Neil Young - On the Beach

Neil Young continued his anti-commercial ways on 1974's On the Beach. The album has some terrific high points, but lacks the consistency of Time Fades Away for one obvious reason: Young once again chooses to work without a steady band. Just as he had established a solid performing rapport with the Stray Gators, he abandoned them for yet another album of shifting permutations of friends, studio pros and guest stars behind him.

Which is not to say that Beach is a bad album; it's better than good, it's very good. But given the sometimes hesitant performances of his sidemen, one can't help but wonder what could have been.

The album opens with "Walk On", which is a story within itself. After the Gold Rush's "Southern Man", a scathing indictment of southern racial history which remains one of Young's best-known electric guitar rave-ups, had inspired a response from pride-of-the-South country rockers Lynyrd Skynyrd. "Sweet Home Alabama," one of Skynyrd's best-known songs, contains the verse:

Well I heard Mr. Young sing about us

Yeah i heard old Neil put it down

I hope Neil Young can remember

A southern man don't need him around anyhow

"Walk On" begins with the lines

I hear some people been talkin' me down

Bring up my name, pass it 'round

Is this pop music's longest running non-hiphop dis war? Might be, but Young seems to be calling for a truce on "Walk On". Too bad they couldn't keep it going for a few more albums. Incidentally, following the tragic 1977 plane crash that killed Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant and several other band members, Young is said to have remarked that he'd rather play "Sweet Home Alabama" than "Southern Man" any day (he hasn't).

As for the rest of the album, side one searches for an identity, while side two settles into a somewhat unsatisfying one. The real lost gem here is "Revolution Blues," an urgent and powerful number dominated by the drumming of the Band's Levon Helm. Helm is a curious figure in rock history. While his drum technique is nothing special on the surface, it's instantly recognisable all the same. Listen to "Revolution Blues", then listen to Mercury Rev's "Opus 40," recorded exactly one quarter-century later. On both songs, Helm's unmistakeable drumming sets the tone. On the latter song, the drumming alters the mood of the song completely following its dramatic intro, imbuing the song with an unmistakable sense of Americana.

On side two of Beach Young finds a groove and settles into it, perhaps too comfortably. "Motion Pictures" is the shortest track, and indicative of the soporific mood throughout. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful song, but the performance lacks energy, as do many of Beach's longer tracks.

Still, all in all a fine album, and a curious gap in Young's release schedule. Like Time, the album remained out of print on domestic CD until this decade. Unlike Time, however, Young chose not to ignore Beach on Decade; the compilation includes "Walk On" and, in a curious and pleasant surprise, "For the Turnstiles". Greatest Hits, on the other hand, ignores Beach entirely. Eleven of its sixteen tracks are drawn from albums I've covered already; depending on how well you know Young's catalog from here on out, you can probably guess the other five.

Buy it... on vinyl.

From my deck to you: Neil Young - "Revolution Blues" and "Motion Pictures"

UPDATE: Mercury Rev - "Opus 40"

Weekend video - Neil Young solo

Found a fantastic video of Neil Young live on the BBC from 1971. It's about a half-hour long. His voice sounds amazing throughout.

The opening rendition of "Out On the Weekend" kills the version on Harvest. He introduces "Old Man" as a new song, so I guess all the Harvest stuff was new here. There's even a few songs from Time Fades Away, which was still two years from being recorded, let alone released. My guess is the audience hadn't heard most of the songs he played.

Also, his between-songs banter is rather amusing, in particular the comments about advertising on American television.


Thanks to the Other Side for the heads up on this one.

Neil Young - Time Fades Away

Following the immense success of Harvest, Young, as is his wont, made an abrupt left turn. He would do this numerous times throughout his career but, this being the follow-up to his most successful album, it would remain the most (in)famous.

And, characteristically, Time fades Away is one of his finest albums. This is the album on which the Stray Gators transform from an ad hoc collection of studio players into a real band. Recorded live at various stops on the Harvest tour, the album is a collection of new songs played with unfakeable spontaneity by a band that had just learned them. The album is loose, lively, sloppy, passionate and urgent: in short, everything Harvest isn't.

So naturally, the album was out of print for years. When I was discovering Young's catalog in college, this was part of an egregious gap in the CD timeline. No bother if you're a consumer of used vinyl (as was I), but confounding all the same. The album wasn't released domestically on CD until 1999.

It's easy to see why Time didn't sell: it's defiantly anti-commercial. Missed notes and dropped beats abound; the band sound drunk on most of the tracks. And yet that's what makes the performances so great, and what makes this a quintessential (non-Crazy Horse) Neil Young album. This is everything one's ever loved about Young distilled into one glorious mess.

What's strangest about the album's long-time absence from the marketplace is that three of the eight songs have lent their titles to other key elements in the Young canon. "Journey Thru[sic] the Past" was the title of an early live documentary (on which the spelling is corrected to "Through") and accompanying soundtrack album assembled by Young himself. "Don't Be Denied" is the title of a 1993 book which, before the release of Jimmy McDonough's Shakey, served as the de facto definitive biography of Young. And "The Bridge" is the name of the school for physically disabled children founded by Young in the 80s, as well as a Young tribute album whose proceeds were donated to said school.

And yet the album is completely ignored by both Decade and Greatest Hits. In other words, if you're a casual Neil Young fan, many of the albums titles will sound familiar, but none of the songs will.

When choosing tracks for this post, I ran into the opposite problem I faced with Harvest: whereas that album has some average songs and is well-represented on compilations, Time's songs are largely unknown and all of them are great. No exaggeration. I was going to post all three cited above, but "Journey" and "Bridge" are both solo piano ballads, and one will suffice as a representation of the album's sound. "Denied" makes it in a walk, plus I'll go with the title track, one of Young's finest songs. It's his entry in the "Subterranean Homesick Blues"/"It's the End Of the World As We know It"/"We Didn't Start the Fire" genre of non-stop jumble-of-images lyric writing, with some vicious piano work by Jack Nitzsche. I've seen Yo La Tengo cover it more than once and would have loved to post a bootleg of that but I can't find one, so I 'll settle for the original. Believe me, "Yonder Stands the Sinner" and "LA" made this a tough choice.

Just buy this one, trust me. If you're at all interested in Neil Young, you need this album.

Buy it... on vinyl.

From my deck to you: Neil Young - "Time Fades Away", "Don't Be Denied" and "The Bridge"

Note: That Amazon link seems to indicate that this album has fallen out of print again! Are you fucking kidding me? What is this world coming to?

Neil Young - Harvest

While Young's tenure with Crosby, Stills & Nash had already placed him on rock's A-list, 1972's Harvest was his most successful outing yet, and made him a reluctant superstar. The single "Heart Of Gold" went to number one, unusual for an artist known mostly for album sales, and the album sold platinum several times over.

It's a good album, but not a great one, not as strong as either the one that preceded it or followed it, and if not for its commercial success would probably be regarded as one of his lesser efforts from the era. However, its sales alone make it an essential piece of the Neil Young canon (it's the subject of a 33¹/₃ volume), and it demands scrutiny.

The standard tale of the album's circumstances is that Young threw out his back and recorded the album wearing a brace, leaving him unable to play the electric guitar and creating the album's downtempo vibe by necessity. Though the story is undermined by the back cover photo of a studio session that shows Young upright and plugged in, the relaxed nature of most of the tracks lends it some credence. But the band is probably just as responsible for the mellow mood. Unlike After the Gold Rush, on which Young relied on a rotating cast of session players, for Harvest he hastily assembled yet another backing band, this one dubbed the Stray Gators.

The problem is that much of the album is too mellow, both in the performance and the relatively unchallenging songwriting. Side one, in particular, is dominated by songs so slow the band sounds as thought they may fall asleep midway through. There are some strong melodies, most notably the title track and "Heart Of Gold", but only Ben Kieth's tasty slide work saves the side-closing "Are You Ready For the Country?" (a live staple for years to come, and a good one I might add) from complete torpor.

Worse, the flow is broken up in the middle by "A Man Needs a Maid", the triumphant return of Jack Nitzsche's orchestral charts. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, the performance is beautiful and the lyrics painfully honest, but the song is flawed. For one thing, the parts don't quite fit together melodically; Young seems to have taken pieces from several work-in-progress songs and tacked them on as bridges. For another, the production is woefully overblown. Whereas on "Expecting To Fly" Nitzsche tastefully underscored Young's song with subtle touches, "Maid" is the sound of Nitzsche's ego run amok.

But it's the very sound of restraint compared to the album's second LSO collaboration. While side two of Harvest breaks out of the monotony of the first side, it's marred by "There's a World", with its portentous kettle drums and harp swirls.

The rest of the side is certainly an improvement over the first. It opens with "Old Man", one of Young's most affecting meditations on aging. Near the end, Young goes it alone for the spare, aching "The Needle and the Damage Done", a desperate plea to Crazy Horse bandmate and friend Danny Whitten to escape his crushing addiction to heroin. Contrary to popular belief, the song is not a memorial; it was written and recorded before Whitten's overdose less than a year later.

Young breaks out the electric and the band picks up the pace toward the album's close. The closer, "Words", is a fine song, but the band meanders, and, unlike the rave-ups on Gold Rush, the performance lacks direction towards the end. It's a big part of the reason Harvest is Exhibit A for anyone arguing that Young isn't half as good without Crazy Horse (untrue, by the way).

The biggest problem with Harvest, ironically for an album so subdued, might be Young's ego. With Gold Rush, Young had proved he could piece together a great album without the help of a steady backing line-up or single producer. Harvest credits three production teams and was recorded at four different locations, and the results betray the scattershot approach with their overall inconsistency.

Given that Harvest has fewer highlights than other Young albums of the period but, due to its commercial stature, has been picked dry for compilations, finding a lesser-known gem is tough. Decade features five of the album's ten tracks, and the shorter Greatest Hits includes three (all overlapping). So I went with "Alabama", one of the electric numbers on side two. The song continues Young's obsession with Americana, lamenting the burden of shameful history in an extension of the previous album's "Southern Man".

Buy it... on vinyl... or hey, check this out.

From my deck to you: Neil Young - "Alabama"

Neil Young - After the Gold Rush

Young never planned on staying with Crosby, Stills & Nash. Even while playing with them, he continued working on his next solo album, which hit stores while he was on the road with CSNY.

After the Gold Rush was the album on which Young truly came into his own as a solo artist. While Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is every bit as good in its own way, much of the credit has to go to Crazy Horse; it's a band album. Gold Rush is a solo album. Which is not to say that Young plays everything. But instead of a single backing band, here he utilises a variety of sidemen (including all three members of the Horse) in different combinations throughout the album. And it still sounds like the vision of a single artist.

The songwriting shows similar growth and confidence. Whereas the variety of styles employed on his debut make him sound inconsistent and uncertain, here he moves effortlessly from all-out rockers to trad-folk country to tender balladry and still manages to produce a cohesive work.

Young was in peak form here; his work from this period is so consistently strong that while these albums tend to weigh heavily in compilations, there are still plenty of strong tracks left out that could just as easily have made it. Gold Rush places three on Decade and Greatest Hits. The title track and "Southern Man" are obviously indispensable, but "I Believe In You", while excellent, could easily have been replaced by a half-dozen others. Greatest Hits contains "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" in its stead, a song made more famous in the early 90s by St. Etienne's terrific dance-pop cover version.

"Tell Me Why" opens the album by immediately announcing that this will not be Everybody Knows, Pt. II, a habit Young would continue throughout his career when following a particularly successful album. Surprisingly, it's Young's first solo acoustic track on a studio album, though he had already been playing full acoustic sets during his tours with Crazy Horse. It also reveals a lesser-known secret about Young as a musician: he's actually a highly skilled guitarist. Though known for his primitive electric soloing, that style is an affectation. On acoustic, he always lets his technique shine through. Both this track and "Don't Let It Bring You Down" display a rapidly developing melodic sense, as well as a distinctive lyrical style combining vivid imagery with more abstract musings on self-doubt and aging (the latter being a dominant theme in Young's lyrics from day one).

Young also shows growing confidence as a band leader, particularly on "When You Dance", a driving rocker that continues to make set lists on Crazy Horse tours. While the song starts out with a fairly conventional structure, by the end Young lets the band really cut loose, particularly the piano player. Still, as wild as they get (start the song over just after it ends and check out how much the tempo speeds up during the performance), Young is always in control. I think it's Nils Lofgren on piano, by the way, but that's just a guess. Also, the album credits both Crazy Horse's Billy Talbott and CSNY's Greg Reeves with bass; this is clearly a Crazy Horse-style track, but I think that might be Reeves on bass.

Incidentally, I've also posted the Flaming Lips' rendition of the album's title track, just because I think it's awesome and I love the Lips. They re-vamp it entirely and make it their own but, despite skipping the first verse, still manage to stay true to the original's mix of exhaustion and hope. It's from a surprisingly strong Neil Young tribute album called The Bridge. I might post a few other tracks from it as the weeks roll on. No promises.

Buy it... on vinyl.

From my deck to you: Neil Young - "Tell Me Why", "Don't Let It Bring You Down" and "When You Dance, I Can Really Love"

Bonus (not from vinyl): The Flaming Lips - "After the Gold Rush"

Weekend video - CSNY

No idea when this one's from nor why CSNY were spending precious television time on a Crazy Horse tune, but this is a killer performance. Interesting to note that Young lets Stills take most of the solo. After about a minute he steps and shows the kid how it's done. Killer organ work by Nash, too.


By the way, that's Reeves and Taylor on bass and drums.