The musicians-Tim Drummond on bass, Kenny Buttrey on drums, Jack Nitzsche on piano and Ben Keith on steel guitar-play with practiced ease that belies the turbulent context of the tour. The sound quality is startlingly clear and the band is locked in on a track list that features five of the 10 songs from Harvest, a couple of tunes from earlier albums and a handful of then-new songs.
Far better late than never: though Tuscaloosa doesn’t include the full show, the album captures Young and The Stray Gators, his band between 1971-73, in peak form. Young kept that recording locked away for 46 years before selecting it for his ongoing Archives series. Maybe that accounts for the arrival in October 1973 of Time Fades Away, a piecemeal live album of previously unreleased songs, instead of the hit-laden setlist from his Feb. Young was also unsettled enough by his growing solo success that he sought to undercut it by loading concerts with new material that audiences wouldn’t have heard before, rather than trotting out the familiar songs that have come to define his career. He was shaken by the recent death of his friend and ex-bandmate Danny Whitten, who had a fatal overdose the same night that Young dismissed him from rehearsals for the Harvest tour, which itself was famously fraught Young later complained about “money hassles,” and the shows were so shaky at one point that he asked David Crosby and Graham Nash to come lend a hand on backing vocals. Though his 1972 release Harvest was the top-selling album in America that year, Young was not in a celebratory mood. Neil Young can be irascible at the best of times, but things were looking particularly dour when he and his band The Stray Gators rolled into Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in February 1973.