In the final days of 2025, the Neil Young Archives team quietly dropped a recording of Neil Young and Crazy Horse‘s Feb. 25, 1970, show at Music Hall in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a “Winter Solstice” gift to the fan community. (Rolling Stone reports)
The tape has circulated for years as a cherished bootleg sourced from the soundboard, but it’s never sounded quite this pristine.
It’s a remarkable 16-song set that includes the debut of “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” which was paired into a medley with “The Old Laughing Lady,” the first performance of “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” and Young’s first known live rendition of Joe London’s “It Might Have Been,” which he eventually recorded for Oceanside/Countryside.
More importantly, this is the very first time that one of his shows with Crazy Horse was captured on tape. They played clubs all across North America in 1969 to promote Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, but this was before Young joined Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and became a household name. Nearly every venue in 1969 promoted him as a former member of Buffalo Springfield, and the good people at the Warehouse in Providence, Rhode Island, billed him as “Mell Young of the Buffalo Springfield.” These were supposedly incredible nights where he forged a bond with Crazy Horse that lasts to this day, but not a second of it was recorded, even on a hissy bootleg.
