This letter is to authenticate a Gold Star acetate of Neil Young’s 1981 album Re-ac-tor. This uses the original song titles for “Opera Star” (Born to Rock) and for “Surfer Joe and Moe The Sleeze” (just “Moe The Sleeze”), and has an engineer’s notes on the label. I was working for Neil at the time, and he gave this to me. I photographed Neil Young for the first time at his first East Coast show with Crazy Horse, at the Bitter End in New York City, in February 1969. I went on to work with Neil extensively, as both his and CSNY’s tour photographer, and shooting him for eighteen of his album covers (including After The Gold Rush, Harvest, Time Fades Away, Tonight’s The Night, Decade and Rust Never Sleeps) plus numerous other official projects including publicity, advertising, songbooks and posters. On various tours from 1973-1993, I also worked with Neil as his guitar technician and served as his archivist for 20 years, researching and presenting him with every source for audio, artwork and text used in his massive box set Archives Vol. 1 1963-1972. During the course of working for Neil, he gave me various acetates, test pressings, set lists and other memorabilia. Neil knew I was a collector and he wasn’t, so once he was done with things like this, instead of throwing them away, he often gave it to me. This is one of those items, from my personal collection. Sincerely, Joel Bernstein.
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