Neil Young Part I: The Essentials
Posted on February 22, 2008
by: Big Jar
While driving down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, a young folk musician named Stephen Stills spotted a hearse driving in the opposite lane. He recognized the driver as a quiet and intense Canadian whom he had met nearly a year earlier at a folk club in Thunder, Ontario. Upon their initial meeting, the two musicians had immediately taken to one another. They shook hands and departed with a vague agreement to work together in the future, but the transient nature of a musician’s life had made it difficult for the two aspiring artists to reconnect. This moment marked the first time Stills had seen the man since they first met.
Thinking quickly, Stills pulled a u-turn in the middle of the street and flagged down the hearse’s driver. They agreed to form a band on the spot, calling themselves Buffalo Springfield, and released their first album just a few months later. Headlined by a hit single that took a whimsical look at the Vietnam War (”For What It’s Worth”), the band dominated the airwaves with one of the most defining songs of the era.
Buffalo Springfield’s lifespan was brief–the band broke up two years after their formation. Despite this, the Canadian driving that hearse evolved into one of the most famous musicians of the twentieth century. His name is Neil Young, and for the last forty years he has challenged, inspired and confounded the world of popular music.
Due to his prolific output and his propensity for releasing “difficult” material, Neil Young is a daunting figure for those who are unfamiliar with his work. When an artist has released over thirty studio albums, it’s hard to know where to start and what to avoid. The following is a how-to guide for those who aren’t Neil Young fans, but are interested in learning more about this enigmatic and brilliant musician.
I’ve chosen three different categories for Young’s work: the essentials, the train wrecks, and the decent albums that are worth investment but probably aren’t good launching pads. I’m going to avoid discussing the collaborative efforts, such as the aforementioned Springfields and Young’s work with Messirs Crosby, Stills and Nash. All of that material is worth checking out, but this is a pure assessment of Neil Young. I am also refusing to consider Young’s live albums (that’s a topic that deserves its own series of posts), and the bootleg/unreleased material (Chrome Dreams, Where the Buffalo Roam, etc.) This is only the official discography.
I am also dividing this post into installments. The essential albums are included with this post (click the “read more” tab below), with the other two lists to follow at a later date. If you’re interested, I recommend listening to these albums in the order that they’re listed.
Enjoy, and don’t forget to keep on rockin’ in the free world!
The Essential Albums
Harvest, 1970. #78 in Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums list.
This is the album to start with for your Young experience. Listen: I respect you, so I’m not going to baby you through this process. This is not Young’s most accessible album. In fact, this is a very challenging album. You will have trouble making an immediate connection with this music, and after a first run through you may even squint at your speakers and ask them “Are you broken? Is this what all the hype is about?”
But forget that first impression. Work your way through it, give it time to sink in to your earlobes. This is an album that you need to break in like a crisp new pair of leather cowboy boots. Sure, you’ll have blisters at first, but in a few months your increased sense of self worth will thank you for the initial pain and suffering. This Young’s best album, and I think it’s a great starting point because it forces you to really listen to his music.
The warm sepia toned cover is a perfect sheath for this country-tinged music. The plucky banjos in “Old Man” and the rhythmic harmonica in “Out on the Weekend” will make you feel like blowing into a jug top in accompaniment. Even so, this is not a country album; it is instead a perfect bridge for people who dislike country music that they hear on the radio, but enjoy roots-influenced artists like Wilco and Whiskeytown. In fact, it’s no stretch at all to claim that this album spawned those bands.
Embedded deep within the pokey rurality of Harvest, you’ll find sharp edges that will poke and discomfit you. You won’t know what to make of Young’s pleas for a maid, and when the London Symphony Orchestra breaks out their string arrangements in “There’s a World”, you’ll leave with more questions than answers. But who doesn’t love a challenge? Listen to this album now, and your world will be forever changed.
After the Gold Rush, 1970. #71 on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums list.
This is a great place to go after you become fairly comfortable with Harvest. After the Gold Rush is Young’s most accessible album, and it contains some of his strongest material. There’s nothing especially risky or experimental about this music, but you’re guaranteed to enjoy it and it sounds great. This is a great way to become accustomed to Young’s strange and sometimes histrionic vocal style, as the orchestration accompanying his singing is lush and robust.
There’s a little bit of a folky edge to this music, especially in “Oh, Lonesome Me” and “Cripple Creek Ferry”, but it’s not as direct as it was in Harvest. Nils Lofgren makes his debut on this album, and his piano playing is absolutely impeccable on the title track, as well as the famous Young standard “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”.
Rust Never Sleeps, 1979. #350 on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums list.
At the end of the 1970s, Neil Young looked back upon a remarkably productive body of work. He had released twelve albums in just under a decade, and many of those have since become rock canon. Despite that, Young was beginning to question whether he had what it took to continue making great rock n’ roll music. His fortieth birthday was rapidly approaching, and it’s no secret that rock n’ roll belongs to the young people. Rust Never Sleeps is Young’s middle finger to the sands of time. It’s a self affirmation that the aging artist still had a few gems left to unearth, and nearly twenty years after its release, the man is still going strong.
The album opens with the quiet whisper of “My My, Hey Hey”, an iconic song about the enduring power of rock n’ roll. Young revisits the tune at the end of the album, but rearranges the melody with clunking percussion and a wildly distorted electric guitar. It’s emblematic for the record as a whole, which is evenly divided between an acoustic side (the first five songs) and an electric side (the latter four). Sure, this has been done before, but it’s an interesting format for Young, who has spent his career writing both soulful roots music and angry psychotic rock n’ roll. This album showcases his talents in both styles amply.
Highlights on this one include the tune “Pocahontas”, where Young imagines himself sharing a campfire with the song’s subject and Marlon Brando. The fiery “Powderfinger” sways drunkenly, teetering over the precipice of Young’s rock persona, as the singer shouts, “GOTTA GET AWAY! HEY! GOTTA GET AWAY!” But, the most famous and enduring song on the album is the aforementioned “My My, Hey Hey”. Like After the Gold Rush, this album is very easy to enjoy and it doesn’t take a ton of investment to get a lot out of it.
Tonight’s the Night, 1975. #331 on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums list.
In 1973, Young’s lead guitarist and roadie died from heroin overdoses within six months of one another. His grief took the form of this rich and complicated album. Don’t make the assumption that this is just another “sad” album, a la Sea Change or Blood on the Tracks. There are still weepy ballads on this album, such as the minor key melody “Borrowed Tune” and the weary “Tired Eyes”, but Young’s grief manifests itself here in a much more complicated way. There are moments when he frantically lashes out at his grief; the song “World on a String” brims with a helpless fury, and the title track builds from a quiet sadness to a complete loss of control, with frayed vocals and erratic guitar distortions. On tracks such as “Albuquerque” and “Roll Another Number (For the Road)”, Young’s exhaustion and weariness is palpable. “Lookout Joe” and “Speakin’ Out” sound jubilant at first, but there is an entrenched sadness that pervades their melodies, as if Young is trying to pretend that there isn’t anything wrong, even though the contrary is observable to the simplest spectator. The music here is often sloppy and Young’s vocals sound more drunken and cottonmouthed than usual, as if he rolled out of bed, picked up a microphone, and began to shout into it. But that’s the charm of the album; it embraces anarchy and fuels itself off its own entropic energy.
This is a wrenching and cathartic experience, and it’s not always easy to take in, but it’s unforgettable. This is a Young album that will take you into strange and unfamiliar territory, and you won’t know what to make of it at first, but after you allow yourself the opportunity to think it through and ponder some of the stranger choices he’s made here, it will be worth the wait.
A bit of added trivia: Ronnie Van Zant, the frontman for Lynyrd Skynyrd, was buried wearing a t-shirt featuring this album cover on its front.
Freedom, 1989.
Young released this album in the wake of the most disastrous recording period in his career. There’s a lot of speculation as to why Young released so many terrible albums in the 1980s. Some have suggested that Young was unhappy with his Geffen Records recording contract, and released awful material in order to fulfill his contractual obligations and move on to another label. Geffen actually sued Young during this period for breach of contract; they argued that his lackluster effort suggested that he wasn’t really performing as Neil Young. I love this story; Young is probably the only artist in the history of recorded music who has been sued for not being himself. When this album was released, many rock critics hailed it as a return to form. Neil Young was back!
The material that appears on this album is actually a collection of songs and projects that Young had abandoned. Our subject is notorious for scrapping nearly completed albums, hastily recording new ones, and abandoning others in mid-production. This is part of what makes him so appealing–he has never followed any rules except the ones that he makes as he goes along, and he couldn’t care less what you or anybody else thinks of that.
As with Rust Never Sleeps, the album is bookended by acoustic and electric versions of its most famous song. In this case, it’s the anti George H.W. anthem “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World”. Young drew a lot of criticism in the 1980s for praising Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy record. This song was, in a sense, part of his plea for restored credibility. The rest of the material here is strong as well, even if it does have the slightly uneven keel that an album of this sort is bound to acquire. Highlights include the strange futuristic ballad “Crime in the City (Sixty to Zero, Pt. 1)” and the Leone-ian western styled “Eldorado”. There’s even a really weird cover of the famous drifters song “On Broadway”, except instead of crooning harmonies, there’s rambunctious woodblock clapping and someone who sounds like they’re playing the guitar with an eggbeater. It’s all in good fun, though, and it’s undoubtedly the strongest latter-day Young album.
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, 1969. #208 on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums list.
This was Young’s second solo album, but it marked his first breakthrough as a solo artist. The music includes both punkish rock songs such as “Cinnamon Girl” and “Down by the River”, but it also includes some hearty country twinged tunes like “Round & Round” and “Losing End”. This is a theme that Young would revisit on numerous occasions down the line, but here we get to witness this at a point where the artist is still working out those ideas in his head. The highlight of the album–and probably one of Young’s most enduring songs–is “Down by the River”, a ten minute long murder ballad with some of the best guitar solo work you will ever hear. “Cowgirl in the Sand”, the other ten minute track on this album, became a substantial hit in its own right and is still performed by Young in concert.
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5 Responses to “Neil Young Part I: The Essentials”
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Great stuff - I plan on tackling Harvest Moon very soon. Great story about him in the 80’s - it makes me wonder how many artists that were so great in the late 60’s just kind of went through their awkward puberty years in the 80’s (George Harrison, Dylan, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder). In appropriate response to the theme of this blog, I blame Reagan.
Well, at least we didn’t have to watch Jim Morrison and Hendrix go through that phase. Can you imagine Jim Morrison with an electric beatbox?!
Harvest Moon is a great album. It will be somewhere near the top of the “Good albums, but only if you enjoyed the essentials” list.
I’m assuming that the album Everybody’s Rockin’ is going on the “decent albums” list. Because if i find it with the train wrecks…i swear to god!
(I know none of your lists include live releases, but…) I would highly recommend his recently released Live at Massey Hall 1971. It’s been consistently sneaking it’s way into my rotation of music since I got it… But then I’m a nut for acoustic guitars and a chatty performer just rambling on stage…
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