Three live performances are included in the Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 box set, two of which were actually released in 2008. Of course, that doesn’t include live video footage you can find in hidden tracks and the video log, usually tucked underneath track listing screens, throughout the set.

If you pre-ordered the set, you also received another previously released concert on DVD/CD, Sugar Mountain Live At the Canterbury House 1968, which I wrote about back in December in this post. Also in that piece, I mentioned a bit about one of the other discs, Live At Massey Hall 1971, which I picked up last year. Live At The Fillmore East 1970 with Crazy Horse and Live At The Riverboat 1969 are the other two performances in the set.

Suffice to say Massey Hall is Young’s best overall performance of these discs. He appears to have fully realized himself as a solo performer by this time despite touring with a rather serious back injury and playing in a brace. But he had found the perfect balance between polished performer and humorous and engaging stage personality.

As is revealed in an Archives meeting elsewhere in the set, he intended to release a live acoustic album from this tour at the time but it was ditched when sessions for the Harvest album began in February 1971.

On both Sugar Mountain and Riverboat his performances are excellent and the song selections feature some of his earliest solo work and tunes from Buffalo Springfield, not material he revisits that often as a solo artist today.

The Fillmore disc, which I didn’t purchase on release, is also very good but my least favorite. I like Crazy Horse, particularly during the Danny Whitten phase, and they are perfectly suited to Young, a rocking, raucous and loose outfit that plays well together if slightly frayed around the edges. I can dip in and out of the disc but it’s not one I will listen to beginning to end.

That disc has no audio hidden tracks I could find but it does have some excellent photos from the concert. The material is from the Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere album along with Winterlong, Wonderin’ and Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown. I particularly like the slow, lazy rendering of Everybody Knows and both Down By The River and Cowgirl In The Sand.

That brings us to Riverboat, which is much like Canterbury but maybe even more engaging. It was recorded in a very small club in Toronto and Young is in his extended rap mode, which kind of startled me on the Canterbury disc, since I’ve seen him and never found him that chatty in concert. Evidently, he was much more so in his early days.

All the raps are amusing and interesting, including an extended one on a visit to a doctor, the most “incredible doctor” he’d ever been to who “put his hand right inside me. I’m not kidding, underneath the skin. And he changed me around.” Raps are included in between just about every track, including one that ramblings on about audiences, dope songs and ’60s band names and another in which he cites Robin Hood minstrel Allen A-Dale as being “better the Clapton.”

In my piece on the Blu-Ray preview disc I received, I trashed the early demo of Sugar Mountain from Disc 0 The Early Years as one of the worst versions I had heard of this seemingly overplayed tune. As an opener on Riverboat, it’s one of the best, if not the best, performance of this Young staple. He takes it to places I hadn’t heard before, particularly in his approach on acoustic guitar. And although nearly six minutes, it’s not in the slightest overlong.

The rest of the repertoire is all from one my favorite eras of Young’s career with The Old Laughing Lady, I’ve Loved Her So Long and The Last Trip To Tulsa from his first solo album. Four Buffalo Springfield tunes, On The Way Home, Broken Arrow, Expecting To Fly and Flying On The Ground Is Wrong are included. Just as on Canterbury, hearing the two songs from the Springfield’s second album Again played acoustically is a real treat. Also included is a little comical ditty called 1956 Bubblegum Disaster.

The highlight of these may be Flying On The Ground, which Young didn’t sing in favor of Richie Furay on the Springfield’s first album. The treatment here is delicate and accomplished. Hearing Young sing it brings out the beauty of the melody more than other renditions.

The disc includes nine hidden tracks, more examples of the loquacious Young, under the Archive listing in the main menu. These are raps from another Canterbury gig from 1969, a year later than Sugar Mountain. Entertaining but it would have been nice if at least some of these included the performances of some of the songs he’s talking about or that they precede. That’s a little curious.

Live At Massey Hall has several video extras that include Young’s performances of Needle And The Damage Done and Journey Through The Past on the early ’70s Johnny Cash TV show, a clip from a Dutch Documentary filmed at his Broken Arrow Ranch in California with the fellow he wrote about in the song Old Man and an Archives meeting. There’s also a radio interview with Redbeard about recording A Man Needs A Maid with the London Sympony Orchestra.

But the most interesting and my favorite live performance isn’t on any of these discs. It’s a hidden track on the timeline of Disc 6 Topanga 3. Here we find Young in June 1970 at the back of a small club in New York, the Feenjon Cafe, playing an acoustic version of The Loner that melds into Cinnamon Girl and is finally edited into the end of the song from an acoustic performance at the Fillmore East.

In addition, the clip ends with Young walking through Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, where he is stopped by a long-haired musician carrying what looks like a Gibson Jumbo acoustic guitar and asks Young if he’ll show him how to play Cinnamon Girl. At first reluctant, Young tunes the axe down to D mode and briefly shows his student where to find the opening chords. An excellent sequence.

This segment, among many others on the set, shows that, although The Archives are expensive, have been endlessly delayed, beset by some problems on release and are housed in a small fortress, it’s a project and concept far ahead of the curve and will be the standard for future career-spanning box sets.