Anniversary Edition - Neil Young

Charles considers 5 albums from Neil Young that are celebrating birthdays this year

Neil Young is one of rock’s great expressors of disillusionment. Sometimes it’s personal, sometimes about the society that surrounds him. Sometimes it takes a while for him to formulate his feelings, sometimes it’s nearly instantaneous. Sometimes he expresses it as blazing noise, sometimes as quiet reflection, sometimes as a mixture of both. Sometimes he seems ready for the future, sometimes it’s a retrenchment and retreat into the familiar. Sometimes it’s Re·ac·tor, and sometimes it’s reactionary. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

In all respects, though, there’s a reason why one of his better 21st-century songs is called “Mr. Disappointment”: Young regularly expresses a kind of weary unfulfillment that paradoxically emphasizes the idealism that he can’t ever shake and bleeds through both louder and quieter moments. Five albums celebrating big anniversaries this year all rest in this ambivalence. (Sidenote: I don’t talk about them here, but happy birthday to Fork In The Road, Letter From Home, and Colorado as well.) These five are also all among his best. Here are some rough-mix thoughts on five of my favorites from an artist who’s never stopped responding.

EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE (1969)

He had a solo album before this, but this is the one that established the Neil Young legend. Backed by Crazy Horse for the first time, Young blazes through a set that overdrives the hazy fantasias of Buffalo Springfield with a rocket booster (or maybe Rockets booster) sending the songs into orbit.  The album is most famous for three of his canonical, prototypical rock epics: “Cinnamon Girl,” “Down By The River,” and “Cowgirl In The Sand” remain staples of his setlists and mythos, and deservedly so. They remain as good as advertised. But the other songs tell their own interesting story. There’s the title track, which only sorta masks its exhausted yearning inside its loping cowboy shuffle and background la-la harmonies. “Round and Round” seems barely awake, a woozy waltz where Young’s tremulous tenor pairs a description of lives bound by walls and “paper illusions” with maybe-hopeful, maybe-fatalist assurance that “it won’t be long.” Love’s gone wrong on “The Losing End,” with Danny Whitten trying his best to support Young with a close high harmony on a lovely bit of broken honky-tonk.

And there’s the hypnotic exhaustion of “Running Dry (Requiem for the Rockets),” which - after many listens - has emerged for me as the album’s surprising standout. Singing close to the mic, with a screeching, near-Velvets violin behind him, Young sings another ballad of personal failure in love that – thanks to its subtitle – also inaugurates one of his favorite topics: a tribute to bands and musicians who used to be. Less fist-pumping than the canonical rockers, with none of their wailing climaxes, “Running Dry” signals the skewed grief that became a staple of many of his most interesting recordings in the decades to come. To borrow a phrase from Richard Thompson, “Running Dry” sounds like it’s running out of road and running out of breath. Everybody knows.

ON THE BEACH (1974)

There’s little more tiresome than “death of the sixties” talk. Was it 1968 and Nixon? Or maybe 1969 and Altamont and Manson? Or maybe 1970 at Kent State and Jackson State? Or maybe 1972 with Nixon again? Or maybe 1974 with the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam? Or maybe who cares? Whenever the sixties came to a close, if they ever did, Neil Young was ready to pick at the scabs.

For a seeming true-blue believer in certain tenets of the countercultural program, Young’s much better when he’s talking about how it failed. 1974’s On The Beach is his most successful recrimination. It’s part of his infamous “ditch trilogy,” where he rejected the commercial success of Harvest in favor of jagged and self-lacerating music that dropped him out of the charts but affirmed his reputation as an ungovernable spirit. (Not that the commercial side didn’t feel just as gloomy, as evidenced by the CSNY “doom tour” of the same year.) On The Beach is the best of the three. Young’s voice is ragged, helped no doubt by notoriously debauched sessions that found many of the participants fuzzy on what they’d recorded the night before. The band, a crew of Young’s friends that doubles as an L.A. all-star team, plays with a ramshackle tightness. The songs range from anthems of persistence (opener “Walk On,” with its surprisingly funky break and its reminder that “sooner or later, it all gets real”) to images of somber foreboding (the rinsed-out country of “See The Sky About To Rain”) to straight-up horror movies. “Revolution Blues,” about Young’s casual acquaintance Charles Manson, earns the most obvious gasps with its snarling description of killing celebrities and dune buggies rumbling across the desert. But I’m equally shaken by “Vampire Blues,” where Young adopts a louche slickness to embody an oil-draining vampire sucking the earth dry. Or the title track, a brooding blues pierced by Young’s electric guitar, where he approaches the alienation of fame by trying to escape, first to the beach refuge that powered the “endless summer” dreams of the previous decade and then to the rural hideaway that fueled the retreat to nature of the next, only to find that the world keeps turning away no matter what. Or “Ambulance Blues,” where a dejected Young – over those strummy acoustic chords that propelled “Heart of Gold” – paints an imagistic letter of resignation from “folkie days” and hopeful past attempts that now just seem like “pissing in the wind.”

On The Beach aches. Not just because it’s expressing such defeat and resignation. But because Young also realizes that he never could’ve won this game in the first place. Sooner or later, it all got real.

RUST NEVER SLEEPS (1979)

The story goes that – like many of his contemporaries – Neil Young was both galvanized and destabilized by the rise of punk rock. Excited and challenged by its forthrightness, Young recorded a mostly live album of new material (just like 1973’s cataclysmic Time Fades Away) that directly responded to Devo and the Sex Pistols, contained a couple of his snottiest and noisiest tracks, and meditated on the new moment as both death and rebirth. Young later said that the album’s title, copped from Mark Mothersbaugh, signaled his own desire to keep moving lest he start to decay. And the album bursts with that attempt.

In the invocation of the acoustic “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue),” Young introduces one his most (in)famous lyrics that doubles as the album’s ostensible mission statement: “It’s better to burn out than fade away.” Reduced to an aphorism on its own, in context the lyric seems far less sure of itself, as Young pairs the newly-deceased Elvis Presley and the newly-ascendant Johnny Rotten in his even less certain declaration that “rock and roll can never die.” It’s pretty clear – if only through the lonesome harmonica that soars above Young’s guitar – that this remains an unanswered question. Fittingly, the rest of the first side is a series of goodbyes, largely acoustic and all in search of escape. The chiming “Thrasher” just barely hides the story of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young inside a dreamlike allegory of agriculture and architecture, with Young waking up from the “hippie dream” once again. (Not that he’s happy about it: he’s sung few sadder lines than “How I lost my friends I still don't understand.”) Speaking of dreams, “Pocahontas” has more than enough vanishing-Indian romanticism (and sexualized fetishism to boot), but Young’s thrumming take on the mythical American past manages to contain enough yearning to avoid feeling either too self-righteous or cartoonish, especially in light of all the other primitivist hoorah that characterized some parts of that era’s culture. (Including, sometimes, Neil Young’s own work.) He escapes with an alien on “Ride My Llama,” and encourages his lover to “Sail Away” on the album’s sweetest moment, a countryfied duet with Nicolette Larson. It’s a fond farewell. But it doesn’t last long.

The second side turns up the amplifiers, starting with the enigmatic tragedy of “Powderfinger” (which, story goes, he wrote for Lynyrd Skynyrd), through the crunchy sneer of “Welfare Mothers,” and on to the exhausted blast of “Sedan Delivery.” “Powderfinger” is as graceful as “Welfare Mothers” is purposely crude, and the guitars keep getting cruddier until “Sedan Delivery’s” night-shift nightmare thrashes away in a manner that seems less conversant with punk’s first generation than the noise-rock experiments coming a bit later thanks to Neil fans like Sonic Youth. (“I gotta get away,” he cackles, still looking for a way out.) Post-industrial in both theme and arrangement, “Sedan Delivery” sounds today like the album’s most prophetic moment. After all this, and surprisingly, climactic reprise of “Hey Hey, My My” seems almost superfluous. But it’s still great, revised as a fuzzed-out inferno where Ralph Molina’s cavernous drums drive the chopping guitars as Young turns the song into a bruised benediction, presaging the blunt-force traumas of the decade to come.

FREEDOM (1989)

Every Neil Young fan seems to agree that the ‘80s were weird, although few seem to agree which parts were good. Young almost literally went back and forth between slickly modern experiments – Trans, the New-Wave-rockabilly gloss of Everybody’s Rockin’, the icy synth-rock of Landing on Water – and retreats into the familiar, whether the comfy country of Old Ways, the Crazy Horse retreads on Life, or the sports-bar R&B of This Note’s For You. For my money, the future-shock albums are better by far. (Now that Trans has been recuperated, Landing on Water is probably his most under-appreciated album.) But no matter where one stood on this issue, Freedom felt like a return to form.

This was partly due to the fact that it deftly blended these seemingly oppositional impulses. The big guitars and twangy melodies are there, for sure, but so is the pop sheen and strange arrangements. Young spends much of the album falling in and out of love, in the big ballad “Don’t Cry” (one of his best vocals), the gentle slow-dance “Wrecking Ball,” the country-rock stomp of “Too Far Gone,” or the careful whisper of “Hangin’ On A Limb,” where he duets with a splendorous Linda Ronstadt. With its the gated drums, plaintive sax, and keyboard tinkles, “Someday” could’ve found a home on Adult Contemporary radio, and offers an odd pairing of verses about pilots, preachers, and pipelines with a final verse of devotion and hope addressed to the one he loves.

Indeed, and befitting the album’s title, Young still found time to comment on the world, whether the restless story-song “Crime In The City” or the way he blows The Drifters’ “On Broadway” to bits with slashing riffs and the addition of a shouted outro demanding crack cocaine. “On Broadway,” like “Don’t Cry” and “Eldorado,” was first featured on the EP Eldorado the previous year, which also features “Cocaine Eyes,” a far better drug song and one of Young’s very best deep cuts. Another, better song about dependency, “No More” pairs the mournful echo of Young’s electric guitar with a desperate plea that breaks apart into the drained title phrase.

The album’s biggest statement – and biggest swing – is its most enduring. Like the ‘70s summation Rust Never Sleeps, Freedom’s ‘80s curtain call is framed by acoustic and electric versions of the same song. “Rockin’ In The Free World” is a fitting anthem for what writer Alfred Soto calls “the Poppy Bush interzone,” perched between the soft conservatism and circumscribed progressivism that defined the political mainstream. It doesn’t buy into the president’s platitudes of a “kinder, gentler” America as machine guns and ozone holes proliferate, but its focus on gangs and addicted mothers reads a bit more like “personal responsibility” politics than the song’s left-wing admirers (like me) might approve of. Then again, it nods favorably at Jesse Jackson (the “man of the people saying keep hope alive”), even as it suggests that such aspirations aren’t possible (or even desirable?) as the protagonist keeps thundering down the road burning fuel. These contradictions – shouting in the wilderness in the solo acoustic version, marching together with his band at the climactic end – are irresolvable, purposely so, and the squall of the song’s big-guitars version render those contradictions less important than the legitimately rousing feeling of its anthemic chorus and relentless rhythm. (I’m one of those people who thinks that the fiery live version from Saturday Night Live, backed by the great rhythm section of Charley Drayton and Steve Jordan, might be the best one.) The song, and the album, doesn’t suggest that Young is buying into anything, but he’s willing to keep searching.

SLEEPS WITH ANGELS (1994)

It was a stark contrast. In 1993 at the MTV Video Music Awards, Neil Young joined Pearl Jam for a blistering rendition of “Rockin’ In The Free World,” an affirmation of the “Godfather of Grunge” title that Young had ridden into a period of prominence and creative output that rivaled his ‘70s peak. It was a heady time for the big guitars and independent streak that made Young a lodestar for younger rockers, and they were ready to turn it up. A year later, with grunge still cresting, Kurt Cobain quoted “Hey Hey, My My” in his suicide note. This justifiably shook Young, then at work on a Crazy Horse album that defies seemingly all expectations of what Neil and the Horse would come up with at the height of alternative nation. But maybe Young foresaw the vibe shift: although the agitated title song is the only one directly inspired by Cobain’s death, Sleeps With Angels is a mourning shroud, with Young lost in the shadows and trying to grab hold to ghosts floating around him.

Even three decades past the expectations of the early ‘90s, this is a very strange album. It’s filled with harpsichord and drone, close harmonies and fuzzy sound-burns, and songs that split the difference between delicate ballads and driving electric sludge. Much like the lonely wake of 1975’s Tonight’s The Night, an album that resonates with its spirit more than On The Beach, Sleeps with Angels is largely muted: even electric buzzes like “Safeway Cart” or “Blue Eden” somehow manage to sound quiet. (Don’t wake the neighbors – or the dead.) At times, it’s as pretty as anything Young’s ever done. With the sweet harmonies that carry “My Heart” or “A Dream That Can Last,” or the crystalline identical melodies of “Western Hero” and “Train Of Love,” Sleeps With Angels finds Neil Young and Crazy Horse reborn as a chamber-pop quartet.

The whole album seems lit by candlelight, with two prominent exceptions. One is the goofy catharsis of “Piece of Crap,” which – even with offkey background vocals and suitably stoopid lyrics – manages to express sincere discontent in its three howling minutes. This is Young as cranky eco-warrior mode, a mode he’s made central to his identity as artist and public figure. The other full-blast moment, and the album’s peak, is “Change Your Mind,” a 14-minute epic that finds the same mix of epic and intimate that animated earlier masterpiece “Like A Hurricane.” Young’s protagonist addresses his song to someone – a friend? a lover? his audience? – in need of refuge, urging them (us?) to find someone who can revive with a “magic touch” that’s underlined by the swirling guitars and the chorus’ blissful melody. There are jagged edges just under the surface – mostly in the extended guitar solos that have anchored Young’s work since Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere – and the song’s presence on this deeply unsettled work of fragile beauty turns its message into something that, if not sinister, is at least \ troubled. And that’s for the better.

His next album, 1995’s Mirror Ball, was recorded with Pearl Jam and was a soaring, searing rock-fest. But it felt like a farewell party rather than a convocation. Then, in 1996, he kicked off Broken Arrow with “Big Time,” a great big rocker with a great big chorus that found Young declaring “I’m still living the dream we had, for me it’s not over.” And maybe it wasn’t, whatever that dream might be. But all five albums in this big commemorative year suggest that he’s always been most effective when discussing the waking moments, when the world turns away and the line between burning out and fading away becomes so blurry that it disappears. Can rock and roll never die? Maybe so, maybe not. But it doesn’t really matter – Neil Young’s always recognized that the living is harder anyway. So keep on rockin’, because sooner or later it all gets real. - CH

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