I saw Neil Young at JavaOne, but he didn’t sing

The headliner of the JavaOne keynote was legendary rocker Neil Young. His connection with JavaOne is that his forthcoming Neil Young Archive will be released on Blu-ray discs. Blu-ray uses an embedded Java virtual machine to drive dynamic content.

But Neil Young didn’t sing! There was even a setup line, where one of the Sun folks — can’t remember if it was Rich Green or Jonathan Schwartz — said after the Archive demo that his favorite Young song is “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

What a clear setup! I expected someone to throw Young a guitar or something. But no, Young just shuffled off the stage. What a letdown. But at least I got a photo of Young with Green and Schwartz.

Sun describes the Archive product as:

More than 15 years in the making, the Neil Young Archive will be a complete biography of the artist’s career in a timeline format including a chronology of songs released and unreleased. Through Blu-ray and Java technology, for the first time viewers will be able to navigate through Young’s music, movies, videos, personal archives, memorabilia, photographs, letters, handwritten manuscripts and more while the high resolution 192/24 audio is playing, giving a chronological insight into the creative process and an opportunity to bear witness to the evolution of Neil Young’s musical soul over the course of his life and work.

The Blu-ray format delivers both unsurpassed 192/24 audio quality and high definition video, capturing the quality of the original analog master recordings in the best digital format available today. The first Neil Young Archive release will be a 10 Blu-ray Disc set available this fall from Reprise/Warner Bros. Records, covering Young’s career from 1963-1972.