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Главная » 2010 » Апрель » 22 » tiranosaurus neil
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Some of these ‘experiments’ work, while others fail spectacularly, causing true fans to shake their heads in disappointed belief while newcomers to the man’s music remain baffled and wondering what all the fuss was about."Не знаю, могу ли я называться современным исполнителем. Я, скорее, динозавр с огромным хвостом - так велик, что постоянно должен чем-то питаться. Я смотрю вокруг и вижу, что не так уж много осталось динозавров, одни только маленькие твари шныряют вокруг с огромной скоростью. И их энергия нужна мне, чтобы оставаться живым. Иногда мне кажется, что можно бы отрубить мой гигантский хвост, а то я просто не могу сам себя прокормить…".
(New Musical Express 4 May 1991)
New Musical Express 4 May 1991
YOUNG AT HEART
THE ENDURING RAGGED GLORY OF THE AMERICAN BUFFALO
Springsteen may have been bigger and Dylan more talked about but, for 20 solid years, NEIL YOUNG has, along with Lou Reed, been America ’s (oh, alright then, Canada ’s) most important rock star. His work has fired the imagination of wave after wave of aspiring musos; even today his influence can be heard in everything from the keening dance paeans of St Etienne to the howling guitar bluster of Teenage Fanclub.
Equally at home in tiny bar-room clubs or packed stadia, his ever-restless travels have taken him across a rainbow of musical styles and occasionally bizarre causes. Sometimes (his zealous backing of punk) he gets it right; sometimes (his endorsement of Reagan) it all goes horribly wrong; always he rocks on the edge, his guitar a swarm of angry bees.
“It’s better to burn out, than to fade away” has always been Young’s motto, and now his nationwide American tour with another of his proteges, Sonic Youth, is once again revealing the noble power of the man. It’s being called the greatest rock show ever seen.
Here EDWIN POUNCEY makes the case for Young’s place in the rock pantheon; an awestruck GAVIN MARTIN describes the shows that are leaving America breathless, and on page 21 we comb the history books for the pick from Young’s often outlandish interviews. Welcome to the (North) American buffalo.
Neil Young may look like an old buffalo, but that doesn’t mean he’s unwilling to learn a few new tricks in order to keep from falling behind.
In fact, this is the secret to Neil Young’s longevity as an artist and musician. While most of his contemporaries have retired to write memoirs, Young has chosen to cast his creative net wide and drag other influences into his work.
Some of these ‘experiments’ work, while others fail spectacularly, causing true fans to shake their heads in disappointed belief while newcomers to the man’s music remain baffled and wondering what all the fuss was about.
Records such as ‘Trans’ (where Young featured a vocoder to mask his voice over a futuristic robot beat), ‘Landing On Water’ (a futile attempt to invade the dancefloor) and ‘Everybody’s Rockin’’ (where Young’s nostalgia for his teenage years came across sounding forced and twee) could be looked back on as massive blunders in his career.
The point is, though, they were statements that Young felt impelled to get out of his system and, despite disgruntled growls from his record company, he did just that. Just mark them up as a couple more scars on the old war buffalo’s weathered hide.
It is this habit of going against the grain, however, that always ensures Young’s fans and critics will return for whatever project he comes up with next. His teaming up with New York noise maestros Sonic Youth and hardcore band Social Distortion, for the ‘Ragged Glory/Don’t Spook The Horse’ tour, is a move that not only provides him with a new audience, but also indicates to his older fans just where he thinks rock (and Neil Young) should be heading.
‘Ragged Glory’ is a record that is as far removed from his ‘After The Gold Rush’/‘Harvest’ days as you could possibly get, an agonised scream of tortured teenage rebellion that overspills into the occasional bout of free-form feedback, a technique that he has most certainly adopted and embraced by listening closely to the work of Sonic Youth. This borrowing of style is a two-way trade that works to the Youth’s creative advantage as well.
Young’s guitar influence can be heard loud and clear on the records of Sonic Youth, Young standards such as ‘Powderfinger’ and ‘Like A Hurricane’ have obviously had their effect on Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo’s impressive guitar grind.
Young’s infatuation with experimentation, coupled with his admirable stubbornness to conform to either his audience’s record company’s secret desires, is undoubtedly another reason why the Youth of today consider him a hero figure for the ’90s.
In 1972, when Neil Young was riding high on the crest of a commercially successful wave with his ‘Harvest’ album and as part of supergroup Crosby , Stills, Nash & Young, he chose to turn his back on fame to return to the road and recording studio.
While his record company were drooling in anticipation for another ‘Harvest’, Young eventually emerged to hand over an oddball double album of out-takes from his previous Buffalo Springfield band, strained (and strange) live recordings and the chorus of the Tabernacle Choir and Beach Boys in full swing.
This was the soundtrack to his rarely screened movie, Journey Through The Past, an unsaleable artefact that has sunk without trace. The follow up to ‘Journey’ was equally frustrating for ‘Harvest’ fans, a set of previously unreleased songs that Young had decided to record live in concert, with not one ‘hit’ to make his record bosses’ job easier.
After this came ‘On The Beach’ a (now deleted) set of angry, dark songs which railed against the Nixon administration and caused his record company to express even deeper concern for their star’s career, which now looked as though it was on the decline saleswise.
Creatively, however, Young was in fine form and had never sounded fitter. In 1975 (much, no doubt, to the relief of his record company) the promise of a partial return to the ‘Harvest’ formula was recorded, a set of acoustic songs with vocal backing that had the tentative title of ‘Homegrown’.
Young decided to invite a few friends over for a playback party, where the finished ‘Homegrown’ album was given its first public hearing. At the end of the tape, however, was another session that Young had recorded in 1973, a tribute to CSN&Y roadie Bruce Berry, who had died of an accidental heroin overdose. As the powerful, sombre and decidedly uncommercial set ground to a halt, its stunned audience unanimously agreed that this should be the next Neil Young album.
The record, entitled ‘Tonight’s The Night’, was released later that same year while ‘Homegrown’ remains unreleased to this day. Although it initially came as a shock, ‘Tonight’s The Night’ is one of his finest albums. As is ‘Rust Never Sleeps’, Young’s powerful pro-punk statement that was released in 1979.
“I can relate to ‘Rust Never Sleeps’,” Young told his biographer Johnny Rogan in 1981. “It relates to my career, you know; the longer I keep on going, the more I have to fight this corrosion.”
Young continues his fight to remain rust-free (but never squeaky clean) by launching such missives as ‘This Note’s For You’ at MTV-brainwashed America and its stars who sell their souls for Pepsi, with first-punching anthems like ‘Rockin’ In The Free World’ (where, perhaps naively, for one minute it looked like all the walls were going to come tumbling down at once) and his return to solid rock with ‘Ragged Glory’, a record that will ensure Young’s place as a creative talent to be reckoned with in the ’90s and beyond. Long may he run.
This time he’s set to kill. There’s wind machines blowing a gale force all around him. Searing whiplash guitar, the booming bass quake and thunderstorm drums capture the sound of an empire crashing.
Neil Young – hounded outlaw, musical terrorist, The Last Rocker In Town – is onstage at The Cow Palace, San Francisco . Across the street, in a town called Troublerock, the corner store’s like a high security prison wing, nearby there’s guns, crack dealers and people sleeping on the streets. The summer of love, the fair gentle creatures with the flowers in their hair, aren’t too much in evidence these days.
Young, who was around to see the Age of Aquarius come and go, knows the score, he’s a world away from the winsome ditties and hippy idylls fostered way back when. Up close his face is mad, mean and angry. A photographer closes in to snap the anguished grimace. Looking up from his furious stomping and axe grinding, Young gives him the finger.
Haggard and beleaguered, the 45-year-old Canadian drifter looks like Mammoth caught out on the wild plains. Mammoth was a buffalo that Neil reared and tamed in his capacity as a wealthy landowning farmer in the nearby Californian county, San Mateo . Young loaned Mammoth to Kevin Costner for a key scene in Dances With Wolves, the Oscar-laden movie about how the west was lost. In the scene Mammoth is the last buffalo of a herd that is slaughtered by ruthless cavalry settlers.
Hacked to pieces, bloodied corpse left to dry in the sun – Mammoth never had a chance. But Neil Young is spoiling for a fight. He laid the gauntlet down when he came onstage to the sound of Jimi Hendrix’s scathing swipe at the ‘Star Spangled Banner’. Then, shouting the odds at his band just like he had earlier at the soundcheck, he struck up the taunting threat and pledge ‘Out Of The Blue … Into The Black’.
Since Young recorded that song over a decade ago, staking his claim in rock ’n’ roll’s eternal Generation Of Vipers (“The King is gone but he’s not forgotten/This is the story of Johnny Rotten.”), he’s been through many guises, played many parts. But now he’s back in the feedback frenzy, the electric minefield and relentless guitar barrages that have played a part in some of his most potent and mercurial musical battles.
Other members of his herd are either out of commission or fallen by the wayside. Too old, too clapped out, sad parodies, would-be sophisticates, slaves to the almighty dollar. The way Neil tells it, “I just keep getting younger/My life’s been funny that way.”
In the Spring of 1991, riding on the back of two of his strongest albums ever, he has met the challenge. Right now, if there’s a hotter, more intense live rock ’n’ roll experience than Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s ‘Ragged Glory/Don’t Spook The Horse’ blitzkrieg, it must be on another planet.
Young’s half-way through his epic story of the modern day American civil war, ‘Crime In The City’. A cornerstone of the album ‘Freedom’ (a withering look at The Last Days Of Capitalism), the song screams and rages, scatter-firing cinemascopic images of media manipulation, street crime, municipal rot, several layers of social decay and moral corruption.
Jumping from first person commentary to narrative overview, it presents a dizzying, random cast of characters – a patrol cop who “takes orders from fools” and gets shot by kids, a bank robber turned hostage taker, a family of killers and a songwriter who is “hungry and alone”, a pawn in the corporate control of the record industry.
How they all connect and fit into the picture isn’t easily explained on paper. But to see and hear Young rapt in fevered delirium, straining against the weight of his years, his various illnesses, his contradictory and perverse worldviews, puts it in a clearer, more vital perspective.
These compromised individuals – troubled loners, violent extremists, old men given a new but psychotic lease of life – are people that in some small way he identifies with. They are the by-product of freedom’s failings, the face of a nation that’s been at war with itself far longer than it’s been fighting other counties.
Just then the scene seems to freeze. Neil Young – mad buffalo, Lost Horseman Of The Apocalypse, Rockin’ Avenger – stamps his foot and his whole body seems to stagger and shake. He moves forward, raises his voice and sings in a piercing alley cat whine.
“Freedom,” he sings, “it’s good to be free.” It’s a cry curdled with mild hope and bruised by bitter cynicism, a voice that somehow carries across the corrosive ear blazing assault of his reckless Crazy Horse compadres. Then he takes a deep breath and sings once more, “FREE – DOM/Let freedom ring.” That’s when he lets loose, goes for the kill, unleashing the most tormented, ravaged, frustrated, merciless scream of a guitar solo you ever heard.
In America in the spring of 1991 it was the sound of blood-letting, a cry from a battered heart, the sound of freedom flashing.
THE BIG, brassy bellow sounds like James Stewart with a hernia and it seems to come out of nowhere. It’s actually coming four deep in the bowels of the Sacramento Sports stadium. “You guys are fuckin’ great, I saw you last night and from where I was standing in the wings you sounded really great.”
All eyes in our ambling, catering room-bound posse turn round and there’s Neil Young looking every inch the off duty rock star clown – shades, fringed suede jacket, baseball hat, the patchwork quilted jeans. Outside is the Crazy Horse tour coach with the legend ‘We like John Denver’ above the driver’s cab.
Nearby there’s a custom-built shiny red sports car driven into the hall. Jaws drop and silence falls over our chattering companions, friends and members of top New York avant noisies Sonic Youth.
This is a rare off stage sighting of the batty buzzard; though the Sonics have been across the country with him, they’ve seldom come into contact with him. This time the meeting is as brief as ever. Young seems to realise that he’s the immediate centre of attention, makes his excuses and disappears. “Aww, I just wanted to say that, y’know, I don’t often get the chance to hear your show but it was fuckin’ great.”
Neil Young and Crazy Horse hit the road for their present tour round about the same time that America went to war against Iraq . Across the nation, magazine editors were keen to talk to Young but he wasn’t playing the game. They wanted clues, secrets, explanations – they wanted to know what it all meant.
The show had played right across the country, and every night it started the same way. Jimi pouring petroleum over ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ while a pantomime Grand Ole Opry hayseed type lugged a giant oversized mic-stand onstage. The hayseed finally tied a yellow ribbon round the mic, a Civil War symbol for homecoming troops, which stayed there in the middle of the full force gale for the duration of the set. A set that included a long, remorseless version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowing In The Wind’, a one time anthem for peaceniks now turned into a horrific grind, complete with detonating bombs and gunfire.
Was Neil rooting for Stormin’ Norman? Was he for the troops but against the war? In control or off his rocker?
There were no straight answers either on or offstage. The dressing room was out of bounds to his record company. Getting the right security passes meant carrying a full deck of cards. Sonic Youth, who seemed to have been invited along to play merry hell with all those ‘Heart Of Gold’ requesting hippies and bring in a younger crowd, confirmed that he was “kind of an elusive guy”.
Perhaps that was hardly surprising, when Young had come into contact with the group, turning up in their dressing room unannounced, babbling and about something completely off the wall and suddenly disappearing, they’d moaned about his hairstyle.
“It was kind of bugging us so we persuaded him to let Jane, the girl who does our lights, cut it,” confided the Youth’s frontman Thurston Moore. Young ended up with a ridiculous pudding bowl crop. Shortly after the chop he fell ill and had to welsh on an appointment to have dinner cooked for him by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon. He probably thought, if they did that to this hair, what were they going to do to his stomach?
Whatever, the chances of securing an intimate tete a tete with Young hardly seemed to improve once aboard the Sonic Youth bandwagon. So I watched the show and went looking for clues.
Over the past few years, Young’s haphazard career had been given new focus. Finally free of a dispiriting and stifling contract with Geffen Records he’d come good with the power swing bolstered, anti-sponsorship blasting ‘This Note’s For You’. The revival continued with the limited release of the high voltage ‘Eldorado’, and ‘Freedom’, an album as abrasive, fully detailed and emotively charged as anything he’d ever released.
A show-stealing spot on the Mandela Birthday broadcast, and a solo tour with Young as a bedraggled, amped-up, acoustic-thrashing troubadour further whetted the appetite. The ‘Ragged Glory’ album, though lacking the grandstand picture of ‘Freedom’ played the final trump card, reuniting Young with Crazy Horse.
YOUNG’S WORK with Crazy Horse had always provided a potent contrast to his more introspective musing. He’d originally modelled the band on The Rolling Stones and succeeded in going beyond their influence, creating one of the great self-justifying sounds in rock history.
‘Ragged Glory’ - a raw, molten radio format-fugging 62-minute blast of country-punk-meets-savage>-distortion – recaptured the gloriously ramshackle chemistry that YoungHorse had lost on recent outings.
What it all amounted to was a sustained reclamation of a career which, having produced classic sides with Buffalo Springfield in the ’60s, landmark records like ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’, ‘Tonight’s The Night’, ‘On The Beach’, ‘Zuma’ and ‘Rust Never Sleeps’ in the ’70s had, not altogether fairly, fallen from critical and commercial favour in the’ 80s.
Surviving, making good on scattered promises, proving it under the lights night after night, that was what the ‘Ragged Glory/Don’t Spook The Horse’ live shows were all about. Young, who’d been on the run for most of his career – running from music business demons like excess, shallowness and pomposity – was psyched up for his Wildman-On-The-Road trip. No distractions were permitted.
Protected by the indefatigable Elliot Roberts, his manager for 24 years, he wasn’t interested in capitalising on or explaining his position. Like all other journos on the Young trail, I’d made my approach to Elliot and, like all the others, he told me ‘Thanks, but no thanks’.
Roberts was there in the catering room just after we’d seen Neil in the corridor. He was reminiscing about the first tour he had Neil in his charge – a West Coast package deal with Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds and The Doors all in one van and on one bill.
When Roberts met Neil he was driving Buffalo Springfield to gigs around Los Angeles in a hearse he’d brought down from Canada . When Roberts began managing him he’d been given a baptism of fire. Young caught him off having a sly round of golf one afternoon on tour and he hit the roof.
“You should have been figuring out something – plotting, planning my life, my career,” screamed the guitar player. It was a ridiculous request but Roberts reckoned Young was a real talent, so he took heed and stuck it out; few artist management relationships have been so lucrative or lasted so long.
Roberts sees nearly every show Neil plays, from a unique protector’s perspective. He felt that the show the night previous at The Cow Palace had been one of the highlights of the tour “because it wasn’t as aggressive as usual”. And he wasn’t talking about the crowd, “No, I’m talking about Neil, that’s my concern, the crowd can look after themselves. My job is to look after Neil.”
Thinking about what Roberts said, various scattered details from Neil Young’s biography came to mind. Back in the days when he really was ‘Too Far Gone’, much of the time Young came on like a cabaret lush, Tom Waits style. He went through some well weird times sometimes regaling the audience with wacky wisdom and bizarre fantasies.
“I met Judy Garland earlier tonight,” he told a crowd some years after the actress died. “She was standing in the orchestra pit, carrying a music portfolio for the song ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ and a picture of herself as a little girl. She looked up at me and said ‘How’s the business, Neil?’ Well, you don’t have to believe me.”
There were his ego battles with Crosby , Stills and Nash, the customary drug binges, the broken marriages, the ludicrous legal battle where David Geffen tried to sue Young for making unrepresentative music. Never an easy boat to steer, but Roberts was still there, still in command. I was genuinely surprised to see how young he looked. “Thank you, Gavin, but don’t think I didn’t see through the flattery trick. The answer’s still no.”
On Young’s behalf Roberts turned down what for many was the ultimate rock star credo, the chance to go on the cover of the US national current affairs Time magazine. In the run-up for the tour Young had talked about the dangers of taking stock and standing still, putting yourself up for rock’s statesmanship.
“When you get back to London take a look at some of those steel buildings that have been there for a long time, they’re corroding. It’s like a warning to me; stay still and you’ll turn to rust and dust. So I’ve been running all my life … where I’m going who the fuck knows. But that’s not the point.”
Young not talking to the press was nothing new, there had been many periods of enforced silence throughout his 25-year career. In fact some would say it would have been a lot better if he’d kept quiet more often. Round about the same time he found favour with the Country establishment, recording the ‘ Old Ways ’ album with Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, he’d sung the praises of the redneck’s friend Ronald Reagan. Then a couple of years later Neil had jumped to the other side of the rainbow, telling the NME that he thought Jesse Jackson would be the best man to run the country.
It was never a good idea to look to rock stars for political acumen or insight. Neil Young in his life and in his music has always been volatile, inflammatory and contradictory. He’s an ecologist who vehemently supports nuclear power, a lover of Country homilies who funds a West Coast College ’s investigation into electronic experimental music, he’s the perpetual loner who sings the praises of home and family.
His willingness to try anything is what makes him a source of fascination. Currently it is the ability to cram many confusing, vivid and opposing images into a totally wired show that makes him so lethal.
HIS LIFE has been governed by the forces of turmoil and heartbreak. As a child he was a polio victim, the epidemic which hit Ontario in 1951 is explored in detail in a recent issue of Broken Arrow , the unofficial Young fan magazine. Later he suffered from diabetes and epilepsy. Sickness, madness and decay have been recurring subjects in Young’s scourging songbook. The 1975 album ‘Tonight’s The Night’ was a gruelling blues wake for junkie casualties Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten (if Crazy Horse really were the West Coast Rolling Stones, Whitten drew the short straw and played Brian Jones). Round about the time it was released, Young told Rolling Stone magazine about his own sickness.
“Epilepsy is a part of me, part of my head, what’s happening in there. It’s a psychedelic experience to have a seizure. You slip into some other world. Your body’s flapping around and you’re biting your tongue and batting your head off the ground, but your mind is off somewhere else. The scary thing is realising you’re totally comfortable in this void.”
In the ’70s, he was laid up for a long spell with a bad back, a legacy of his childhood polio virus, and on the present tour an ear infection caused him to postpone several dates.
If Young’s music lost its edge and became distanced during the ’80s, that may have been because he was coming to terms with an awful, much bigger challenge as a father. With two different wives Young sired two non-oral, spastic kids suffering from cerebral palsy. Then he was looking for clues, a reason, an explanation.
“I couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t have happened twice. I remember looking at the sky, looking for a sign, wondering what the fuck is going on,” he told Village Voice magazine.
Every year Young holds a benefit concert, with guests like Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, for The Bridge, the school where his kids go through an intensive computer oriented training programme. The albums ‘Trans’, ‘Re-ac-tor’ and ‘Hawks & Doves’ directly related to the children’s therapy and the need for both himself and his wife Pegi to reconcile themselves to their situation. A compilation album of Young cover versions featuring Pixies, Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth also raised money for the school.
It would be foolish and not a little cheap to try and directly relate any of these factors to Young’s present performance. But they must be in there somewhere, I can’t believe that he could just ditch them for what is a caustic, wholly impassioned show. He came on like a man grappling with all sorts of questions, driven and torn apart by wild raging forces.
The weird thing, considering he’s released 25 albums and with the promise of a soon-come 180 track retrospective (comprising much unreleased material), is that the set has stayed more or less exactly the same throughout the nationwide tour. And yet on both occasions I saw him there was no doubt about the commitment, the conviction, the very real issues at stake in his performance.
Young had stoked his show into a conflagration of love and peace, hate and war, anger and compassion, fear and bravery, death and rebirth. He was bombarded from all sides, still determined to take in, eat up and spit out the world mapped out in his songs. That world was a warring ball of confusion embracing West Coast Utopianism, urban outrage, hippy idealism and punkish nihilism.
It was about the country which has inspired him with pride and filled him with despair. It was about making connections right across his career, from the sweet but savage ‘Cinnamon Girl’ to the wrathful and majestic ‘Cortez The Killer’, the besieged and fated Civil War victim of ‘Powderfinger’, the irresistible but merciless force of ‘Like A Hurricane’ right up to ‘Love To Burn’ from ‘Ragged Glory’. Perhaps strangest of all, it was about American homicidal maniac Charles Manson. Charlie was right there, somewhere in the middle of the set.
The thing about Manson had started as a joke in the Sonic Youth camp. During Neil’s song ‘Mansion On The Hill’, one of their chums had sung along, dropping the ‘i’ and making way for the infamous mass murderer, would-be musician and one time acquaintance of Young. But in his column in California ’s Art Forum, magazine critic Greil Marcus actually went and suggested that the old man with the weird eyes in the song actually was Manson.
The Sonics’ resident Young fanatic pooh-poohed the idea, but Manson has cropped up in various Young interviews over the years. He was a symbol, if nothing else. A symbol of the hippy dream turned to nightmare, a warning about decadence and stupidity. I wasn’t about to try and work it all out, but when Young came to the line about “There is no way to lose love’s grace,” Marcus’ idea seemed plausible and kind of scary.
MANY OF the songs Young played centred on love, but they also embraced the need to destroy, insisting on the absolute necessity of all-out aural violence. Young uses violence like film director Martin Scorsese or rap star Ice T. He gives himself over to it totally, rejoicing in its purgative, restorative, ultimately healing power.
Marty uses his camera, Ice T uses his lyrics and Young uses his guitar. Young is probably a technically awful musician, but I’ve never heard a more brutally effective player, all manner of pent-up emotions are sent driving through his bloodied, burning fingers. It’s the sound of profound disgust, like he’s mad with himself because he can never get to hit the right notes. It all comes out through his guitar playing, the sound of a bitter tormented soul striving to be free.
I never got meet Neil Young, never got to sit down and work it all out, get a few answers, a rationale for his antics, a chance to weight up his gameplan. In fact I never even got to see his whole show, being whisked off on the second night from the mid-point of what was undoubtedly one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll blasts I’d ever witnessed to go across town and see what was undoubtedly one of the worst. But it didn’t seem to matter, the impression was indelible. If he was putting on an act, it was one where the line between real life and performance was totally obliterated.
Young who’d weathered and even consumed all manner of parody in the past, knew the dangers. He was a big fan of Spinal Tap and he was still willing to go out there – a mixed up middle-aged firebrand, a quixotic epileptic, a millionaire punk – aware how ridiculous he could look.
He probably knew about rock ’n’ roll in America , probably knew that for many nowadays it had become synonymous with careerist, spandex-clad, Perrier-sipping LA poodle cuts. But he couldn’t let that stop him, couldn’t even think about it when it was time to make his stand.
He once said that rock ’n’ roll was the sound of revenge, and at 45 he wasn’t too old to taste revenge, to take it out on enemies, his adopted country, on broken dreams, on false promises, bloodied history, the world at large and even on himself. “Why Do I Keep Fuckin’ Up” he’d screamed, and it sounded as real as anything he’d ever put out.
Before I left the sports stadium in Sacramento I looked at the stage once more. The gale was still blowing, Young was still bent over his guitar, wired, venomous. He was ready to tear it apart. He had the look in his eye. This time he was going to kill.
SIX NEIL YOUNG LPS THAT YOU REALLY SHOULD OWN
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH (Reprise) (released September 1970)
THOUGH STILL touring with Crosby , Stills and Nash, ‘After The Gold Rush’ confirmed Neil Young as a solo star. It remains the quintessential Young acoustic set. Poignant, melodic but quirkily tough, ‘Goldrush’ encompasses the melancholic rage of ‘Southern Man’, the simple affecting ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ and closes with the delicious whimsical fragment of ‘Cripple Creek Ferry’. The sheer individuality and strength of the songwriting lifts it above the introspective mewlings common in the genre. The surreal title track was an acapella hit for Prelude in England .
TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT (Reprise) (released June 1975)
YOUNG’S STILL astonishing ‘Black’ album, which was released as a tribute to CSN&Y roadie Bruce Berry and Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, both of whom Oded. An occasionally off-key set of powerful and emotional songs that manage to dredge up the man’s dark side and keep you awake at nights. Essential listening.
DECADE (Reprise) (released November 1977)
THE TRIPPLE retrospective set covers all the important areas of Neil Young’s solo career up to his ‘American Star ’N Bars album and features choice cuts from his career with both Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. ‘Decade 2’ has been promised but remains a long time coming.
RUST NEVER SLEEPS (Reprise) (released June 1979)
NEIL YOUNG and Crazy Horse’s recorded refusal to lay down with the other old dinosaurs from the ’60s, a kick up the late ’70s that was delivered when punk had reached its height. Ten years later and punk has kicked the bucket while Young and Crazy Horse are still delivering the goods.
FREEDOM (Reprise) (released November 1989)
AFTER A low-key ’80s, Young came out at the end of the decade with all guns blazing. There were people marching, well crumbling, talk of a brave new world but Young’s cynical anthem ‘Keep On Rockin’ In The Free World’ spelt out democracy’s darker side. The song’s acoustic and electric versions, a la ‘Out Of The Blue Into The Black’, book-ended the record, in between came some of his strongest ever compositions – the majestic ‘Wrecking Ball’, the scouring ‘Crime In The City’ and ‘Too Far Gone’, a country lament which beat Nashville at its own game.
RAGGED GLORY (Reprise) (released October 1990)
PROOF POSITIVE that Neil Young and Crazy Horse are still on the warpath. A truly awesome display of power rock that shakes the dust from under their feet, along with any foolish theories that the unit may be a spent force. ‘Ragged Glory’ fuses together Young’s matured rebel streak with the electric angst of today’s new breed of rockers. One of his very best.
THE WIT AND, ERM, WISDOM OF NEIL YOUNG ON HIS RECORDS
“I think ‘Harvest’ was probably the finest record that I’ve made, but that’s a restricting adjective for me. It’s really fine … but that’s it.”
June ’75
“‘Tonight’s The Night’ didn’t come out right after it was recorded because it wasn’t finished. It just wasn’t in the right space, it wasn’t in the right order, the concept wasn’t right. I had to get the colour right, so it was not so down that it would make people restless. I had to keep jolting every once in a while to get people to wake up so they could be lulled again. It’s a very fluid album. The higher you are, the better it is. And it really lives up to that, a lot of records don’t … you should listen to it late at night.”
June ’75
“What we were doing was playing those guys on their way. We all got that high – not that high, but we got as close as we could. I mean. I’m not a junkie and I won’t even try it out to check out what it’s like. But we’d get really high – drink a lot of tequila, get right out on the edge, where we knew we were so screwed up that we could easily just fall on our faces and not be able to handle it as musicians. So we’d just wait until the middle of the night until the vibe hit us and just do it. We did four or five songs on the first side all in a row one night, without any break between ’em.”
June’75 on ‘Tonight’s The Night’
“I don’t think ‘Tonight’s The Night’ is a friendly album. It’s real, that’s all. Either you’ll want to hear it or you won’t. A lot of records don’t even make you think that much. Then after that it will take you somewhere if you want to listen to it. I’m really proud of it. It’s there for me. You’ve got to listen to it at night when it was done. Put on The Doobie Brothers in the morning. They can handle it at 11am . But not this album. It’s custom-made for night-time.”
June ’75
“I was doing a lot of honey slides. Do you know what honey slides are? Marijuana and honey fried on a plate. Close you right down, make your voice lower.”
Mar ’86 on ‘On The Beach’
“I remember when I was living at ‘Zuma’ I told Carole King, you gotta come down and listen to my new album (‘Zuma’). It’s the cleanest album you’ve ever heard. She came down and listened and said ‘This isn’t a studio album! What are you talking about! And James Taylor on ‘Heart Of Gold’ - C’mon Neil, why don’t you make a real record!”
Oct ’82
“My first Horror record, a Horror record.”
June ’75 on ‘Tonight’s The Night’
“I’ve always put a piece of Roy Orbison on every album I’ve made. His influence is on so many of my songs … I even had his photograph on the sleeve of ‘Tonight’s The Night’ for no reason, really. Just recognising his presence. There’s a big Orbison tribute song on ‘Eldorado’ called ‘Don’t Cry’. That’s totally me under the Roy Orbison spell. When I wrote that it and recorded it I was thinking Roy Orbison meets trash metal. Seriously!”
Nov ’90
“The vocoders on ‘Trans’ are me trying to communicate with my younger son, Ben, who is unable to talk. He can understand what people are saying to him, but can’t reply. I guess it’s like someone who has suffered a stroke. I tend to refer to the whole situation as a condition of life. It will never be easy to reconcile myself, but the more I understand and the more I am able to communicate with Ben, the less of a heavy thing it is.”
Sept ’90
ON HIS LIFE AND WORK
“Hey, I’m fuckin’ crazy, man. I’m totally fuckin’ crazy. Just look at me.”
Nov ’90
“When I was in school I was called into the principal’s office – I was al
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