Record store owner finds rare tape of ‘lost’ 1973 Neil Young concert at university in Hamilton | CBC News

Last year, Chad Silva, 24, owner of Flashbacks Records on Concession Street in Hamilton, received a large donation of cassette tapes. Silva said that most record shop owners wouldn’t have given the pile of homemade mixtapes and recordings a second glance. 

“I went through everything because I’m thorough,” he said. “Everything else was almost trash worthy.” 

Except for two unlabelled tapes, containing notes in looping handwriting on the back of the setlist for a lost 1973 McMaster University Neil Young show. 

“As a fan, I was like oh my God, Neil Young at McMaster University. I never even thought he would play there,” Silva said. 

The Sugar Mountain Neil Young fan website has curated a list of all the known Neil Young shows, and their recordings. Silva found the date of the McMaster show, Oct. 28, 1973, almost 50 years ago. 

“Beside that date, it said not recorded, presumed to be lost. And I was like, well, I have it in my hands right here,” Silva said. 

A ‘unique and unusual’ concert

The tape Silva found was part of Young’s ‘Tonight’s the Night’ tour. 

Paul Panzechek, a McMaster student at the time, and long-time volunteer at CFMU, McMaster’s student radio station, said even though it was almost 50 years ago, he said he remembers it well. 

“It was just before Halloween. It was raining and cold,” he said. 

“[Young] wore the white suit like the cover of Tonight’s the Night, and had a palm tree with a light bulb on top of it. And every once in a while he flicked the light bulb on and said ‘Welcome to Miami Beach, everything is cheaper than it looks.'”

After the concert, an article in McMaster’s student paper, The Silhouette, written by Carol Ann Wilson, brought up the stage dressing in a scathing review of the concert. 

“If an artificial palm tree and a light bulb ‘sun’ can convince you you’re in Palm Beach, then you also probably feel that the long awaited Neil Young concert was worth the $5.00 ticket,” the article said. 

Panzechek said the crowd of students didn’t know how to take the concert either. 

“They didn’t recognize any songs and, you know, it was interesting, but… it wasn’t familiar,” he said.

Panzechek said that to this day, the 1973 McMaster Neil Young concert is in his top three shows he’s ever been to. 

“I’ve been to a fair amount of concerts in my life but, it’s up there because it was so unique and unusual and had so many unexpected twists and turns, and they played great,” Panzechek said. 

‘Neil’s pretty consumed with his archives’

Silva said the woman who recorded and donated the bootleg copy of the concert never intended for it to be distributed. 

“The story is her husband couldn’t make the show, so she just brought her tape recorder for him to hear it later,” Silva said. 

Silva said the woman who donated the tapes was worried Young would file a lawsuit against her, after reading that Eric Clapton allegedly sued a German widow after she put a bootleg CD of his on eBay in 2021. Clapton did not pursue the lawsuit. 

“I don’t think a lawsuit is even in the realm of possibilities,” Astrid Young, Neil Young’s sister, said. “I think it’s more of a matter of interest at this point, like a ‘Let’s see what it sounds like’ kind of thing.”

In fact, in 2020 Young released six bootleg recordings of his concerts as vinyl records.

Astrid said that in recent years, Young has turned his focus to archiving his life’s work, and that he’s currently working on his music from the 90s and 2000s. 

“Currently Neil’s pretty consumed with his archives,” she said, and added that her brother has recordings of most of his concerts from his long, prolific career. 

“There is so much material, and they started working on this probably in the late 80s, sifting through shows and a lot of it’s on tape too,” she said. 

“If you can imagine having to listen to 300 different versions of Down by the River, each one of them being 20 minutes long or something like that. It’s definitely a full time job for quite a few people,” Astrid said. 

“There’s a lot of bootlegs floating around. Some of them are really good and some of them are really bad,” she said, and added that Young’s interest comes down to how clean the audio is. 

CBC Hamilton listened to the tape at Flashbacks Record Store, and found the audio very clear. 

Silva said he has been in contact with Young’s management and is donating the tape to the Neil Young archives. 

He said he’s happy he ended up with the tape, so it can go into the archives instead of the trash. 

“I truly think in my heart of hearts, if any other store received this donation, it’d be in the landfill right now,” he said.