all of a sudden it'd be like, okay, we're doing the wallflowers and pineapple and, you know, and you'd get a bunch more episodes. I think the last one I did was Lauren Hill, which is also sort of a legendary, uh, either depending on who you ask, either a disaster or, or sheer brilliance. right yeah I think it, I think it's a little more on the brilliant side, uh, certainly not a typical unplug.
01:15:00
Speaker
So yeah, that, that, that, Took us up to like early 2000, like when we did Stained and Lauryn Hill. Then it kind of died. And then when it came back as 2.0, it was done in the, it was in the TRL studios.
01:15:13
Speaker
It became a much, sort of went back to like what it was in the early days where it was sort of like, you know, rush it to air. Don't spend too much time or money on it. and They were great shows, but it was a different beast. Less than a hundred people in the room, just real tight. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:15:28
Speaker
All right. Well, um last question. This one's this one's a two parter. First, of all the unplugged episodes you did work on, is there a single shot or sequence that you edited together that you are most proud of or is most memorable to you?
01:15:43
Speaker
The Nirvana lead belly, where did you sleep last night, is kind of one of those moments. think the Lenny Kravitz gospel close is another one of those moments.
01:15:55
Speaker
By that point, by the time we got to Alice in Chains, like 95, I had opened my own company, Beehive, and all the posts moved over to my shop, which I ran with my wife, who was the, she was the creative director at Broadway Video, and we opened up Beehive and had edit rooms there.
01:16:13
Speaker
Sometimes the edit room would get a little too loud, and it was an office with a bunch of graphic designers and people. I remember that, strangely enough, the Alice in Chains episode, because their harmonies and the melodicism, when you take out the drop-D guitars and the grunge, it was just...
01:16:32
Speaker
The beauty of the harmonies were so great that I remember the entire week we working on that, no one ever complained about the sound of the music. And it was blasting all the time. And by the end of the week, my whole staff was like, you know, singing everything.
01:16:46
Speaker
I can't remember the name of the Alice in Chains song, but there's a moment in that with a close up of Lane that is just, you know, again, he's he's left us. And it was just an indelible, and indelible performance. Amazing. We caught him at their peak.
01:17:02
Speaker
And it was just a bunch of it. Yeah. Oh, very cool. do love that one. That's actually one of my favorite unplugged moments is when Lane messes up a song, he's feeling a little down, and Jerry plays a couple bars of the Hee Haw song, Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me. yeah And Lane gives him just like the sweetest little smile where you're like, even of everything that Lane was dealing with at that time, there was still such a beautiful humanity and relationship between those two that, like you're saying, even even came out harmony. Yeah.
01:17:31
Speaker
Who was it that started playing Sweet Home Alabama? Oh, that's Nirvana. that Yeah, they did that one. That would be a great compilation album is all the like less than a minute snippets that happened here and there. Yeah.
01:17:44
Speaker
Well, i guess I remember the Roland and Tumbling, Eric Clapton thing was not part of the part of the set list. And I think that the front half of that, they just started playing in between and they'd Start rolling the tapes. I think it was during a break that he started doing that. I think I read they were swapping out film or something like that in the camera. Yeah. And they started playing yeah Alex and everybody's like, well, get cameras on this. what was That's great.
01:18:08
Speaker
Yeah. so second part of the final question, is there a specific episode or two that you didn't work on that in retrospect you would have just loved to be a part of? The ones that get me are the first Pearl Jam.
01:18:21
Speaker
I just barely missed the first Pearl Jam, and I missed the LL Cool J episode. The Yo Unplugged, yeah. Yeah, so Sleeper One is the Uptown Unplugged. Yeah.
01:18:34
Speaker
See, if you want to talk about great moments, Heavy D's set in the Uptown, when he does when they when he does the one, two, three, scream. right I watched that recently, and that that was a fan favorite around the edit room. Oh, nice.
01:18:49
Speaker
I think that the Clapton one is is the big get that I kind of regret, and then maybe the Pearl Jam one, because that's such a legendary performance. Oh. Yeah, that's so funny. I actually, I mentioned it, I think in one of the first couple of episodes I did is that the two, not just individual episodes, but the two multi-taping sessions that I wish I could go back to is the night that they did Pearl Jam, Mariah Carey, and then Boyz II Men, Joe Public, and Shawnee. So that would be one. And then the Yo Unplugged REM double taping would have just been insane to be at as well. I think those are, those are great. So I, I caught REM at the end.
01:19:25
Speaker
I did the second second thousand one one performance. yeah But I would have loved to have done the first one. I was a big, huge REM fan. With MTV News, I got to hang around them.
01:19:37
Speaker
because the Tim Summer and a lot of a lot of MTV friends that were in the r REM circle. So I was really into them. I went to an amazing show with MTV News hanging around just as a hanger on when they played Rutgers.
01:19:52
Speaker
And it was right about when Fables came out. They were sort of breaking out of the true indie. So I would have loved to have done that first the first REM one. That would have been another. Absolutely.
Conclusion and Farewells
01:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, completely agree.
01:20:05
Speaker
Well, John, it's been such a fun time getting to pick your brain and hear your unplugged stories. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. i really appreciate it. My pleasure. And there we go.
01:20:15
Speaker
My thanks to John for adding another insightful, clarifying, and record-correcting layer to the Youngplug saga. I hope you all have enjoyed and gotten as much out of this fun little retrospective journey as I have.
01:20:27
Speaker
And who knows, maybe all this Neil Unplugged chatter and love will result in some eventual good news about the 92 Unplugged somehow, someway, finally seeing the light of day.
01:20:37
Speaker
Okay, I think that'll do it for this episode. Don't forget about our Heart of Gold Vinyl giveaway contest with our friends over at Killphonic. To enter, just send me an email at unpluggedrevisited at gmail.com telling me one thing you like about Neil Young's Unplugged, and you can double your chances by rating and reviewing Unplugged Revisited wherever you stream the show and attaching a screenshot of that to your email.
01:21:01
Speaker
If you want to connect with the show for any questions, corrections, or anything else, you can email me, unpluggedrevisited, at gmail.com, or leave a voicemail by calling 234-REVISIT or reach out on social media.
01:21:14
Speaker
As always, please take a moment to follow the pod on your platform of choice so that it'll automatically pop into your feed when it goes live. I've got a great batch of artist interviews already in the can for the next few episodes, so make sure to join me again in two weeks to hear from a certified double-diamond rock star who played Unplugged back in... Well, should I give away the year?
01:21:35
Speaker
Okay, it was... 1996. ninety ninety six Whoa, huge clue, right? The list of artists who actually fit that descriptor is not very big, so you can probably guess it. Or just wait a couple weeks for the next episode and be pleasantly surprised.
01:21:50
Speaker
Until then, my friends, be kind to yourself and look out for each other.