Time Fades Away (50th Anniversary Edition) LP

From Neil

"‘Time Fades Away’ is taken from a tour in 1973, a tough time to go on the road, right after the death of Danny Whitten. With me on the tour, Ben Keith, Jack Nitzsche, Tim Drummond and Kenny Buttrey made up this wonderful band of musicians. Johnny Barbata joined the tour half way through down near New Orleans, and he can be heard playing drums throughout this recording. Johnny was originally from the Turtles. The tour was about 3 months and it was my very first big tour, traveling throughout the USA and parts of Canada, playing full sized arenas with between 15 and 19 thousand people in the audience. We had never done this before and neither had many other people. Our PA was lifted on towers on either side of the stage, not like today’s tours where everything hangs from the ceiling of the building. The monitors, which were to allow me to hear what I was singing, were not big enough and I had to sing very loud just to hear myself. Again, no one had done this before at the time and we were blazing some new ground in 1973. You can hear it in my voice. We played a lot of Harvest songs on the tour but I wanted to make a live album of new material. That is what Time Fades Away is. It was not well received, much less popular than many of my previous records, but I did do what I wanted to do and that was the most important thing to me. Elliot Mazer produced and did a great job in the truck we carried to all the shows. Some of the already known songs we did on the tour were released many years later on Tuscaloosa (which features Kenny Buttrey on drums). The whole tour was stressful and ‘Time Fades Away’ does reflect that. I am still uncomfortable hearing it even today, though I still hear from a people who liked it. Thank goodness for these die-hard fans!"

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