These pages are dedicated to Richard Hunt
of Half Moon Bay for his wonderful spirit during the OPL shows
An overcast day at OPL and The Roadhouse
Cafe
During the Spring of 1996, Neil Young and
Crazy Horse (Frank 'Poncho' Sampedro, Billy Talbot and Ralph
Molina) were recording a new album up at Neils' Broken Arrow
Ranch in the Santa Cruz mountains near San Francisco. A Tour
of Europe and the USA was planned to begin in mid-June.
For whatever reasons, whether to gain inspiration
for the new album or to warm-up for the forthcoming tour, Neil
and Crazy Horse embarked on what has become known as 'The Northern
California Bar Tour of 1996' - a string of sixteen performances
conducted over a period of three months. Although it is not uncommon
for Neil and The Horse to play a few local warm-up shows before
hitting the road, the number of these particular shows led some
to speculate that they were a nostalgic celebration of a similar
series of shows performed some twenty years earlier in 1976.
However, although many old favourites from that time period were
played, the intensity of the performances and the eventual introduction
of all of the songs from the new album showed that this was a
far cry from a stroll down memory lane.
While two of these shows occurred at The
Catalyst in Santa Cruz, the remaining fourteen were performed
at the Old Princeton Landing (OPL) bar in Princeton-By-The-Sea,
a small harbour town about four miles north of Half Moon Bay
on the California Coast south of San Francisco.
Formerly known as The Harbor Bar and Scotts,
Old Princeton Landing has an occupancy limit of 150 people, and
on weekends attracts a clientele of about 30-100 folk depending
on the drawing power of the live band performing. The band that
performed there in the Spring of 1996, though almost completely
unpublicised, had an unusually high drawing power.
