Everybody Knows This Is Neil
By any measure, Neil Young has had one of the most remarkable careers in the history of music. At sixty-seven years old, Young has not only outlived many of his contemporaries and those artists whose music first inspired him (“From Hank to Hendrix” as one of Neil’s own songs puts it), but he has also pulled off the rather amazing trick of remaining as relevant and vital as he has ever been, well into his fifth decade of making music.
In fact, Young’s music continues to influence subsequent generations of young rock bands and artists—a list including, but not limited to, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, and—well, you get the idea.
Not to take anything away from the other greats of his generation, but with the possible exceptions of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, Neil Young is probably the only major rock icon from his era who has steadfastly (and quite stubbornly, many would add), followed his artistic muse without compromise, and often to his commercial detriment.
Young also continues to crank out records at a rate that would kill most artists half his age (and quite possibly nearly did back in 2005, but we’ll get to all that in due course). When you figure in his solo albums, the live albums, as well as his work with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, there have been well over fifty albums over the course of his five-decade career—and many of these have been boxed sets and multiple-disc collections.
In 2009, Neil Young released no less than three new collections—including the massive, decades-in-the-making Archives Vol. 1 boxed set. Ambitious even by Young’s own very exacting standards, the multiple-disc set comes in CD, DVD, and Blu-ray versions, and chronicles Young’s career up until 1972. At least two more volumes are planned, and the December 2009 release of Dreamin’ Man Live, a live concert rendering of the classic Harvest Moon album, is an apparent warm-up to one of them. Somewhere in the midst of all this, Young found time to release an album of new material (Fork in the Road), and to tour (which he does nearly every year like clockwork).
If nothing else, Neil Young is “prolific,” to say the least. Yet, as staggering as the sheer volume of his recorded output has been over the years and decades, the fact that through it all he has made this music strictly on his own artistic terms every step of the way is a rather astonishing feat in and of itself. This is what makes Neil Young an artist who is truly unique in all of music.
This same uncompromising approach to his art—some would call it a stubborn streak—has both earned Young the admiration of his peers and drawn the fire of folks like the record company suits charged with marketing his music to the masses.
Two quick cases in point:
Following the release of his first #1 album Harvest in 1972—the album has long since gone platinum many times over and remains a steady seller to this day—Young followed it up with a series of bleak, desolate, and downright depressing records that were the very antithesis of the folky, singer-songwriter pop that made Harvest, and particularly its single “Heart of Gold,” such a huge hit.
On the liner notes for his three-disc retrospective Decade, Young famously described the albums Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight’s the Night as a period when he “left the middle of the road, and headed towards the ditch”—hence earning these records the fans’ nickname of “the Ditch Trilogy.”
When these albums earned Young the respect of then emerging new wave artists like Devo—bands who were otherwise notorious (and often quite brutal) in their disdain of other so-called dinosaurs from the sixties—Neil responded with Rust Never Sleeps in 1979, an album whose title track embraces “the story of Johnny Rotten” with its famous lines of how “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
But this would be only one of many incidents in which the mercurial (that’s a word associated with him quite a bit, by the way) Young would follow his artistic muse in such a way as to cause record executives to tear their hair out in frustration.
After signing with David Geffen’s self-named new label in the eighties, Young then spent the better part of that decade making albums that veered wildly from the Devo-inspired synthesized new wave of Trans to the goofy rockabilly of Everybody’s Rockin (“they wanted a rock album, so I gave them one,” he once explained)—his record with makeshift greasers the Shocking Pinks.
Geffen eventually sued Young for breach of contract, citing of all things, the artist’s failure to deliver any actual “Neil Young records.” You just can’t make this stuff up.
But if Young has made a career of confounding critics and fans alike by following his at times seemingly strange artistic whims, the bottom line is he always seems to find his way back home. He did it after the Ditch Trilogy in 1979 with Rust Never Sleeps, and he did it again after the Geffen years in the eighties with the album Freedom and its anthemic single “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
When all is said and done, the two things Young is best known for are the cranked to eleven, feedback-laden noise he makes with his trusty guitar Old Black on albums with his on-again, off-again band Crazy Horse like Rust and Ragged Glory, and the quieter, more introspective acoustic folk-pop of albums like Harvest and its equally gorgeous nineties successor Harvest Moon. As different as these two styles are, together they form the cornerstone of Young’s sound. The glue that binds them—and everything else that Neil Young does—is the songs.
With Young, it always comes down to the songs. And make no mistake, when it comes to writing great songs that stand the test of time, he has very few equals.
At sixty-seven, he also remains as prolific and relevant as ever. He continues to record new material and tour constantly—and the amps are for the most part still cranked as high as God will allow—even as he pursues such side-projects as the shepherding of his back catalog and legacy with the ongoing Archives series, and his passion for energy efficient, environmentally sound cars like his beloved LincVolt.
As 2010 dawned, Young spent the first few weeks of the New Year being honored on Grammy weekend as MusiCares’ Person of the Year for his charitable work with organizations like Farm Aid and the Bridge School by the Recording Academy. He also found time to perform “Long May You Run” on Conan O’Brien’s final night of NBC’s Tonight Show. Jimmy Fallon also paid respect to Young’s continuing relevance by doing a spot-on parody of Young performing American Idol reject Larry Platt’s viral sensation “Pants on the Ground” on his late night show. Fallon repeated the Neil Young parody again with a hilarious song based on the fifteen minutes of YouTube fame enjoyed by the “double rainbow” guy.
Even when he is relatively inactive (at least by his own prolific standards), Neil Young’s influence continues to be everywhere.
On September 28, 2010, Young released Le Noise, a new album recorded with producer Daniel Lanois (best known for his work with artists like U2 and Bob Dylan). As boldly experimental as ever, Le Noise finds a mostly solo Neil Young cranking up the electric guitar unaccompanied by a band, but rather aided only by the “sonics” of Lanois. Lanois = Le Noise. Get it?
Following the practice of testing new material on live audiences that he has utilized for years, Young first played several of Le Noise’s songs—including “Love and War,” “Hitchhiker,” and “Peaceful Valley Boulevard” on his 2010 Twisted Road tour (where he also performed them solo on electric guitar).
On October 23, 2010, Young also reunited the Buffalo Springfield for their first shows together in over four decades. The occasion of the reunion was the annual benefit concerts for the Bridge School, which serves the needs of children with severe disabilities (Neil’s children Zeke and Ben both have forms of cerebral palsy, and his wife Pegi sits on the Bridge School’s board of directors).
For the two Bridge shows, original Springfield members Young, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay were joined by bassist Rick Rosas and drummer Joe Vitale (replacing the late Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin).
The second of a planned trilogy of concert films with director Jonathan Demme, called Trunk Show, also came out in 2010. The third installment of the Young/Demme trilogy, Neil Young Journeys, was filmed during the Twisted Road tour, and is expected in theatres through Sony Classics sometime in 2012. Young also continues to work on a planned second volume of his Archives, which will include the first official appearances of the “lost albums” Homegrown, Chrome Dreams, Toast, and Oceanside, Countryside. What other rock icon from the original sixties generation can you think of who maintains that type of pace today?
Quickly now … Jagger? McCartney? Nope. Didn’t think so.
Neil Young FAQ is not intended as the definitive work on the artist (Jimmy McDonough has already accomplished that with his semiofficial biography Shakey), but rather as a reference guide that takes the reader through his recorded work album by album. I am also very proud to have my humble efforts here associated with a fine publishing house like Hal Leonard, and with a great series like the FAQ books.
My hope here is that this book both offers up the sort of facts known by few but the most devoted fans and serves as an introduction for the uninitiated Neil-phyte. In researching this book, I found myself coming across so many little known facts that I had either forgotten, or never knew in the first place, that in many ways it was as much a process of rediscovering this remarkably gifted artist as it was anything else.
I’d also be lying if I didn’t say that listening to all those great albums again—not to mention the one thousand or so rarities and concert recordings I’ve got stored on my hard drive—was a blast. My hope is that in reading this, you will have much the same experience. It’s definitely been a labor of love, and one that I hope you will enjoy reading as much as I did spending the many very late nights I did in writing it.
And forgive me if in between all the geeky facts here, I also occasionally offer my own personal insights into things like the many Neil Young concerts I’ve seen (my first was as a thirteen-year-old boy in 1970 accompanied by my grandma—God rest her soul), or how you’ll learn why I’m most likely feeling depressed when I put on the album On the Beach.
Neil’s just been that kind of a friend to me that way over the years. Mercurial and methodical, enduring and infuriating—everybody knows this is Neil.
Glen Boyd
December 2010