Record Reviews
📝 2096 reviews| Artist | Title | Review |
|---|---|---|
| Neil Young | Time Fades Away | <p>Anyone who has followed Neil Young's career knows enough not to expect a simple evening of mellow good times when they see him in concert, but in 1973, when Young hit the road after Harvest had confirmed his status as a first-echelon rock star, that knowledge wasn't nearly as common as it is today. Young's natural inclinations to travel against the current of audience expectations were amplified by a stormy relationship between himself and his touring band, as well as the devastating death of guitarist Danny Whitten, who died of a drug overdose shortly after being given his pink slip during the first phase of tour rehearsals. The shows that followed turned into a nightly exorcism of Young's rage and guilt, as well as a battle between himself and an audience who, expecting to hear "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold," didn't know what to make of the electric assault they witnessed. All the more remarkably, Young brought along a mobile recording truck to capture the tour on tape for a live album and the result, Time Fades Away, was a ragged musical parade of bad karma and road craziness, opening with Young bellowing "14 junkies, too weak to work" on the title cut, and closing with "Last Dance," in which he tells his fans "you can live your own life" with all the optimism of a man on the deck of a sinking ship. While critics and fans were not kind to Time Fades Away upon first release, decades later it sounds very much of a piece with Tonight's the Night and On the Beach, albums that explored the troubled zeitgeist of America in the mid-'70s in a way few rockers had the courage to face. If the performances are often loose and ragged, they're also brimming with emotional force, and despite the dashed hopes of "Yonder Stands the Sinner" and "Last Dance," "Don't Be Denied" is a moving remembrance of Young's childhood and what music has meant to him, and it's one of the most powerful performances Young ever committed to vinyl. Few rockers have been as willing as Young to lay themselves bare before their audience, and Time Fades Away ranks with the bravest and most painfully honest albums of his career -- like the tequila Young was drinking on that tour, it isn't for everyone, but you may be surprised by its powerful effects.</p><p>— <strong>Mark Deming</strong></p><hr/><p>Neil Young boasted of steering his career into "the ditch" in the early 1970s, choosing to make sad, lonely, difficult records in the wake of Harvest's wide success. The "Ditch Trilogy" (as Young enthusiasts dubbed it) of Time Fades Away, Tonight's the Night, and On the Beach marks his creative peak—yet for decades, this era was neglected and incomplete. On the Beach only made it to CD in 2003, and Time Fades Away was never reissued digitally.Thanks to the vinyl revival, the trio is finally available. Rereleased initially as a pricey Record Store Day box set, and now as individual LPs, the "Ditch Trilogy" records—plus its sunnier epilogue, Zuma—are back in print for the first time since their original releases. So while On the Beach and Tonight's the Night are well-established masterpieces, now's the time to consider the on-ramp and the off-ramp to the Ditch, and understand how Young entered that dark spiral and how he escaped it.</p><p>Time Fades Away is the album Neil Young didn't want us to hear; in several interviews over the years, he's bluntly referred to it as his "worst album." In Waging Heavy Peace, Young's 2012 memoir, the 1973 live album is mentioned exactly twice, which is approximately 1,000 times fewer than his electric Lincoln and his Pono music service. Even when major missing pieces of his '70s catalog were patched in 2003, Time Fades Away was left to rot in the archives. Several theories have circulated to explain the conspicuous snub, most often returning to the cursed fog that hung over Young's 1973 tour. Originally, the band was supposed to include Danny Whitten, Neil's guitar foil in Crazy Horse—but, fighting drug addiction and alcoholism, Whitten couldn't hack it at rehearsals in fall 1972, and he was fired and sent back to Los Angeles. That same night, he was found dead from an overdose of alcohol and Valium. Whitten's death cast a shadow over the tour, which started the following January and wormed its way across the United States in a rigorous 62 shows in 90 days.The stories from the tour, as regaled in Young biographies, are like a nightmare version of Almost Famous, replete with drug indulgences, money arguments, audience riots, medical issues, and technical problems. Two-thirds of the way through, Neil's vocal cords were shot, leading to show cancellations and inclusion of David Crosby and Graham Nash, to no great help. Young's band the Stray Gators, the murderer's row of session musicians from Harvest, didn't translate to basketball arenas; drummer Kenny Buttrey had the worst time of it, with Young asking him to play louder and louder until he literally bled on his drums. Legendary producer and arranger Jack Nitzsche, playing piano, self-medicated his stage fright with alcohol; for his own part, Young spent the tour chugging tequila and trying out a new Gibson Flying V guitar instead of his totemic Old Black, his dissatisfaction with the sound leading to endless soundchecks and after-show spats. So this wasn't exactly the tour you'd want to commemorate for eternity with a live album—but at least initially, Young was perversely excited to reflect its chaos, and left the recording mostly free of the overdubs that glossed many live albums of the era. "Money hassles among everyone concerned ruined this tour and record for me, but I released it anyway so you folks could see what could happen if you lose it for a while," Young wrote in the liner notes of 1977's Decade.</p><p>But in retrospect, he was too harsh. The Stray Gators were one of Young's most interesting bands: they were fragile, straining, and desperate. One could easily see where their heavier material, such as "Yonder Stands the Sinner" and "Last Dance," would have fit Whitten-era Crazy Horse. Here, pedal steel wizard Ben Keith levels up from a classy hired hand on Harvest to assume Whitten's role, his instrument providing wobbly, intoxicated howls that amplify the haunted mood. Nitzsche plays a deceptively clunky piano that turns "Time Fades Away" into a chicken-wire saloon and creeps with tinkling anxiety around the edges of "Last Dance." When Crosby and Nash show up, they create an alternate-dimension CSNY that uses their harmonies as a weapon instead of a balm, with Young and Crosby's "Yonder Stands the Sinner" choruses particularly deranged.</p><p>Coming on the heels of the slick Harvest, Time Fades Away was a crucial swerve for Young, and it established the proudly flawed aesthetic that has kept his work immediate and powerful for decades. These are weary, acidic songs about the hollowness of stardom—recording them during a tour from hell is an asset, not a flaw. Even the crowd noise between songs heightens the despair—blissful, oblivious applause from an audience too remote to see Young's naked pain. Songs previously lost on Time Fades Away are key parts of Young's story. "Don't Be Denied" is one of Young's best autobiographical songs, wistfully telling the story of his Canadian childhood through Buffalo Springfield's early days. "L.A." is a wonderfully cynical kiss-off to the city where that band found stardom, a land of dreams beset by earthquakes, traffic, and smog.</p><p>Because Zuma was packaged with the trilogy for the Record Store Day vinyl box set, there's been some recent chatter of a "Ditch quadrilogy." But Zuma is a poor fit with the other three; it's a record made on a beach instead of On the Beach, a happy reunion and fresh beginning for Crazy Horse, and a goofy boys' club hangout released only five months after Tonight's the Night's tortured slog. It hits the reset button in many ways—most literally with its opener, "Don't Cry No Tears," which recycles the melody from "I Wonder," one of Young's first recorded works with his high school band, the Squires. It also marked Young's decision to reform Crazy Horse for the first time since Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, with new guitarist Frank "Poncho" Sampedro filling the big rhythm guitar shoes of Danny Whitten. That Young could even stomach replacing Whitten, two years after his death, signaled that the session in Malibu would be one of recovery and rebirth. That period was particularly debauched, with the recently divorced Young and his bandmates enjoyed the company of California girls and Colombian powder, and the party carried over into the "studio" (essentially just a room in producer David Briggs' rental house). There, the new Crazy Horse got to know each other over some hastily written material, simplified to work with Poncho's rudimentary guitar. This lackadaisical formula explains the uneven nature of Zuma, which is equally filled with classics and duds. "Cortez the Killer" and "Danger Bird" are two triumphantly moody, electric epics—lesser cousins to the "Down by the River"-style sprees of the first Crazy Horse, but still spacious opportunities for Young to revive his trademark lacerating guitar tone. It's here that the sludgy Crazy Horse known today takes shape: the trade-out of the communicative Whitten for Sampedro's simpler style creates that blunt sound. The rhythm section of Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina lurches menacingly through "Cortez" and "Danger Bird," and Sampedro's blocky guitar caddies for Young's lengthy soloing.The album's two other highlights revive a breezy, poppy Young that had been missing since After the Gold Rush. "Don't Cry No Tears," is simple twangy country-rock well in the Horse's wheelhouse, gilded with innocent backing harmonies. "Barstool Blues," despite being a fairly shameless rip of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," is a convincing and catchy depiction of drunken euphoria—and a pretty accurate portrait of Zuma's making. On the less lovable side of the endless party, "Stupid Girl" is nowhere near good enough to justify its casual misogyny and title swipe from the Rolling Stones, and "Drive Back" is barely a song beneath its mighty riff and creepy piano. Leftovers tossed in from Homegrown ("Pardon My Heart") and the aborted second CSNY record ("Through My Sails") don't quite fit the mood, presaging the less cohesive and spottier records over the rest of Young's decade.</p><p>Still, if Zuma is an epilogue to the Ditch Trilogy, it's also a prologue to the rest of Young's career, kicking off his fickle, impulsive zig-zagging between genres and volume levels. That restlessness would keep Young vital long after his peers faded—and it can be traced all the way back to the stoned sunsets of Malibu, where Young decided to cry no more tears and move onward down the road, swerving all the way.</p><p>— <strong>Rob Mitchum, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | On The Beach | <p>Following the 1973 Time Fades Away tour, Neil Young wrote and recorded an Irish wake of a record called Tonight's the Night and went on the road drunkenly playing its songs to uncomprehending listeners and hostile reviewers. Reprise rejected the record, and Young went right back and made On the Beach, which shares some of the ragged style of its two predecessors. But where Time was embattled and Tonight mournful, <i>On the Beach</i> was savage and, ultimately, triumphant. "I'm a vampire, babe," Young sang, and he proceeded to take bites out of various subjects: threatening the lives of the stars who lived in L.A.'s Laurel Canyon ("Revolution Blues"); answering back to Lynyrd Skynyrd, whose "Sweet Home Alabama" had taken him to task for his criticisms of the South in "Southern Man" and "Alabama" ("Walk On"); and rejecting the critics ("Ambulance Blues"). But the barbs were mixed with humor and even affection, as Young seemed to be emerging from the grief and self-abuse that had plagued him for two years. But the album was so spare and under-produced, its lyrics so harrowing, that it was easy to miss Young's conclusion: he was saying goodbye to despair, not being overwhelmed by it.</p><p>— <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p><hr/><p>There are few musical artists who need the old canonization speech less than Neil Young. With his reputation preserved amongst us youngsters as the Godfather of Grunge (apparently based on little more than a predilection towards flannel), he's already known by all as the hip great-uncle amidst the Woodstock era's senile grandparents. Still, attention must be paid to the most impressive feat of Young's career: an all-but-perfect streak of very good-to-excellent albums that spanned an incredible, and unparalleled, eleven years. To put it another way, from 1969-1979, Neil Young was rock's Joe Dimaggio. Which makes it especially cruel that, for years afterward, Neil's eccentric skepticism about the auditory worth of the compact disc format kept many of those albums out-of-print. So it's somewhat ironic that now, in the dying days of the digital disc, Reprise Records has finally convinced their stubborn client to allow for patching up most of these holes, rescuing four albums from obscurity and bootleggers.</p><p>Fancy remastering, fancy packaging: who cares? I can finally retire four crackly vinyls to wall-decoration duty.The most criminal omission by a long shot was On the Beach, the 1974 disc that represented Young's last ramp-up before his masterpiece, Tonight's the Night. Recorded with help from The Band's crack rhythm section and colorful multi-instrumentalist hick Rusty Kershaw, On the Beach is one of the few from Young's catalog that doesn't land easily on either his country or hard-rock piles. Three song titles with the word "blues" give you an idea of the mood, but hardly prepare you for the bleak anger of "Revolution Blues" or "For the Turnstiles", post-apocalyptic visions as eerie as any of 28 Days Later's scenic pans. The real engine of the album's brilliance, though, is the trio of slow, long, lonely hotel room folk songs that closes out the album, peaking with Neil's "Desolation Row", "Ambulance Blues." To hear them is to know that Jason Molina goes to bed each night caressing a copy of this record.</p><p>The stark tone of On the Beach was only carried over to one track from 1977's American Stars 'n' Bars, the creepily lo-fi "Will to Love". What fills the remainder of the album is a sort of buffet-style Neil Young, offering up choice leftovers from various failed projects of the era. The peak, of course, is "Like a Hurricane", perhaps one of the finest examples of Neil's willfully untechnical guit-hartic playing style, a chord progression that induces string-popping frenzy in his live shows to this day. But also making appearances are Skynyrd Neil, slashing country-rock lines through "Bite the Bullet" and Farm Aid favorite "Homegrown", and Sensitive Poet Neil, revisiting Harvest seasoning with "Hey Babe" and "Star of Bethlehem".</p><p>Unfortunately, reclaiming that Harvest mood is what chokes the majority of Hawks & Doves, notable for being the dashed-off post-Rust Never Sleeps album that breaks his streak of excellence, and not much more. Other than faux-traditionals "The Old Homestead" and "Captain Kennedy", this 1980 release captures an uncharacteristically tentative Neil, clearly unsure of whether to develop quirky singalongs like "Lost in Space" or plastic soul like "Staying Power" (an early harbinger of his recent unbecoming Motown romanticism). Young can't even seem to stay on task thematically here, sequencing the patronizing "Union Man" before "Comin' Apart at Every Nail"'s fanfare for the working man. Consider that the title track is brimful of pro-American nationalism from the Canadian-born songwriter, and you've got a good idea of just how confusing an effort Hawks & Doves can be.</p><p>But confusion was to be the name of the game for Young in the 1980s, a period celebrated for his principled resistance to record company pigeon-holing, but very, very rarely actually listened to. The fourth reissue in this batch, Re-ac-tor, doesn't quite fall into the gimmick trap that so much of his second full decade's work did, but the effort is still held back by an unhealthy fascination with using guitars as sound effect generators: machine guns in "Shots", backfiring cars in "Motor City", train engines in "Southern Pacific". Quality of songwriting and fierce playing by Crazy Horse manage to redeem the album, however: "Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze" and "Shots" rank as two of his most underrated barnstormers. To own all four reissues, then, is to witness a couple snapshots of the man mid-streak, and a couple from the immediate aftermath, as he began to slouch towards genre experimentation and respectably above-mediocre twilight. However, all but the most devout Neilologists should forgo the latter two; it'd leave enough money to track down a bootleg copy of Time Fades Away, now the only neglected step-child of Young's peak period (and despite what you may have heard from Neil himself, one of his best). Although we'd love to see that record in print, too, us superior folk would no longer have anything to lord over the peons. Sorry, Col. Molina, your secret recipe is out.</p><p>— <strong>Rob Mitchum, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | On The Beach | <p>Following the 1973 Time Fades Away tour, Neil Young wrote and recorded an Irish wake of a record called Tonight's the Night and went on the road drunkenly playing its songs to uncomprehending listeners and hostile reviewers. Reprise rejected the record, and Young went right back and made On the Beach, which shares some of the ragged style of its two predecessors. But where Time was embattled and Tonight mournful, <i>On the Beach</i> was savage and, ultimately, triumphant. "I'm a vampire, babe," Young sang, and he proceeded to take bites out of various subjects: threatening the lives of the stars who lived in L.A.'s Laurel Canyon ("Revolution Blues"); answering back to Lynyrd Skynyrd, whose "Sweet Home Alabama" had taken him to task for his criticisms of the South in "Southern Man" and "Alabama" ("Walk On"); and rejecting the critics ("Ambulance Blues"). But the barbs were mixed with humor and even affection, as Young seemed to be emerging from the grief and self-abuse that had plagued him for two years. But the album was so spare and under-produced, its lyrics so harrowing, that it was easy to miss Young's conclusion: he was saying goodbye to despair, not being overwhelmed by it.</p><p>— <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p><hr/><p>There are few musical artists who need the old canonization speech less than Neil Young. With his reputation preserved amongst us youngsters as the Godfather of Grunge (apparently based on little more than a predilection towards flannel), he's already known by all as the hip great-uncle amidst the Woodstock era's senile grandparents. Still, attention must be paid to the most impressive feat of Young's career: an all-but-perfect streak of very good-to-excellent albums that spanned an incredible, and unparalleled, eleven years. To put it another way, from 1969-1979, Neil Young was rock's Joe Dimaggio. Which makes it especially cruel that, for years afterward, Neil's eccentric skepticism about the auditory worth of the compact disc format kept many of those albums out-of-print. So it's somewhat ironic that now, in the dying days of the digital disc, Reprise Records has finally convinced their stubborn client to allow for patching up most of these holes, rescuing four albums from obscurity and bootleggers.</p><p>Fancy remastering, fancy packaging: who cares? I can finally retire four crackly vinyls to wall-decoration duty.The most criminal omission by a long shot was On the Beach, the 1974 disc that represented Young's last ramp-up before his masterpiece, Tonight's the Night. Recorded with help from The Band's crack rhythm section and colorful multi-instrumentalist hick Rusty Kershaw, On the Beach is one of the few from Young's catalog that doesn't land easily on either his country or hard-rock piles. Three song titles with the word "blues" give you an idea of the mood, but hardly prepare you for the bleak anger of "Revolution Blues" or "For the Turnstiles", post-apocalyptic visions as eerie as any of 28 Days Later's scenic pans. The real engine of the album's brilliance, though, is the trio of slow, long, lonely hotel room folk songs that closes out the album, peaking with Neil's "Desolation Row", "Ambulance Blues." To hear them is to know that Jason Molina goes to bed each night caressing a copy of this record.</p><p>The stark tone of On the Beach was only carried over to one track from 1977's American Stars 'n' Bars, the creepily lo-fi "Will to Love". What fills the remainder of the album is a sort of buffet-style Neil Young, offering up choice leftovers from various failed projects of the era. The peak, of course, is "Like a Hurricane", perhaps one of the finest examples of Neil's willfully untechnical guit-hartic playing style, a chord progression that induces string-popping frenzy in his live shows to this day. But also making appearances are Skynyrd Neil, slashing country-rock lines through "Bite the Bullet" and Farm Aid favorite "Homegrown", and Sensitive Poet Neil, revisiting Harvest seasoning with "Hey Babe" and "Star of Bethlehem".</p><p>Unfortunately, reclaiming that Harvest mood is what chokes the majority of Hawks & Doves, notable for being the dashed-off post-Rust Never Sleeps album that breaks his streak of excellence, and not much more. Other than faux-traditionals "The Old Homestead" and "Captain Kennedy", this 1980 release captures an uncharacteristically tentative Neil, clearly unsure of whether to develop quirky singalongs like "Lost in Space" or plastic soul like "Staying Power" (an early harbinger of his recent unbecoming Motown romanticism). Young can't even seem to stay on task thematically here, sequencing the patronizing "Union Man" before "Comin' Apart at Every Nail"'s fanfare for the working man. Consider that the title track is brimful of pro-American nationalism from the Canadian-born songwriter, and you've got a good idea of just how confusing an effort Hawks & Doves can be.</p><p>But confusion was to be the name of the game for Young in the 1980s, a period celebrated for his principled resistance to record company pigeon-holing, but very, very rarely actually listened to. The fourth reissue in this batch, Re-ac-tor, doesn't quite fall into the gimmick trap that so much of his second full decade's work did, but the effort is still held back by an unhealthy fascination with using guitars as sound effect generators: machine guns in "Shots", backfiring cars in "Motor City", train engines in "Southern Pacific". Quality of songwriting and fierce playing by Crazy Horse manage to redeem the album, however: "Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze" and "Shots" rank as two of his most underrated barnstormers. To own all four reissues, then, is to witness a couple snapshots of the man mid-streak, and a couple from the immediate aftermath, as he began to slouch towards genre experimentation and respectably above-mediocre twilight. However, all but the most devout Neilologists should forgo the latter two; it'd leave enough money to track down a bootleg copy of Time Fades Away, now the only neglected step-child of Young's peak period (and despite what you may have heard from Neil himself, one of his best). Although we'd love to see that record in print, too, us superior folk would no longer have anything to lord over the peons. Sorry, Col. Molina, your secret recipe is out.</p><p>— <strong>Rob Mitchum, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Zuma | <p>Having apparently exorcised his demons by releasing the cathartic Tonight's the Night, Neil Young returned to his commercial strengths with Zuma (named after Zuma Beach in Los Angeles, where he now owned a house). Seven of the album's nine songs were recorded with the reunited Crazy Horse, in which rhythm guitarist Frank Sampedro had replaced the late Danny Whitten, but there were also nods to other popular Young styles in "Pardon My Heart," an acoustic song that would have fit on Harvest, his most popular album, and "Through My Sails," retrieved from one of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's abortive recording sessions. Young had abandoned the ragged, first-take approach of his previous three albums, but Crazy Horse would never be a polished act, and the music had a lively sound well-suited to the songs, which were some of the most melodic, pop-oriented tunes Young had crafted in years, though they were played with an electric-guitar-drenched rock intensity. The overall theme concerned romantic conflict, with lyrics that lamented lost love and sometimes longed for a return ("Pardon My Heart" even found Young singing, "I don't believe this song"), though the overall conclusion, notably in such catchy songs as "Don't Cry No Tears" and "Lookin' for a Love," was to move on to the next relationship. But the album's standout track (apparently the only holdover from an early intention to present songs with historical subjects) was the seven-and-a-half-minute epic "Cortez the Killer," a commentary on the Spanish conqueror of Latin America that served as a platform for Young's most extensive guitar soloing since his work on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.</p.<p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Tonight's The Night | <p>Written and recorded in 1973 shortly after the death of roadie Bruce Berry, Neil Young's second close associate to die of a heroin overdose in six months (the first was Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten), Tonight's the Night was Young's musical expression of grief, combined with his rejection of the stardom he had achieved in the late '60s and early '70s. The title track, performed twice, was a direct narrative about Berry: "Bruce Berry was a working man/He used to load that Econoline van." Whitten was heard singing "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown," a live track recorded years earlier. Elsewhere, Young frequently referred to drug use and used phrases that might have described his friends, such as the chorus of "Tired Eyes," "He tried to do his best, but he could not." Performing with the remains of Crazy Horse, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina, along with Nils Lofgren (guitar and piano) and Ben Keith (steel guitar), Young performed in the ragged manner familiar from Time Fades Away -- his voice was often hoarse and he strained to reach high notes, while the playing was loose, with mistakes and shifting tempos. But the style worked perfectly for the material, emphasizing the emotional tone of Young's mourning and contrasting with the polished sound of CSNY and Harvest that Young also disparaged. He remained unimpressed with his commercial success, noting in "World on a String," "The world on a string/Doesn't mean anything." In "Roll Another Number," he said he was "a million miles away/From that helicopter day" when he and CSN had played Woodstock. And in "Albuquerque," he said he had been "starvin' to be alone/Independent from the scene that I've known" and spoke of his desire to "find somewhere where they don't care who I am." Songs like "Speakin' Out" and "New Mama" seemed to find some hope in family life, but Tonight's the Night did not offer solutions to the personal and professional problems it posed. It was the work of a man trying to turn his torment into art and doing so unflinchingly. Depending on which story you believe, Reprise Records rejected it or Young withdrew it from its scheduled release at the start of 1974 after touring with the material in the U.S. and Europe. In 1975, after a massive CSNY tour, Young at the last minute dumped a newly recorded album and finally put Tonight's the Night out instead. Though it did not become one of his bigger commercial successes, the album immediately was recognized as a unique masterpiece by critics, and it has continued to be ranked as one of the greatest rock & roll albums ever made.</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p><hr/><p>In February 1972, Neil Young put out an album called Harvest and it became massive, going platinum and becoming the best-selling album of the year. In addition to changing Young's position in the marketplace, the album's runaway success made a mark on record shopping for years to come. Anyone who went to a store before the vinyl revival began in earnest can tell you that used copies of Harvest were utterly ubiquitous—like Cat Stevens' Teaser and the Firecat and Carole King's Tapestry, there was seemingly no thrift shop or garage sale without one. With Harvest, Young built on the commercial breakthrough of his work with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, mixing two sounds beloved by aging baby boomers—rootsy country-rock and intimate singer/songwriter folk. Harvest was the right record for this weird, post-'60s moment, and a shaggy Canadian singer-songwriter with the shaky voice was suddenly something approaching a pop star.Harvest had its share of wistful and breezy songs, but a number on the second side called "The Needle and the Damage Done" was a sign of things to come. It was a song, in part, about guitarist, singer, and songwriter Danny Whitten, Young's friend and a member of his frequent backing band, Crazy Horse, specifically Whitten's addiction to heroin. "The Needle and the Damage Done," recorded live in concert and solo, set a template for a certain kind of song about drug abuse: It's beautiful, elegiac, precise—a focused lament written with a great deal of craft, like Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay" or U2's "Running to Stand Still."</p><p>While he always excelled at this style, Young's approach to songwriting was about to shift drastically. "'Heart of Gold' put me in the middle of the road," he famously wrote of Harvest's big single in the liner notes to his 1977 collection Decade, perhaps thinking of his album in the bins next to those by massive sellers by Cat Stevens and Carole King. "Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch." Tonight's the Night, a noisy, harrowing scrape along the guardrail that sends sparks flying upward, was Young's most moving dispatch from his chosen place. As summer turned to fall in 1973, 18 months after Harvest hit stores, Neil Young was 27 years old. He was learning that bad things can start to happen when you reach your late twenties, especially when you're drinking too much and doing too many drugs and are hanging around people who do the same. Your late twenties is when you might find that certain people who once seemed like "they like to party" are going much further, and the situation is getting dangerous. Bodies that seemed indestructible in youth start to give out; good times suddenly aren't so good anymore.</p><p>In August of '73, when Young started the sessions that produced the bulk of Tonight's the Night, he found himself in the heart of such a scene, and the center could not hold.Two events in the previous 10 months had shaken Young to his core, and they shaped how this album came to be and how it was heard. In November 1972, Young was rehearsing the band he dubbed the Stray Gators to take them on tour in support of Harvest. Whitten was asked to join the group but it quickly became clear that his addiction had advanced to the point where playing shows was impossible, so Young fired him and gave him $50 and a plane ticket back to Los Angeles. Whitten died of an overdose of valium and alcohol within a day, and Young was overcome with guilt about his friend's death. In June of '73, two months before the Tonight's the Night sessions, Bruce Berry, a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and beloved member of Young's particular L.A. scene, died of an overdose of heroin. So Tonight's the Night comes freighted with a certain amount of legend, and people generally encounter it now through the lens of 40 years of rock writing.</p><p>If you've read enough about music, you've read the above "ditch" comment, and you'll have it somewhere in your mind the first time you press "play" or lower the turntable arm. The general understanding on Tonight's the Night is that it's dark, it's depressing, a record about loss and destruction and the end. If you listen to it knowing these things, you're in for a surprise. Because it is those things, but it's also so much more. Tonight's the Night is shocking the first time you hear it because for a record on the receiving end of so much first-generation rock criticism focusing on its sorrow and grief, it often sounds like a raucous party being thrown by a bunch of lovable knuckleheads having the time of their life.After the repetition of the opening "tonight's the night" refrain on the opening title track, the first two words on the album are "Bruce Berry," and the album's connection to Young's deceased friend go deeper.</p><p>In August '73, after some sessions at the L.A.'s Sunset Sound, Young decided a proper studio wasn't the right setting for the album he had in mind. So Young's producer David Briggs had the idea to record at a Studio Instrument Rentals, which was started by Bruce Berry and his brother Ken. In addition to renting equipment, S.I.R. had a small practice space in the back with an elevated stage. A mobile recording truck was parked behind the building and a hole was knocked in the wall to run cable to the truck. Young's band now consisted of the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums, young guitarist and sometime Crazy Horse member Nils Lofgren, and steel guitar player Ben Keith, who had worked with Young in Nashville on Harvest. Over the course of a month, they'd assemble in the evening with Briggs at S.I.R. to drink and do drugs and play pool and shoot the shit until they were ready to climb onstage and make music. The Tonight's the Night songs recorded in the practice space were cut live in this fashion, with no overdubs and minimal editing, and the album itself is one of the most sonically raw albums ever released by a major artist. The band is loose and well-oiled. At times Young is too close or too far away from the microphone, and his voice is often straining at the upper end of his range. Young was recording the month after Steely Dan had released Countdown to Ecstasy, and the rich possibilities of the recording studio were reaching a zenith, but he was recording in a dimly-lit room with a drunk band in the back of a retail store, noisily banging into microphone stands on takes that would eventually be used on an album by a label owned by Warner Brothers. </p><p>This off-the-cuff feel defines the album. Working with Young, producer David Briggs was about capturing performances, not making records. The album begins with a ghostly bit of tinkling piano and guitar that sounds like a brief warm-up, the kind of thing that would be cut from any record without a second thought. But here it's perfect, lending the kind of "here we go!" feeling of the best album-openers. Young's words on Berry are personal and almost uncomfortably specific, basically saying, "Here was this man; here is what he did, and now he's gone." Young talks about Berry picking up Young's guitar and singing late at night after gigs when everyone was gone, and being moved deeply by a voice that was "as real as the day was long." That kind of "realness" is the animating idea of this album. The meticulous craftsmanship that had carried Young to the top with Harvest had no place here; now it was time to make some noise. Tonight's the Night is an album not so much about death as about mourning. And while we might like to think of mourning as a dignified pursuit grounded in ritual—a black veil, food at the door, loved ones at beck and call—the truth is that mourning can be messy and out of control and it can sometimes look like something else entirely. Sometimes mourning can even look like a macabre celebration, embracing life with one arm while the black figure of death is curled inside the other. That's where Young and his band found themselves during this period. "Lookout Joe," one of a couple of songs on Tonight's the Night recorded in December '72, has a couplet that conveys the record's reckless spirit perfectly: "Remember Bill from up on the hill?/A Cadillac put a hole in his arm/But old Bill, he's up there still/Havin' a ball rollin' to the bottom."A few songs seem at first to exist more for the people playing them than the listener, but that conspiratorial sense of community between the musicians turns out to be a huge part of the appeal. "Speakin' Out" is the sound of a band feeling their way through the most basic chord changes possible, the kind of structure even the most intoxicated and most damaged musician could handle with no problem. The meaning lies in hearing these people in this room playing together, the feeling they conjure by the presence, and not in Young's lines like "I went to the movie the other night/The plot was groovy, it was out of sight." Tonight's the Night's beauty lies in its imperfections. "Mellow My Mind" has a similarly unfinished feel, but the strain of Young's voice is so palpable, every half-baked couplet swollen with ache, that it's almost unbearably affecting."Roll Another Number (For the Road)" is a song about the end of a long night of incapacitating inebriation performed by a band that sounds like they've just experienced a long night of incapacitating inebriation.</p><p>Young has always been, on one level, of the hippie generation's true believers—he did, after all, title the first volume of his memoir Waging Heavy Peace. But he can just as often be repelled by the soft-headedness of the movement. "I'm not goin' back to Woodstock for a while," he sings on "Roll Another Number," explaining that he's "a million miles away/From that helicopter day." The road so many of his generation had taken led him here, drunk on a dark stage singing songs about death and loss to nobody. Sometimes songs are knocked together and passed around, something to be used as much as something performed. And for songs like these, you grab whatever's at hand. Such a loose and generous approach led Young to a place where he could lift the melody of a song someone else had written wholesale and call his creation "Borrowed Tune" without shame or apology. "I'm singing my borrowed tune, I took from the Rolling Stones/Alone in this empty room, too wasted to write my own," he sings over minimal piano, voicing a melody first found on the Jagger/Richards composition "Lady Jane." Young's Stones' interpolation and blues changes suggest that the building blocks of music belong to us all, and we should take what we need and turn the raw material into a new expression. That feeling, of the possibility of transformation, extends to the record as a whole. There are so many loose ends, frayed connections, and smudgy borders, no single song has any one specific meaning.</p><p>Listening to the album becomes an act of authorship, as its slurred words and pugnacious spirit are mapped onto your own life. Ben Keith's pedal steel guitar playing is often astonishing in its beauty, which provides a layer of tension with the often-sloppy playing and rough sonics. In Keith's hands, the pedal steel imbues every song with a symphonic grandeur, and also a feeling of life-affirming dignity. His show-stopping number here is the gorgeous ballad "Albuquerque." While Young sings about disappearing western landscape ("So I'll stop when I can/Find some fried eggs and country ham/I'll find somewhere/Where they don't care who I am"), Keith conjures up huge, rich clouds of notes. No matter what else is happening on a given song, how loud the party gets, Keith lends a note of pathos, ensuring that the undercurrent of grief remains. Whitten's loss is honored by the inclusion of "(Come on Baby, Let's Go) Downtown," a song he composed with Young and sings, heard here on a version recorded at a 1970 Neil Young and Crazy Horse gig. That "Downtown" wound up on Tonight's the Night is kind of a twisted joke, because the song itself, despite being a joyous rave-up, is actually about scoring heroin. Whitten's death seems impossible when this song crackles with so much life. It's both a celebration and a lament. Hearing their voices in unison on the chorus is a kind of prayer, two music lifers realizing in a moment the power of what they could do together. And the album as a whole takes this idea and extends it outward, first to Young's fellow musicians, and then to us.</p><p>The three albums later grouped together as "The Ditch Trilogy" include the 1973 live album Time Fades Away (culled from the shows Whitten had hoped to play on) and 1974's On the Beach. They are very different documents bound together by the force of Young's vision. Though Tonight's the Night was recorded before On the Beach, it wouldn't be released for another two years. This turned out to be to the album's advantage, because its final presentation highlighted the fact that it was snapshot of a moment in time, and gave Young the opportunity to inflate its myth.When it finally emerged, it came inside one of rock's greatest sleeves, a spooky high contrast black-and-white photo of Young printed on blotter paper. On the LP itself, the Reprise label, usually tan, was black, and there were cryptic carvings in the run-out groove, "Hello Waterface" in the A-side and "Goodbye Waterface" on the B. An insert included with album features notes from Young with a sort of apology ("I'm sorry. You don't know these people. This means nothing to you.") and a lengthy article about Young written in Dutch. The article, as it turns out, was a harsh pan of a show from Young's tour following the completion of the Tonight's the Night material, undertaken a year and a half before the album's release. These shows, which are now the stuff of legend, were theatrical. "The stage set was very strange," reads a translation of the liner notes. "At the back a large palm tree; next to the piano and loudspeakers were hanging all sorts of women's boots and there were hubcaps laid all around. We were in total darkness when Neil and his band—Ben Keith, Nils Lofgren, Ralph Molina & Billy Talbot took the stage and slowly began playing the 1st number 'Tonight's the Night.' The sound was miserable, the band's coordination was miserable and Neil's piano and singing were miserable." During these shows, Young would often mix songs with long rants about his deceased friends. He was toying with his place in the entertainment machine, trying to figure out how to sneak these heavier feelings in. His "Miami Beach" routine was a way of externalizing the artifice of your typical music performance to make the real feelings at the core that much more intense. It was a rock show designed to feel like a seance, a way of communing with the dead. But in the end, Tonight's the Night is really a record about life. Like a drunk at the end of a long night or a boxer barely on their feet, the record staggers, stumbles, and lunges forward; it's prevailing mode is "unsteady." Nothing lands where it should, and it feels like it could collapse at any moment. But while a lurching gait can be a marker of damage or dysfunction, it can also be a sign of defiance. Because some force, whether it's from outside or it's something you bring on yourself, is trying to cripple you. But guess what: you're still standing.</p><p>— <strong>Mark Richardson, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Zuma | <p>Having apparently exorcised his demons by releasing the cathartic Tonight's the Night, Neil Young returned to his commercial strengths with Zuma (named after Zuma Beach in Los Angeles, where he now owned a house). Seven of the album's nine songs were recorded with the reunited Crazy Horse, in which rhythm guitarist Frank Sampedro had replaced the late Danny Whitten, but there were also nods to other popular Young styles in "Pardon My Heart," an acoustic song that would have fit on Harvest, his most popular album, and "Through My Sails," retrieved from one of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's abortive recording sessions. Young had abandoned the ragged, first-take approach of his previous three albums, but Crazy Horse would never be a polished act, and the music had a lively sound well-suited to the songs, which were some of the most melodic, pop-oriented tunes Young had crafted in years, though they were played with an electric-guitar-drenched rock intensity. The overall theme concerned romantic conflict, with lyrics that lamented lost love and sometimes longed for a return ("Pardon My Heart" even found Young singing, "I don't believe this song"), though the overall conclusion, notably in such catchy songs as "Don't Cry No Tears" and "Lookin' for a Love," was to move on to the next relationship. But the album's standout track (apparently the only holdover from an early intention to present songs with historical subjects) was the seven-and-a-half-minute epic "Cortez the Killer," a commentary on the Spanish conqueror of Latin America that served as a platform for Young's most extensive guitar soloing since his work on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.</p.<p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Decade | |
| Neil Young | Southern Man | |
| Neil Young | Decade | |
| Neil Young | American Stars And Bars | <p>Neil Young made a point of listing the recording dates of the songs on American Stars 'n Bars; the dates even appeared on the LP labels. They revealed that the songs had been cut at four different sessions dating back to 1974. But even without such documentation, it would have been easy to tell that the album was a stylistic hodgepodge, its first side consisting of country-tinged material featuring steel guitar and fiddle, plus backup vocals from Linda Ronstadt and the then-unknown Nicolette Larson, while the four songs on the second side varied from acoustic solo numbers like "Will to Love" to raging rockers such as "Like a Hurricane." Just as apparent was the album's unevenness: side one consisted of lightweight compositions, while side two had more ambitious ones, with "Will to Love," for example, extending the romantic metaphor of a salmon swimming upstream across seven minutes. The album's saving grace was "Like a Hurricane," one of Young's classic hard rock songs and guitar workouts, and a perennial concert favorite. Without it, American Stars 'n Bars would have been one of Young's least memorable albums, and since it turned up the following year on the compilation Decade, the LP was rendered inessential.</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Comes A Time | <p>Six and a half years later, Comes a Time finally was the Neil Young album for the millions of fans who had loved Harvest, an acoustic-based record with country overtones and romantic, autobiographical lyrics, and many of those fans returned to the fold, enough to make Comes a Time Young's first Top Ten album since Harvest. He signaled the album's direction with the leadoff track, "Goin' Back," and its retrospective theme augmented with an orchestral backup and the deliberate beat familiar from his number one hit "Heart of Gold." Of course, Young remained sly about this retrenchment. "I feel like goin' back," he sang, but added, "back where there's nowhere to stay." Doubtless he had no intention of staying with this style, but for the length of the album, melodies, love lyrics, lush arrangements, and steel guitar solos dominated, and Young's vocals were made more accessible by being paired with Nicolette Larson's harmonies. Larson's own version of Young's "Lotta Love," released shortly after the one heard here, became a Top Ten hit single. Other highlights included the reflective "Already One," which treats the unusual subject of the nature of a divorced family, the ironic "Field of Opportunity," and a cover of Ian Tyson's folk standard "Four Strong Winds" (a country Top Ten hit for Bobby Bare in 1965).</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Comes A Time | <p>Six and a half years later, Comes a Time finally was the Neil Young album for the millions of fans who had loved Harvest, an acoustic-based record with country overtones and romantic, autobiographical lyrics, and many of those fans returned to the fold, enough to make Comes a Time Young's first Top Ten album since Harvest. He signaled the album's direction with the leadoff track, "Goin' Back," and its retrospective theme augmented with an orchestral backup and the deliberate beat familiar from his number one hit "Heart of Gold." Of course, Young remained sly about this retrenchment. "I feel like goin' back," he sang, but added, "back where there's nowhere to stay." Doubtless he had no intention of staying with this style, but for the length of the album, melodies, love lyrics, lush arrangements, and steel guitar solos dominated, and Young's vocals were made more accessible by being paired with Nicolette Larson's harmonies. Larson's own version of Young's "Lotta Love," released shortly after the one heard here, became a Top Ten hit single. Other highlights included the reflective "Already One," which treats the unusual subject of the nature of a divorced family, the ironic "Field of Opportunity," and a cover of Ian Tyson's folk standard "Four Strong Winds" (a country Top Ten hit for Bobby Bare in 1965).</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Live Rust | <p>All the kudos Neil Young earned for Rust Never Sleeps he lost for Live Rust, the double-LP live album released four months later. Live Rust was the soundtrack to Young's concert film Rust Never Sleeps (he had wanted to give it that title, but Reprise vetoed the idea, fearing confusion with the earlier album), and likewise was recorded October 22, 1978, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. But much of the Rust Never Sleeps album had been recorded on the same tour, and Live Rust repeated four songs from that disc; besides, since Young had released the career retrospective Decade in 1977, critics felt he was unfairly recycling his older material and repeating his new material. In retrospect, however, Live Rust, now a single 74-minute CD, comes off as an excellent Neil Young live album and career summary, starting with the early song "Sugar Mountain" and running through then-new songs like "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" and "Powderfinger." Young is effective in both his acoustic folksinger and hard-rocking Crazy Horse bandleader modes. The various distractions of the concert itself and the film, such as the pretentious props and cowled roadies, are absent, and what's left is a terrific Neil Young concert recording.</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Rust Never Sleeps | <p>Rust Never Sleeps, its aphoristic title drawn from an intended advertising slogan, was an album of new songs, some of them recorded on Neil Young's 1978 concert tour. His strongest collection since Tonight's the Night, its obvious antecedent was Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home, and, as Dylan did, Young divided his record into acoustic and electric sides while filling his songs with wildly imaginative imagery. The leadoff track, "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" (repeated in an electric version at album's end as "Hey Hey, My My [Into the Black]" with slightly altered lyrics), is the most concise and knowing description of the entertainment industry ever written; it was followed by "Thrasher," which describes Young's parallel artistic quest in an extended metaphor that also reflected the album's overall theme -- the inevitability of deterioration and the challenge of overcoming it. Young then spent the rest of the album demonstrating that his chief weapons against rusting were his imagination and his daring, creating an archetypal album that encapsulated his many styles on a single disc with great songs -- in particular the remarkable "Powderfinger" -- unlike any he had written before.</p><p>— <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Hawks And Doves | <p>Following the triumph of Rust Never Sleeps, Hawks & Doves benefited from the enormous critical goodwill Neil Young had amassed, though fans and critics nevertheless were baffled by its set of obscure acoustic and country-tinged songs. The seven-plus-minute "The Old Homestead" (copyright 1974) was interpreted by some as an allegory for Young's relationship to CSNY, perhaps because that was the only way to make any sense of the most mysterious Young lyric since "The Last Trip to Tulsa." In retrospect, now that it's known Young was distracted by domestic medical concerns while working on the album, its theme of perseverance in the face of adversity, both in a personal context of family commitment ("Stayin' Power," "Coastline"), and in a national context of hard work and patriotism ("Union Man," "Comin' Apart at Every Nail," "Hawks & Doves") seems more apparent, as does the sense that Young may have been trying to fulfill his recording contract (even with the inclusion of trunk songs like "The Old Homestead," the album runs less than half an hour) while devoting a bare minimum of his time and attention to the effort. The result is correspondingly slight.</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Reactor | <p>Neil Young employs Crazy Horse to help him bash out a guitar-drenched hard rock set made up of thrown-together material. The group plays fiercely, as usual, but the lyrics are sketchy, seemingly improvised (the nadir is the nine-minute "T-Bone," which consists of the lines "Got mashed potato/Ain't got no t-bone" repeated over and over), and frequently cranky, as in "Motor City," which finds Young criticizing Japanese cars, and "Rapid Transit," which takes a belated swipe at new wave music while sounding like second-rate Talking Heads. For the second album in a row, Young seems to be just fulfilling his one-album-a-year record contract. The exception is the album-closing "Shots" (written by 1978), a more substantive and threatening song given a riveting performance. Later, it would be revealed that Young was finding time for his music while giving most of his attention to caring for his disabled son. Still, he might have been better advised to have suspended record-making for a few years instead of turning out half-baked efforts like this one.</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Old Ways | <p>In 1984, Geffen Records sued Neil Young on the grounds that he had submitted uncharacteristic, uncommercial records to the label. By the time a settlement had been reached, Young had been on the road with a country band called the International Harvesters for over a year and recorded a revamped version of Old Ways, a 1982 recording originally rejected by Geffen that was cut in the style of Harvest and Comes a Time, but with a stronger country leaning. Young depends heavily on friends, especially for vocals -- Waylon Jennings sings harmony on six out of the ten tracks, and one of the others is a duet with Willie Nelson. Though populated by cowboys and country references, Young's take on the genre is typically idiosyncratic, including a reworked version of his autobiography in "Get Back to the Country," a cover of the 1956 Gogi Grant hit "The Wayward Wind," and the uncategorizable "Misfits," which portrays astronauts watching Muhammad Ali fights on television in space. Old Ways is not a great Neil Young album and at the time of its release served to alienate him even further from his audience, but it has its moments.</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Life | <p>In the fall of 1978, Neil Young undertook a North American tour with Crazy Horse, then added overdubs to new songs recorded on the tour for one of his best albums, Rust Never Sleeps. In the fall 1986, he did the same thing, but Life, Young's first album with Crazy Horse since 1981's Re-ac-tor, was not one of his best albums. It was, however, better than most of the other albums he had made in the 1980s, and it was the first really interesting album he'd made in a long time. Despite the return to Crazy Horse, Young continued to use some of the production techniques from Landing on Water, especially the loud drums and the synthesizers. But he mixed things up, including acoustic-based songs such as "Long Walk Home" (which recalled "After the Gold Rush") and "Inca Queen" (the third in his series of long, atmospheric songs about the Incas) and rockers like "Prisoners of Rock 'n' Roll." The last, with its attacks on "record company clowns" and chorus "that's why we don't want to be good," seemed intended as the theme song for the Rusted-Out Garage Tour on which it was performed and served as a reminder that Young was still at odds with Geffen Records, which he left after releasing this album. Despite the criticism he had endured for his support of President Reagan's military buildup, Young had foreign policy on his mind in the action-movie-in-song "Mideast Vacation" and in "Long Walk Home," which addressed military misadventures from Vietnam to Beirut. It could be argued that Young was repeating himself on much of this material and that the album was typically uneven. But Life was an encouraging step back to the tried and true for an exploratory artist who finally seemed to have realized that he had experimented too much for his own good.</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Freedom | <p>Neil Young is famous for scrapping completed albums and substituting hastily recorded ones in radically different styles. Freedom, which was a major critical and commercial comeback after a decade that had confused reviewers and fans, seemed to be a selection of the best tracks from several different unissued Young projects. First and foremost was a hard rock album like the material heard on Young's recent EP, Eldorado (released only in the Far East), several of whose tracks were repeated on Freedom. On these songs -- especially "Don't Cry," which sounded like a song about divorce, and a cover of the old Drifters hit "On Broadway" that he concluded by raving about crack -- Young played distorted electric guitar over a rhythm section in an even more raucous fashion than that heard on his Crazy Horse records. Second was a follow-up to Young's previous album, This Note's for You, which had featured a six-piece horn section. They were back on "Crime in the City" and "Someday," though these lengthy songs, each of which contained a series of seemingly unrelated, mood-setting verses, were more reminiscent of songs like Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" than of the soul standards that inspired the earlier album. Third, there were tracks that harked back to acoustic-based, country-tinged albums like Harvest and Comes a Time, including "Hangin' on a Limb" and "The Ways of Love," two songs on which Young dueted with Linda Ronstadt. There was even a trunk (or, more precisely, a drunk) song, "Too Far Gone," which dated from Young's inebriated Stars 'n Bars period in the '70s. While one might argue that this variety meant few Young fans would be completely pleased with the album, what made it all work was that Young had once again written a great bunch of songs. The romantic numbers were carefully and sincerely written. The long imagistic songs were evocative without being obvious. And bookending the album were acoustic and electric versions of one of Young's great anthems, "Rockin' in the Free World," a song that went a long way toward restoring his political reputation (which had been badly damaged when he praised President Reagan's foreign policy) by taking on hopelessness with a sense of moral outrage and explicitly condemning President Bush's domestic policy. Freedom was the album Neil Young fans knew he was capable of making, but feared he would never make again.</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
| Neil Young | Ragged Glory | <p>Having re-established his reputation with the musically varied, lyrically enraged Freedom, Neil Young returned to being the lead guitarist of Crazy Horse for the musically homogenous, lyrically hopeful Ragged Glory. The album's dominant sound was made by Young's noisy guitar, which bordered on and sometimes slipped over into distortion, while Crazy Horse kept up the songs' bright tempos. Despite the volume, the tunes were catchy, with strong melodies and good choruses, and they were given over to love, humor, and warm reminiscence. They were also platforms for often extended guitar excursions: "Love to Burn" and "Love and Only Love" ran over ten minutes each, and the album as a whole lasted nearly 63 minutes with only ten songs. Much about the record had a retrospective feel -- the first two tracks, "Country Home" and "White Line," were newly recorded versions of songs Young had played with Crazy Horse but never released in the '70s; "Mansion on the Hill," the album's most accessible track, celebrated a place where "psychedelic music fills the air" and "peace and love live there still"; there was a cover of the Premiers' garage rock oldie "Farmer John"; and "Days That Used to Be," in addition to its backward-looking theme, borrowed the melody from Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages" (by way of the Byrds' arrangement), while "Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)" was the folk standard "The Water Is Wide" with new, environmentally aware lyrics. Young was not generally known as an artist who evoked the past this much, but if he could extend his creative rebirth with music this exhilarating, no one was likely to complain.</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
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