The audio from the Bridge Street School Benefit concert is available

Buffalo Springfield reunion

Forty years waiting and it was all over in two days.

For fans of Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield et al, the audio from the benefit concert in Mountain View is online.

The sound is much better than the fan videos posted yesterday from YouTube. Thanks to Bob Lefsetz for the tip.

The last song is a treat “Rockin in the Free World”

The reunion concerts were part of the 4 day event called “Rustfest” running October 21 to 24th.

“Listen to this before they take it down,” says Bob Lefsetz.

The two concerts were benefits for the Bridge Street School, ” professional development opportunities for people interested and/or involved in working with individuals who have severe physical and speech impairments”. It’s a charity favored by Neil Young.

Bob Lefsetz writes

“Solid proof that video is a disservice to music.  Listening to these tracks one feels closer to the music, closer to being there than watching any YouTube clip.

And for those of you young ‘uns who wonder what it was like in the pre-MTV/video days, it was like this.  Live takes by our favorite bands were rare.  We snuck in cassette decks, we purchased bootleg albums, all in an effort to get closer to the music.

You can’t hear the image on these streams.  Whether the players are beautiful or ugly is unknown.  But you can hear the experience.  This is not the sound of mechanized beats, this is the imperfect sound of human beings.  So imperfect as to touch our hearts in a way no airbrushing, whether audio or video, ever could.  You can clean up the tracks, but you end up with less.  It’s our warts that make us appealing.  Remove them at your peril.

You can’t play this well at age thirteen.  Used to be you had to pick up your axe at that age, practice when you were the only one who was listening and slowly enter a world that only let you play if you were good.  You couldn’t post your tracks online, if you were truly good, you could get someone to pay a cover to see you live.

Really, these tracks are revelatory.  I’m listening to “Bluebird” and the guitar interplay as the track wears on is the essence of music, the interplay amongst musicians speaking to each other and ultimately to us through their instruments.

See – Buffalo Springfield reunion