The Neil Young Archives series has kept its targets mostly clustered around a thin slice of his long career: 1968-1971, the brief era stretching from Buffalo Springfield’s dissolution to the cusp of Young’s early commercial peak around the time of Harvest. As I mentioned yesterday in my review of the new Live at the Cellar Door release, I’d like to see Young’s “Performance Series” spread out a little more. Between the 1971 Massey Hall shows and the 1984-1985 International Harvesters shows released in 2011 as A Treasure, there’s a gaping hole in the officially released live timeline that covers some of his best years.

Fortunately, Young is among the most bootlegged artists in rock, and the dark bootleg underbelly of YouTube grants listeners easy access to these unofficial archives. So here are five shows that fill that current gap, some of which will hopefully find their way to official releases some time around the Archives Vol. 2 box set is released in approximately 2029. (Many of these bootlegs—or the stories behind them—I learned about from Tyler Wilcox’s excellent Tumblr, Doom & Gloom From The Tomb.)

11/5/73 - Rainbow Theatre, London

“Welcome to Miami Beach, ladies and gentlemen. Everything is cheaper than it looks.”

Though largely recorded in the summer of 1973, the caustic Tonight’s The Night wouldn’t make it into record stores until two years later. That didn’t stop Young and his tequila-soaked Santa Monica Flyers from taking the album on the road, playing the unheard material for befuddled European crowds between long, mumbling monologues about Miami Beach and dead friends. The killer joke of the tour was when Young reassured the crowd, “Here’s one you’ve heard before,” then launching into a second (sometimes third), even longer and more harrowing rendition of the unreleased album’s title track. It’s a sloppy Irish wake gut-punch that makes the studio album sound almost cheery by comparison.

5/16/74 - The Bottom Line, New York City