Neil Young - Re-Ac-Tor Gold Star Acetate - 1981

Here’s an ultra rare Neil Young’s artifact,Neil’s very own acetate for his 1981 album Re-ac-tor, acquired directly from photographer Joel Bernstein.

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.

Bob Dylan - 4 Dylan Owned Unreleased Acetates Ball and Stripe Rag AKA Little Sadie - 1970

A 10” acetate of an unreleased, alternate version of Bob Dylan’s “In Search of Little Sadie”
(titled here  “Ball & Stripe Rag”) from his 1970 album Self Portrait. This acetate was previously owned by Dylan and used during the making of that album. The version is just voice and guitar; it was completely unreleased until a different mix of it appeared on The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971).

This acetate was part of a collection of Dylan acetates discovered this year in a five story brownstone at 124 West Houston Street in Greenwich Village. From approximately 1969 through 1972, Dylan rented the ground  floor of the building for use as a studio (at the time, he lived two blocks away at 94 McDougal St.). When the owner of the building died in January 2014, her executor found the acetates in two boxes labeled “Old Records,” in a a loft closet above the bedroom. The discovery of these acetates received extensive media coverage in publications including The New York Times, Wall St. Journal, Rolling Stone, and Billboard.

The Houston, St. Studios acetates originally belonged to Bob Dylan, who either discarded them or left them when he moved out of the building in the early 1970’s. For more than 40 years, they were carefully stored by the building’s owner, and only discovered by chance by before the building was put up for sale earlier this year. 

Article courtesy of Rolling Stone Magazine.

Article courtesy of The New York Times