Neil Young ‎– Sample And Hold

Be careful mixing with this one! For a track that presumably was made for the dance floor, the tempo on the dance remix drifts all over the place.

Suprised people are not on this record more.....Super melodic vocoder!

This Sample and Hold/Mr. Soul release was extremely contreversial in that Geffen was completely dissatisfied with the whole album and Neil's musical direction--and because Neil loyalists thought that the vocoder/dance tempo version of Mr. Soul was a sacrilegious slam to the original 1972 release of the song.

Neil was pretty excited about the album though, and I was fortunate enough (with my colleague John Ingham) to be hired by Warner Brothers to do the 12" remixes and edits--a process that took over a month, drove everyone involved to the brink of insanity, and cost ten times more than it should have.

The remix/edit drama began on a rainy weeknight at a recording studio high in the hills above Malibu where we met David Briggs, Neil's longtime producer, who had placed duct tape over all of the guages on the recording console, which was HIS style of recording/mixing--and the first sign of trouble. He had no intention of allowing us to actually remix the songs or touch the console; he wanted complete control over all 24 tracks and all we were allowed to do was listen and (politely) comment on what we were hearing.

Finally--three days later and after nothing meaningul had been produced (except for a minor relationship with Briggs and the five enginners hired to sit though the process)--we were able to influence the mix (but not touch the console!!) and spent several more days mixing down the songs to 2-track tape (24 reels!!!!) that we had to take back to Warner Brothers' Amigo Studios in Burbank and splice together into the final release versions.

The editing took another two weeks of late nights, and without the help of Phil Brown, a senior enginner at Amigo, we would have used the splicing razor blades to take our lives because we had to pull tape from all 24 reels to assemble the remixes and had completely lost our minds and ears. A three day project had now stretched to nearly thirty and everyone involved was pissed off--including us.

When we finally delivered the mixes to Warners, they loved them--as did Neil--enough that he insisted that John and I be flown to his Northern Claifornia ranch/studio for the day to hang out, which was an incredible experience.

Despite our month of effort and angst, the remixes were played by about 10 club DJs (including me) and were a commercial and chart bomb, eventually leading to a massive lawsuit between Neil and Geffen Records. Billboard's dance music critic hailed our version of Mr. Soul as an excellent remix treatment and called to personally say how much he liked it, which, combined with our fantastic day with Neil at his ranch, was enough to justify dedicating a month of late nights to the project. It's still a personal favorite of mine (and Neil's)--give it a spin!

Steve Sukman
Team Groove