Neil Young

Neil Young's self-titled solo debut sticks out like a sore thumb in his catalog. There are two instrumentals, elaborate overdubs, brief pop songs and noextended guitar workouts. In short, nothing one would come to associate with a typical Neil Young album. The album also lacks coherence and clear direction, and basically sounds like an artist with an overabundance of ideas and little idea of how to filter them properly.

The album opens with a breezy instrumental country song that, to my knowledge is one of only two instrumental songs in Young's catalog (excepting Arc in its entirety). The other, which opens side two, is written and arranged by Jack Nitzsche. I don't think Young even plays on it.

The closing number, "Last Trip To Tulsa", is a nine-and-a-half minute acoustic epic with no guitar solos whatsoever. Young's elliptical lyrics seems like an effort to emulate the more oblique musings of Bob Dylan songs like "Tombstone Blues" or "115th Dream". It doesn't work. I considered posting it here for sheer curiosity value, but, as I mentioned previously, it's nine-and-a-half minutes long and not very good.

"The Loner" and "The Old Laughing Lady" represent the album on Decade; nothing made the cut for Greatest Hits. "I've Been Waiting For You" is in the same vein as "The Loner", a brief and powerful sixties-pop number with gobs of organ swirls and some fierce guitar tones.

"I've Loved Her So Long" is another Jack Nitzsche collaboration (Nitzsche produced three of the album's cuts, including his own aforementioned one) and is the real find here. Rather than overloading the track with strings as on "Expecting To Fly" and later tracks, here Nitzsche uses a chorus of female voices to give the song its lush textures. Young's voice sounds terrific here; while he's best known for the nails-on-chalkboard whine he employs for his louder electric rave-ups, he has a gentler sound he uses for quiet numbers that sounds lovely, particularly on the early ballads.

Incidentally, this track led to the first real sound quality dilemma I've faced since starting this blog. I record all of the songs from records in my own collection and actually rather like the vinyl sounds in some of them, but here it's a bit much. The combination of the track's unusually low mastering volume (it's noticeably quieter than the other songs on the album, even at its peak) and the advanced state of deterioration of my copy makes for an almost unlistenable aural soup. I boosted the level more than 200% in SoundForge, so the song becomes audible over the vinyl pops, but that makes said pops create digital peaks in the level.

So I'm posting it anyway, best I can do. I considered posting a digital version as well, but figured that kind of goes against the point of this blog; the version I listen to sounds like that, so there it is. If you want a better sounding version of this one song, by all means, grab it on iTunes. It's just a buck.

Buy it... on vinyl.

From my deck to you: Neil Young - "I've Been Waiting For You" and "I've Loved Her So Long"

Weekend video: Buffalo Springfield

I found a pretty cool TV performance by the Springfield here. They start out with a verse from "For What It's Worth" then suddenly shift into "Mr. Soul". I thought at first they might be lip-synching because the sound is so close to the record, but Young's solo is definitely live.

I couldn't figure out why the bass player is sitting at the front of the stage with his back to the crowd. So the band can all be in a circle? Then it occured to me that's probably not Palmer, who missed appearances due to drug busts more than once during the band's brief history. Is the band trying to hide their replacement bassist?

Also, I have no idea who that host is.



Man, some 60s fashions seem so strange now, beyond just dated. A double-breasted suit and a cowboy hat? That doesn't look like a relic from another era, it looks like it's from another planet.

That wraps up Young's Buffalo Springfield period. Here's Young, many years later, looking back on what a time it was. Is that Donald "Duck" Dunn on bass?

Buffalo Springfield - Last Time Around

Buffalo Springfield fell apart after the release of Again, working sporadically on individual members' tracks in the studio and playing concerts with incomplete lineups. Bassist Bruce Palmer was deported to Canada following a drug bust and replaced by Jim Messina (later of Loggins and fame). Follwoing the break-up, Messina and Richie Furay put together a final studio album from extant finished songs. Here Neil Young's contributions are down to two songs and a co-writing cerdit on one of Furay's.

Not only were his contributions dwindling, but his style seems to be regressing. "On the Way Home" is a solid tune, but sounds like the straightforward folk-rock the other members had been producing. The song could just as easily have been written by Stephen Stills. "I Am a Child" is a bit more interesting due the haunting minor-key shifts in the verse melody, but it still sounds like the same strain of west coast country-rock Furay had been exploring as his own writing developed.

Furthermore, I can't find my own copy of it. I'm not even sure if I ever owned it, though I'm pretty sure I know most of the songs on the track list. So the tracks posted here aren't even from vinyl. Bit of an underwhelming end to the first week, but Young was just getting started, and would bounce back strong upon going solo. I'll get into his debut on Monday.

Buy it... (tempting, I know) on vinyl.

From my deck to you: Buffalo Springfield - "On the Way Home" and "I Am a Child"

Buffalo Springfield Again

By the time Buffalo Springfield's second album was released, Neil Young had already quit the band once (forcing them to play part of a tour without him), and would do so again shortly after its release. One listen to the album, widely considered the band's best, and the creative differences become quite clear. Richie Furay had begun contributing songs of his own, leaving room for fewer from Young and Stephen Stills. Stills and Furay's songs are clearly of a piece: tight, catchy California folk-rock, solid but hardly groundbreaking.

Young, on the other hand, had recorded "Mr. Soul" with the band, but had it rejected by the others as a single. He retreated, began working on his own, and produced two more songs that sound completely out of place on the album, like the work of another band entirely.

"Expecting To Fly" (the lyrics are said to have been inspired by a wheelchair-bound friend who had been a passenger in a car that drove off a cliff) is, from a songwriting perspective, a direct progression from the first album's "Out Of My Mind". The arrangement, however, is unprecedented, and is largely the work of producer Jack Nitzsche. Nitzsche had already established a name for himself in the industry through his arrangement work for Phil Spector (including "Be My Baby" and the legendary "River Deep – Mountain High"), and would go on to build one of popular music's most astounding résumés. Though he has been referred to as "the Yoko Ono of Buffalo Springfield", this was the only Springfield track on which he worked. Young and Nitzsche would go on to maintain a tumultuous and sporadically collaborative relationship over the next couple of decades.

While my intent for these posts is to present lesser-known Young tracks from each album, his songs on Again are all fairly well-known (all three appear on Decade), so I'm going with "Expecting" here because it's my personal favourite. At least until the long-rumoured acoustic demo of "Broken Arrow" surfaces. To make up for the lack of Young material, I've included a few Jack Nitzsche items of interest here. The first, "The Lonely Surfer", was Nitzsche's first solo single for a recording contract he signed in 1963 on the basis of his arranging work. The charming and aptly-titled single made the top 40, but the subsequent album didn't fare as well, and Nitzsche set aside the idea of a solo recording career for the time being. The second is the fourth movement of a classical symphony Nitzsche recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. It's pleasant and professional, though unspectacular, and seems to point to a career direction in which Nitzsche would head in the coming years: film scoring.

Buy it... on vinyl.

From my deck to you: Buffalo Springfield - "Expecting To Fly"

Bonus (not from vinyl): Jack Nitzsche - "The Lonely Surfer" and "St. Giles Cripplegate No. 4 (For Mori)"

Buffalo Springfield

Grab a seat, kids; it's time to learn about Neil Young. Young was probably my "favourite ever" in college, i.e., back when it would occur to me to rank those sort of things. I'm going to spend the next several weeks posting a lesser-known track or two from every Young album I own until they run out (I'm pretty sure I'm complete through the early 80s). Take notes. I don't have any Mynah Birds records, so we'll start with Young's Buffalo Springfield years, which is appropriate since the band recorded three albums.

Springfield's formation is one of the most oft-repeated legends of 60s-rock history; I'll run through it here once more. Stephen Stills had met Young years before, but they lost touch. Young drove down from Canada to Los Angeles in a hearse, hoping to find his fortune in the music business. Stuck in a typical LA traffic jam, Stills spied a hearse, thought it might be Young, walked over to see. It was indeed Young, they started a band, history etc.

Buffalo Springfield jumped right into the industry hype machine and became a widely celebrated act for a brief period before breaking up. It was a classic case of too many talented songwriters in one band. Lennon-McCartney, Mould-Hart, Kember-Pierce; you know the drill. They remain celebrated as one of the 60s great coulda-been stories, a band that released a few solid albums but seemed capable of so much more.

Their first, self-titled album is the sound of a young band searching for an identity. Folk-y chord changes and vocal harmonies mingle awkwardly with crude psychedelic guitar effects. Young is credited with composing five of the album's twlve cuts (Stills supplies the other seven) but, curiously, sings only two. The other three are sung by future Poco frontman Richie Furay. It's easy to picture Young being nudged out of the vocal booth due to his, shall we say, unconventional singing chops, but in hindsight he seems rather savvy in in his selection of keepers. "Burned" and "Out Of My Mind" are among the album's most memorable cuts, while the other three are rather pedestrian folk-rock cuts that he may have been more than happy to surrender. Of the three, only "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" made it into Young's later set lists; the other two he seems happy to let go.

Of those, "Flying On the Ground Is Wrong" is the keeper, an MOR soft-rock cut with a marvelous minor-chord change at the start of the chorus. But that bridge, ugh, what a wet blanket. It's followed immediately by "Burned", one of Young's best early tunes, which he says in the liner notes to Decade was his first studio vocal performance, one which he took a handful of uppers to get himself ready for.

The truly revelatory find here is "Out Of My Mind", a flawed but intriguing track that points the way to his subsequent late-60s work. It's not a great song, but it's an interesting experiment that shows Young was more than just a folkie with an amp. The sweeping, dramatic chord changes (in particular the E major chord at the beginning of the song and each verse) reveal a restless creative mind drawing influence from a pool far wider than that of the average LA folk musician of the era. Young's remaining work in the late 60s, through his first solo album, would find him exploring a majestic, orchestral sound to which he would never return despite the many stylistic transformations he would explore throughout his career. And it all begins here.

It's interesting to note the lines

All I hear are screams

From outside the limousine

Young seems to be complaining about the alienating effects of fame before he even became famous. This from an artist who was well known for his retreat from the public eye in the 80s, when many of his generational peers were cashing in.

Ironically enough, the guitar solo in "Out Of My Mind" is awful. It's not even clear if Young actually played it, but I'll bet he did. Oh well, at the very least one can argue that the simple follow-the-melody-line format inspired Kurt Cobain.

Buy it... on vinyl.

From my deck to you: Buffalo Springfield - "Flying On the Ground Is Wrong" and "Out Of My Mind"

Weekend video: Spacemen 3

So, as interesting and occasionally excellent as Kember's post-Spacemen work has been, it's pretty obvious that his early work was best. He clearly dominated the band, and they were glorious. Jason Pierce, by contrast, struggled to find a voice in those days, tentatively exploring the possibilities of gospel music's uplifting power, then fully realised that vision after the band split up. Not that I'm giving Kember total cerdit for the 3's glorious sound, mind you. I'm just saying he peaked earlier.

Speaking of peaking, drop a tab and watch this slice of awesomeness. I'm closing out Kember week with an incredible two-part video of "Suicide", a frequent closing number on Spacemen set lists. This is actually a relatively short version, clocking in at under 20 minutes, but that doesn't make it wny less incredible. Can you imagine experiencing this in person?


The second half should come up as a suggested "Related Videos" link in the Flash box after the first half finishes; if it doesn't, click here. Then, if you're still conscious, watch the whole thing again.

Well, September's here at last, which means school's in, suckers. Neil Young's on the Shelf for the next couple of months, at least until I run out of records. The semester starts Monday with Buffalo Springfield week. Grab a seat and take notes.