“They’ve got it now, Robbie,” says Neil Young to The Band’s Robbie Robertson in The Last Waltz. Young has just been introduced and run through a few chords and notes on his harmonica. Young cracks himself up at his mock-confident assurance before launching into a performance of “Helpless” that would forever help me begin to come to terms with both the wheat and the chaff among this free-wheeling artist’s highs, lows, suspect collaborators, and unintended associations. The fact that Young could do this while retaining such a singular voice was eye opening. The “singular voice” thing wasn’t hard for me to grasp. I’d gravitated toward the opinionated, iconoclastic sort for as long as I could remember, but embracing and making the most of the likes of Crosby and Stills? No thank you! Sure, I’d been thinking this stuff to death. As a 9-year-old boy hearing “Heart of Gold” on AM radio, this Neil Young guy sounded pretty damn cool and deep. A few years later, however, between wondering what he saw in those smug, hippie CSN assholes and suffering the Neil-lite of America’s “A Horse With No Name” my life with Neil Young was on life support. Even in 8th grade, with Neil’s “Cinnamon Girl” among the ranks of hundreds of girls, real and imagined, I was bursting to simply talk to if not touch, this guy had some unsettling baggage. It wasn’t until 10th grade, when I saw him in The Last Waltz, that I finally found a way to get inside Neil Young and his music. It would be too late to help me fully navigate the high school social scene, but it was a start.

The release of an 8-CD box set, Archives, Vol. 1: 1963-1972, set me on a journey through the past with Neil, an artist I’ve bought a good 15 albums by, most of which I’ve cranked up, fired up to, and shed a tear over. I dumped one a few months after buying it, Ragged Glory, which launched his “Godfather of Grunge” era and, for me, drove home the sorry site of a middle-aged rocker in ill-fitting jeans. Today I find myself square in my own rocker in ill-fitting jeans era. Although I’ve never listed him, in mouth-breather fanboy fashion, on any list of my All-Time Favorite Artists of, Like, Ever, I’m appreciating more than ever the role Neil Young played in my high school years and beyond. It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of Young fanatics already own most of this set in bootleg/blog download form. A few years ago, for instance, a friend handed me five CDs worth of Buffalo Springfield outtakes and early solo recordings of this variety, all swiped from the web. Young’s finished recordings are so direct and unpolished that, if you like his stuff, it’s hard to go wrong with this archived material documenting the development of his voice. That said, this collection is not to be mistaken for Vol. 1 of an expanded Decades, the classic 3-lp collection of Neil’s work through the mid-’70s that is still the best place to start if you want to make one Neil Young purchase before departing on a year-long trip to the moon.

Speaking of the high school social scene, around the same time I acquired this box set I finally gave into Facebook. As a friend promised, it’s given me the chance to catch up with old classmates who’d long left my life, including grade school classmates I lost touch with before our voices broke. Most of our interactions, following an initial string of messages that confirms we’re actually alive and all grown up, are of the Like variety. I Like their link; they Like my status update. It’s not too far removed from our hallway greetings and furtive classroom giggles. The more I surfed Facebook and spun Neil the more I thought about what a great a role model Neil could have been for me through my high school years. Unlike my more idealistic and confrontational rock ‘n roll heroes, Neil got along with anyone who crossed his path all the while doing it his way. It’s cool, you know?
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