Executive Editor, Music

Neil Young was already on his generation’s Mount Rushmore by mid-1976, when the brilliant and troubled era in this third installment of his sprawling “Archives” series began. Over the previous decade, he’d written hits and classics from “Heart of Gold” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” to “Cinnamon Girl,” “Mr. Soul,” “Down by the River” and “Cortez the Killer”; as a solo artist and as a member of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, he’d laid the foundation for the country-rock that dominated the airwaves of the ’70s, as much as anyone else.

But he had rejected mainstream commercial success as soon as he achieved it, abandoning the middle road “for the ditch,” as he wrote in the liners to his 1977 retrospective “Decade” — “A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people.” In short order, he had become the most fiercely self-defined contemporary musician since Bob Dylan: His albums grew darker and harder, but swung up in mood with the rocking “Zuma.” He was riding that vibe as this set began, with a load of live material from 1976 (both solo and with his faithful bandmates in Crazy Horse), a stack of gorgeous demos, and a few numbers with Joni Mitchell from the Band’s Baby-Boomer-defining, all-star “Last Waltz” concert.

But that's just the beginning for this mammoth 17-CD/5-DVD/198-track/28-hour set, culled from the vast archives of this astonishingly thorough self-documenter (even the set's "unboxing" video is 22 minutes long). Like the previous two volumes, it features familiar album cuts alongside previously unreleased demos, outtakes and (sometimes tinny-sounding) live recordings, interspersed with brief spoken-word explanations by the man himself.