- A MONSTER Shootout Winning early pressing with Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
- Bruce Botnick engineered at Wally Heiders, with Henry Lewy in charge of the mix, so this album’s bona fides are hard to fault
- Fans of Neil Young (and the album Zuma in particular) will find plenty to like here
- 4 1/2 stars: “Since Crazy Horse first came to public attention as the backing band for Neil Young it makes sense to expect that the band on its own would play something similar to the hard guitar rock and country-rock heard on those albums… But there is more going on than that. Also joining in are veteran arranger/producer Jack Nitzsche and guitarist Nils Lofgren, while Ry Cooder adds slide guitar to a number of tracks.”
Drop the needle on ‘Gone Dead Train’ and tell me it doesn’t remind you of ‘Waiting for the End of the World’ by Elvis Costello.
This vintage Reprise pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What outstanding sides such as these have to offer is not hard to hear:
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1971
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
What We’re Listening For on Crazy Horse’s Self-Titled Debut
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would have put them.
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
TRACK LISTING
Side One
Gone Dead Train
Dance, Dance, Dance
Look at All the Things
Beggars Day
I Don’t Want to Talk About It
Side Two
Downtown
Carolay
Dirty, Dirty
Nobody
I’ll Get By
Crow Jane Lady
AMG Review
Since Crazy Horse first came to public attention as the backing band for Neil Young it makes sense to expect that the band on its own would play something similar to the hard guitar rock and country-rock heard on those albums… and that is what one hears to a large extent on the debut album Crazy Horse. But there is more going on than that. Also joining in are veteran arranger/producer Jack Nitzsche and guitarist Nils Lofgren, while Ry Cooder adds slide guitar to a number of tracks. The result is a varied group of songs that range in style from rock and country to blues and folk.