Pitchfork

The term "solo artist" is the most common misnomer in rock history, an insult to the oppressed and silent majority behind each legend's curtain. I'm talking about the sidemen, the backing bands, the producers, whose names are known only to the most ardent of sleeve-note scholars and biographers, and whose importance is recognized all too rarely. Elvis Presley had Scotty Moore and Sam Phillips, Bob Dylan had Al Kooper and Bob Johnston, David Bowie had Brian Eno and Mick Ronson, all integral parts of the sound that made each one famous, but doomed to never grace the marquee alongside the featured star.

Over the course of his career, Neil Young has run through a whole wardrobe of identities, each with its own critical supporting cast: a handful of country-rock bands with Stephen Stills, his seminal acoustic records with Nashville session supergroup the Stray Gators, tours and records with Booker T. & the MG's and Pearl Jam. But the group that Young returns to again and again is perhaps the unlikeliest, certainly not the most famous, and definitely not the most technically polished. Since 1969, Crazy Horse have been the three-piece engine that has fueled some of Young's most iconic work, and he has repaid them with the kind of equal billing that unsung sidemen so infrequently receive.

The proof is pictured on the cover of Live at the Fillmore East, where Young made the venue's sign-letter putter-upper do the extra work of spelling out his backing band's name alongside his own. At the time, Young was coming off an insanely successful record and tour with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but he brushed them aside to play shows with the band that had backed him on his breakout solo statement Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot, and Ralph Molina. Unknown, unpolished, even untalented (according to some), Crazy Horse were the complete antithesis of the polished and fashionable CSN, yet they helped Young achieve his apocalyptic garage-rock visions more vividly than the awkward compromises of the industry-assembled supergroup ever could.

Ironically, given Crazy Horse's oft-documented lack of technical ability, these 1970 shows took place at the time in rock history when improvisation was prized almost to the point of being a requirement. The Fillmore itself was a venue closely associated with the marathon jam sessions of bands like the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers, and Miles Davis' fusion experiments actually shared the bill with Young & Crazy Horse. Young's contribution to this trend were his fraternal-twin epics "Down By the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand", each with grand valleys of open space between brief scripted moments of verse and chorus. This release is dominated by those two songs, both of which gallivant past the 10-minute mark without ever growing stale, perfect demonstrations of the chemistry between frontman and supporters. The rhythm section of Talbot and Molina is anything but tight or flashy, but their dinosaur lope contains enough unpredictability to give the band a weird sort of swing, the bedrock upon which Danny Whitten and Neil Young stage their guitar conversations. The myth of Whitten has always been cloudy, his heroin habit having extinguished his much-lauded talent and, eventually, his life just as Crazy Horse started to gain a reputation, but it's on full display here, his ever-evolving rhythm parts combining with guest Jack Nitzsche's electric-piano to steer the jam sections' flow, giving Young plenty of room to lay down his alternately sad and angry note-choked leads.

Between these monumental performances, the set's other songs are almost like smoke breaks, brief bits of the heartfelt, ragged pop Young specialized in circa After the Goldrush. Relative rarity "Winterlong" is the gem of these shorter tracks, one of the sweetest songs in Young's electric repertoire, with a romantic aura made somehow more genuine by the hilariously broken harmonies. "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown" is the Horse's spotlight, Whitten showing that he was arguably a better, or at least more traditionally rock'n'roll, singer than his boss-- a reminder that he essentially sings the lead part on "Cinnamon Girl", Young's biggest electric radio hit.

Yet as the first release of the long-promised purge of Young's extensive archives, the format of Live at the Fillmore East is condescendingly slight, selecting only highlights from the band's two-night/four-show run rather than providing complete, unabridged sets. For a band whose genius sprouts from imperfections and serendipitous mistakes, it's a disservice to deny Young's rabid fanbase unedited release of tapes that have been so long anticipated; they were recorded at the time for a live album that was later scrapped. But the few scraps they deemed worthy of release are nevertheless enough to justify the legendary status of Crazy Horse's early days, and explain why it was an easy call for Young to make the rare "solo artist" decision of treating his collaborators as equal partners.