Nils Lofgren is releasing a career retrospective box set, and among the tracks unearthed is an early take of Nils' plea to his "main inspirer".

From Rolling Stone:

How did you end up with a 10-disc set? You'll make Neil jealous.
Fifteen months ago, the Concord Muisc Group approached me. They said, "We think we can do a 10-disc package. There's enough music there." And I said, "All right, man." I handpicked every song and went through decades of basement tapes. The gem we found — and thank God we found it — is Grin doing "Keith Don't Go" with Neil [Young] playing piano and singing. It was a vivid memory: Neil was passing through town on tour and [producer David] Briggs got him down there. Neil was up for singing and playing piano, and it's rare he does a piano session. I thought the tape was lost. We found the 16-track in the basement of the house in Maryland where I grew up.

Yes, most of us know that song from your first solo album after Grin. What lead you to write a song about Keith's problems as far back as '73?
I wrote it on the Tonight's the Night tour with Neil in England in 1973. All these great musicians were showing up, and at every gig I'd meet 10 of Keith Richards' best friends, who were worried about his heath and predicting doom and gloom. I was naïve and thought, "Geez, the guy just made Exile on Main St." I wasn't worried about Keith, but every day I was bombarded with this. So I wrote a thank-you note to him. I already had this dark, sinister music.

Nils Lofgren - 'Keith Don't Go' > [w.soundcloud.com]

[www.rollingstone.com]

and predicting doom and gloom.

..... Hey that's cool ...Nils must know some friggin' good fortune tellers....





ROCKMAN

Great story bye bye johnny. I'm a huge fan of his eary stuff, Grin through to Cry Tough.

Not sure many people outside the U.S., or the DC area, are real familiar w/ Nils even though he's been playing with Springsteen for ages now, and w/ Crazy Horse well before that. His early stuff is just unbelievably good and this song has long been one of my favorites. This particular version just flat out ROCKS.

I had a Lofgren/Grin vinyl compilation years ago which was great and one of my fave records.Unfortunately lost it . .

There are some Lofgren vinyls in my place and on one's the track Keith Don't Go-
Great story

[www.nilslofgren.com]

Sign up for your chance to win an autographed Fender® Stratocaster® guitar and a Face The Music box set from Nils Lofgren! Everyone who enters gets a FREE download of the previously unreleased version of Nils' song 'Keith Don't Go' featuring Neil Young!

Wasn't he left out of the E-Street band's HOF induction last week?

Years ago a similar question was asked to Nils about the meaning of "Keith don't go" and Nils said ,at that time, that he wrote that song because he heard rumors that Keith wanted to leave the Stones. I guess he remembers it differently nowadays.
Rock and roll,
Mops

Thanx for this news/link....

From Nils' interview with Joe Bosso at Music Radar:

Were there any songs or performances that surprised you? Were you ever like, “Oh, I forgot we did that.”?

“Yeah, there was a lot of stuff. I got very thorough in digging through tapes; I went on a lot of fishing expeditions for things that I felt needed to be included. Billy Wolf and I would spend hours and hours pouring over tapes; some of them were useless, but there were some real gems, too. I was desperately trying to find a cassette tape of Keith Don’t Go that I did with Grin and Neil Young – he played piano and sang on it. I went through thousands of cassettes in my home in Arizona and back in Maryland – I’ve got a place out here to tour the East. But we struck gold when we discovered the actual 16-track master. We got to remix it in the same studio and with the same engineer who worked with Briggs and Grin, but obviously we made it what it should have been, not just a primitive rough mix.”

It’s interesting that you recorded that song in ’73 with Neil on it, but you recorded it again and put it on your debut solo record two years later.

“On the ‘Fat Man Album,’ right. I had written it on the Tonight’s The Night tour. I was with Neil Young in England and was meeting a lot of people who claimed to be Keith’s best friend. I took that with a grain of salt. The recurring theme with everybody was how worried they were about Keith’s health. I thought anybody who had just done Exile On Main St. couldn’t be that bad off – I was naïve and young. But I had this dark, ominous piece of music, and I put the two concepts together. The idea was to write giant thank-you note on behalf of all the fans, like, ‘Take care of yourself, Keith, for our sake and for yours.’”

I’m curious – has Keith ever spoken to you about the song?

“No. In fact, I don’t know if he’s ever heard it. I just don’t know. I mean, I know that he knows I wrote a song about him. I’ve met him at shows – he’s always been very friendly. At a show in LA he saw me playing ping-pong, and he gave me a big hug. He yelled at a photographer to come over and take a picture of us. He said to the guy, ‘Make sure Nils gets a copy of that.’ We put it in the booklet.

“But as for the song, a friend of mine, Don Marrandino, a GM in Vegas who was running the Hard Rock, asked Keith about it, and he said he hadn’t heard it. Don asked him why, and you know, Keith jokes a lot, and I guess he said, ‘Because I don’t wanna go.’ [Laughs] Maybe if he heard the song it would give him ideas. I thought that was pretty funny. Maybe it’s the truth. Who knows?”

[www.musicradar.com]