Score - 6.2
Neil Young (1968) - 5.5
While the unusually sweet production lends itself to the
ears, the lack of incisive lyricism and the horrible acoustic The Last Trip To Tulsa ultimately make
this an uneven and underwritten product. Neil
Young arrives at his debut album with a bag full of contrasting items. Still in
the marvelously experimental and baroque sixties, his contrasts are the forceful
and often jagged electric guitar, and the gorgeous post-Byrds
jangling/orchestral sound. This is no doubt the most beautiful album that Neil
Young ever recorded – The guitar arpeggios are drenched in Leslie cabinet
swirl, the organs glide and crescendo, and Jack Nietzsche’s arrangements swell
in sympathetic ways.
I
cannot talk about this album without mentioning the hideous Last Trip To Tulsa. It’s tempting to
deduct more points from the album, but it’s greatest saving grace is that this
ten-minute snooze fest is at the end of the album. Even Van Morrison was smart
enough to bring in other people (or apply simple reverb) to make his boring
songs more interesting. Cut out the final track and you have a 27-minute, Beach
Boys album of a work.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere with Crazy Horse (1969) - 5.7
Cinnamon Girl is
the pure distillation of Neil Young’s electric, aggressive, but ultimately love
sick side. Crazy Horse and especially Danny Whitten provide a comfortable bed
for Young to fall back on, and make Cowgirl
In The Sand and Down By The River
surprisingly entertaining long tracks, which I usually hate. Check out the way
that Young’s guitar bounces off of Whitten’s on DBTR, rhythm and lead blurring together. The tunes themselves are
modally sharp, drifting on their crudely effectively chord progressions and
bursting into hook-laden choruses with harmonic movement and pull.
While
the country bump of the title track is harmless and the vocal harmonies lushly
ragged, like a fine shirt swaying on a ratted clothesline, the other acoustic
songs drag and confuse.
Overall,
however, the electric tracks make up three-fifths of the running time, making
the album worth the price of purchase. Just be careful not to fall asleep while
waiting for the guitar workouts.
After The Gold Rush (1970) - 6.8
Young has begun to slide into the Dylan-fallacy of “live is
better,” and it shows in the declining quality of the sloppier tracks on side
two. But when the group is well-rehearsed and the vocal harmonies are tight,
tracks like Tell Me Why, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, and Birds reach the peak of Young’s
clumsy-but-heartfelt lyricism combined with simple and efficient melodicism.
Rough rockers Southern Man and When You Dance seem almost like token
admissions to the previous album. The remaining half-acoustic tracks don’t hurt
the album, but also do nothing to raise it to classic status.
The
other piano tracks, the tags which end each side, are the true highlights,
light-hearted and uplifting in the best way. The title track is one of the
strangest recordings Young made, and the song adeptly tracks the roundabout, hallucinatory
thoughts of a stoner dreaming in a basement. The meta-middle verse, with
someone opening the door and hurting Young’s blood-shot eyes, is the only
sparkle of wry self-awareness on the album. If only this quality, which makes
or breaks any artist working in the roots/Americana idiom, was more than just a
flash, the way that this album is a flash of quality in the otherwise horribly
inconsistent discography of American music’s favorite Canadian.
Harvest (1972) - 6.0
There’s no telling exactly where or why and artist was influenced, and it’s even more difficult to evaluate whether said influences are even positive. Regardless of these questions, Neil Young pushes off in a single direction with this album. Rightful classics Heart Of Gold and Old Man display the curious dichotomy of Young’s best work - the incisive and potent imagery of traveling from “Hollywood to Redwood,” as if this was some sort of massive undertaking, delivered in the typically clumsy colloquialism of Young’s writing, set against the economy of boilerplate guitar chord shapes and a curiously typical folk melody. No wonder Bob Dylan was frustrated to hear “his song” on the radio, at the number one spot.
In
other places, the album is uneven and continues the trend of
live=>sloppy=>better that reveals the underwritten quality of many of
Young’s songs. Harvest and Are You Ready For The Country? are
disposable if both boasting decent melodies, and Jack Nietzche’s over-arranged
and hideously pompous A Man Needs A Maid and There’s
A World hilarious demonstrate how far Young was willing to go in the
opposite direction.
Setting
his two electric tracks at the end of the album was another unusual move, and
the sublime guitar tone that drives Words
(Between The Lines Of Ages) and it’s heartbreaking solo is an unexpected
but pleasurable way to end the album. Alabama
takes the indignant self-righteousness of Southern
Man to even less subtle heights, but thankfully is much more than just a rewrite.
The
album’s quiet centerpiece, tucked away between these loud songs, is the live
recording of Young’s world-weary The
Needle And The Damage Done. Enough has been written about Neil Young’s friends
and the song’s influence. I will merely add that Harvest’s best track deftly traces what is so often forgotten about
the demons of addiction – That we enable our friends without realizing, that
damage is so much more permanent than we could ever realize, and that so often
drugs are the way that people self-medicate and make their way through life.
The loping and insidious guitar chords fight and endless battle to reach
stability, but never succeed.
Time Fades Away (1973) - 6.8
Download this album if you can find it online, and buy it
when it comes out. Much has been said about this live album already, especially
within historical contexts, but I wish to move away from historical context and
instead discuss the music itself – is this album really worth releasing on CD?
None of
the tracks were released on a previous album (barring Journey Through The Past) or would be recorded in studio versions
after. This avoids the troublesome problem of comparing live cuts to their
studio counterparts. Since Young never played with this band again either, it
is a singular record. The title track revives the true conflict in rock and
roll – between parent and child – and sends it up in a cautionary tale, filled
with junkies and Dylan-esque unsavory characters. The chorus, imploring the son
to “get back by eight … because you know that time fades away” can be
interpreted successfully as a parent bemoaning their own loss of time, another
eulogy for Danny Whitten, or a reflection on the passing of rock music from its
original ideals.
Other
riffing songs Don’t Be Denied, L.A., and Yonder Stands The Sinner (thumbs up to the former two, thumbs down
to the latter) burst with energy and demonstrate that Young’s live-is-better
approach really works best, unsurprisingly, in a live setting. The switch in L.A. from hard rocker to glittering,
major-seventh chord chorus calls back the best of Young’s debut album. The
three piano songs, taking up an unprecedented amount of time from the rockers,
demonstrate Young at his expressive best, and while The Bridge feels redundant after the first two, all three of the
songs are strong and sad in their own sweet way.
The
raucous finale, Last Dance, barely
carries any sort of riff or melody. It calls back images of the deejay at a
school dance announcing the final number for the night, as the ceiling lights
begin to flicker on. Young drops the allusive and dreamy imagery of his
previous songs for straight-forward, “real person” lyrics, describing waking up
in the morning and going to the same job. The chorus of NO’s, and the
mastodonic riff that repeats endlessly highlights the monotony of the regular
life – but Young is torn, having lived as a rock star for years, seen his
friends die and his fortunes change time and time again. He acknowledges that
the punch-clock life is no way to live soullessly either – but Young doesn’t
want to live the rock and roll life with just as little soul, trapped in the
perpetual last dance.
On The Beach (1974) - 6.3
Here we
have the continuation of the struggle that began with 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Young
seems torn between making music that is as melodic, atmospheric, and
entertaining as possible – Walk On
and See The Sky About To Rain – and
as abrasive and unlistenable as can be. Sometimes, the latter works. Revolution Blues and Vampire Blues serve as humorous or
harmless blues punk with a muddled social message, with Vampire Blues in particular having a “onomatopoeia” guitar solo,
Young’s noodling on the lower strings depicting the vampires “sucking blood
from the earth.”
Two
good things and two bad things now. For
The Turnstiles is Young’s strangest folk tune yet, played on a guitar-tuned
banjo with a guttural low-D and hosting a cast of bewildering characters. “It
will wake you up in the middle of the day,” indeed. The title track is the best
song on the album, however, with many of Young’s best characteristics on
display. Among them, his use of usually jazz-inflected chords such as major and
minor sevenths as colors on a palette rather than as the scholarly, tepid
functionality of re-harmonization is brought to the forefront here. The
stretched-out blues form suggests the druggy atmosphere of sleeping post-part
on the beach, with those elusive seagulls flying above. The incisively personal
lyrics, though, make the song meaningful, with what is perhaps Young’s best
lyric: “Though my problems are meaningless, that don’t make them go away.” How
about that for celebrity confessionals, John Lennon?
What a
shame that this album should end with two tracks that learned nothing from the
horrid long-form acoustic tracks of the past. While both Motion Pictures and Ambulance
Blues carry incredible and unique atmospheres, their offensive length
renders them worthless, squandering the good will of the first half of the
album with a cascade of lazy lyrics and highly-personal, but severely boring
images.
Tonight's The Night (1975) - 6.3
This album was recorded before On The Beach, but released after. Neil Young doesn’t necessarily
display artistic growth (as distinct from lyrical development/musical
development) so the chronology is mostly irrelevant. The story of this album is
that after years of the death of his friends from drugs and the general malaise
of celebrity pain, Young recorded the most tortured and emotional album of his
career. Wow, what a statement!
Let’s
talk about the lyrics: At best, Young is cheeky (“I’m singing this borrowed
tune / I stole from the Rolling Stones”) or hilariously blunt about his
emotional troubles (“If you never heard him play / You won’t hear him any time
too soon”). At worst, like in the mostly spoken “Tired Eyes,” they are bathetic
and plunge the depths of superficiality. Of course, most of the lyrics lie
somewhere in the middle, with certain tunes such as “Mellow My Mind” and
“Albuquerque” strung together from the same basic building blocks that Young
has used for the last few albums.
Boy
wonder Nils Lofgren plays guitar, and provides a sparkling Stratocaster touch
to several tracks, but they don’t quite fit the nitty gritty effect of the
album. The dual title tracks are sufficiently redundant, though they do bookend
the album nicely, their crude lyrics sway more towards “public service
announcement” than “artistic expression of grief.” What the album is worth for
is the set of six songs from Borrowed
Tune through New Mama – as
sublime a set of tracks as the best on After
The Gold Rush, and colored with the best of Young’s paint box. Nonetheless,
while the album can be quite enjoyable, the tired, stoned feeling the rolls
through even the heavier rockers and makes this a difficult album to truly sit
through.
