Comes A Time: Shot Full of Bullet Holes

Here's an interesting anecdote on Comes A Time. From Broadview Book of Canadian Anecdotes by Douglas Fetherling:

"One day," Neil Young's father Scott recalled, "Neil and I dropped into the big storage building where in 1981 he kept his two tour buses and some prime elements in his antique car collection - sixteen-cylinder Cadillacs, a 1934 Bentley, a La Salle, a Buick Roadmaster station wagon, the Packard station wagon...

"We wandered from there into a smaller storage area filled with scenery, his own travel trunks and some belonging to Joni Mitchell, boxes of... odds and ends... Also in the room were stacks of boxes full of records. 'You know what they are?' he asked. I didn't. 'Comes A Time copies that were no good,' he said. The master tape of Comes A Time had been damaged. He checked it, thinking it wasn't quite right, but not able to identify what. So he okayed it. A week or so later he found one of the tapes taken off the original master.

"Checking the tape against the album, then ready, he found that some frequencies in the high register were missing altogether from the album. He called the Reprise people to say that production had to be stopped. Aghast, they said they had already printed and shipped 200,000 copies. He said it was his fault, and they must be recalled; he would pay for this personally. They told him it would cost $200,000, at one dollar per album plus shipping back from Italy and Japan where they'd been shipped. He said he would pay that.

"'I don't like throwing money around,' he said. 'But I wasn't going to have this album circulating around the world in bad quality.

"'How do you make sure they won't get out sometime?'

"He showed me. Each case of albums had been fired at with a rifle, piercing each record and making it unusable."

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