The Ducks’ High Flyin’ is out now on Reprise.“I’d rather keep changing and lose a lot of people along the way,” Neil Young told Rolling Stone in 1975. And he said, ‘Oh, I remember when I was 33 and a third…’ (laughs).” “He told me he was 75, and I told him I was 78. “It has quality.” Two years ago, Mosley and Young even spoke on the phone for the first time in nigh on half a century.

“It’s much cleaner and it’s got all the songs from all the different gigs,” he enthuses. Plus I was doing stuff with Moby Grape again.”įollowing years of listening to their bootlegs, the bassist is clearly very happy to finally hear an official Ducks album. “Neil didn’t come around any more, so we didn’t play any more. “Neil just had enough, I guess,” says Mosley. But come the end of the summer, Young quit the city after his rented bungalow was burgled and his TV and guitar stolen. There was vague talk of a Ducks album at the time, and many of the shows were professionally taped. “‘Quack quack!’ Great fun.”īut due to Young’s contractual touring obligation to Crazy Horse, The Ducks never played outside of Santa Cruz. Local stores quickly sold out of duck calls, bought by fans who loudly honked them in-between songs. “We were driving around town for days, throwing out names… There were a lotta ducks crossing the street and somebody yelled out, ‘The Ducks’.”

Young’s long-time friend, Sandy Mazzeo, quoted in Jimmy McDonough’s 2002 Neil biography Shakey, recalled the source of the band’s name.

He tells MOJO today that he thinks there was more than one reason why Young was attracted to both Santa Cruz and The Ducks. But only now, 46 years later, are their live, mobile studio recordings being released, with the 25-track album, High Flyin’, as part of Young’s Original Bootleg Series.īob Mosley first met Neil Young when Moby Grape shared the stage at the Whisky A Go Go in LA with Buffalo Springfield in ’66. The band broke up after three months and so the 20 shows that The Ducks played together have become the stuff of legend, and widely bootlegged. There, from July to September, he jammed and gigged with The Ducks, a bar band supergroup comprising bassist Bob Mosley of Moby Grape, guitarist Jeff Blackburn – co-writer of My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue) – and drummer Johnny Craviotto. In the summer of 1977, following the release of his eighth studio solo album, American Stars ’N Bars, Neil Young moved to Santa Cruz, the northern Californian city that was at the time a haven for stoners and surfers.

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