7

You See Us Together Chasing the Moonlight

Neil Young’s Bands

Crazy Horse—1969–Present

Neil Young (vocal, guitar), Danny Whitten (guitar, vocal), Billy Talbot (bass, vocal), Ralph Molina (drums, vocal), Frank “Poncho” Sampedro (guitar, keyboards) (1975–present).

The most durable of all Neil Young’s bands, Crazy Horse’s lineup has also featured on and off members like Jack Nitzsche and Nils Lofgren at various junctures—but otherwise has stayed relatively intact for four decades and counting.

They have also endured tragedy, the most notable of which was the heroin-related death of original guitarist Danny Whitten on November 18, 1972. Whitten’s death occurred immediately after he had been given one last chance by Young to get clean of the drugs, which he subsequently failed to do, resulting in Young sacking him from a spot on the 1972 Harvest tour.

Whitten’s death hit the other members of Crazy Horse hard, but perhaps had the most profound impact on the psyche of Neil Young himself (who felt at least partially responsible for the tragedy, and who would express this guilt over the course of a series songs found on his next several albums making up the infamous Ditch Trilogy).

Along with the passing of longtime Young/CSN&Y confidante and road crew warhorse Bruce Berry not long afterwards, this would particularly influence the songs found on Neil Young’s very next album with Crazy Horse, 1975’s Tonight’s the Night.

For this album, Crazy Horse was completed with the addition of Frank “Poncho” Sampredo, a guitarist from Mexico who had came highly recommended by Billy Talbot. “Poncho,” who has remained a member of the Horse ever since, has also performed double duty with several of Young’s other bands including the Bluenotes and the Restless.

Throughout the years, Crazy Horse has become the band Neil Young most often turns to when he wants to crank the amps up to eleven and let the shit rip. For most (but not all) of Young’s most paint-peeling, ear-splitting extended guitar jams, including classics like “Down by the River” and “Cortez the Killer” and albums ranging from Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, to Zuma, Rust Never Sleeps, and Ragged Glory, Young has called upon Crazy Horse in what has to be considered one of rock’s strangest examples of a band that has endured for so long while being on a standby status as often as not.

Even so, Crazy Horse have not always been Young’s first choice when he wants it loud.

A surprising number of his hardest-rocking albums have in fact been made without the Horse at all, including 1995’s Mirror Ball (made with Seattle grunge slingers Pearl Jam) and 2006’s infamous “folk-metal-protest” album Living with War (made with a more or less revived version of the Restless).

Although Crazy Horse will probably always be best known for the sloppy groove they provide when Neil wants to turn the amps up, they have also been Neil Young’s go-to band for moodier-sounding records like 1994’s Sleeps with Angels (an album that finds Young at his most preoccupied with issues like death—most notably the suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain—and mortality since Tonight’s the Night).

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young—1969–Present

Neil Young (vocal, guitar, organ), David Crosby (vocal, guitar), Stephen Stills (vocal, guitar, piano, organ), Graham Nash (vocal, guitar, organ), Gregory Reeves (bass), Dallas Taylor (drums), Calvin Samuels (bass), Johnny Barbata (drums), Joe Lala (piano), Russ Kunkel (drums).

Although they have officially only made five albums together as a band (and two of these are live recordings), Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young also stand as the band Neil Young has played with the longest, outside of Crazy Horse.

Not that the relationship has always been an easy one—it’s no accident that CSN&Y’s albums have come decades apart from each other, and that up until the turn of the millennium they had only done two full-scale tours together (in 1970 and 1974). They have remained inactive as a complete unit in the recording studio since 1999’s Looking Forward album, but have toured together more often in the past ten years than in the preceding three decades (most recently on 2006’s Freedom of Speech juggernaut, which turned into more of a vehicle promoting Young’s then current Living with War album).

In some respects, CSN&Y almost function as two separate entities—one being the Neil Young–dominated group and the other being the band featuring those other three guys.

From day one, it’s been a strange relationship, but also one where Young is clearly calling the shots when he chooses to jump onboard. When he first joined the group (largely at the behest of Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun and Elliot Roberts, who managed both acts at the time), he only did so once it was agreed he would be a fully vested partner (the other members originally saw Young’s role as more of a guest musician or sideman) with equal creative control and a full 25 percent of the financial stakes involved.

Since then, he has come and gone from the group on numerous occasions pretty much at his own will, often leaving abruptly on a moment’s notice (or even with no notice at all) and returning only when he felt the moment and the conditions were absolutely right and most suited to his own artistic needs at the time.

As contentious as that relationship may sound—and the four principals involved have feuded both hard and often in public—there is also little doubt that these are four men who share a bond that borders on brotherly love. “It’s fun to look around and see those guys,” is how Young himself has described performing onstage with them.

Together, they have produced exactly one bona fide classic in 1970’s Déjà Vu, of which Young’s most noteworthy contributions are “Helpless” (his wistful song of yearning back to his earlier days in Canada) and the “Country Girl” suite (which recalls his more ambitious work with Buffalo Springfield like “Broken Arrow”).

The Young-penned single “Ohio”—written in response to the National Guard shootings of four students at Kent State University during the height of Vietnam War protests in the Nixon era—also has to be considered one of the group’s higher artistic watermarks.

During the peak of their popularity, CSN&Y also produced the live tour document 4-Way Street, an album that still holds up remarkably well today—particularly during the mesmerizing guitar exchanges between Stills and Young on the extended versions of “Carry On” and Young’s at the time still officially unrecorded “Southern Man.”

On the Déjà Vu album, CSN&Y were completed with the rhythm section of bassist Greg Reeves (who came onboard at the recommendation of Young’s former bandmate in the Mynah Birds Rick James) and drummer Dallas Taylor. But by the time of the tour documented on 4-Way Street, both had been replaced by bassist Calvin Samuels and drummer Johnny Barbata.

On their next tour four years later in 1974, CSN&Y truly hit the big leagues by becoming the first rock band to play almost exclusively in sports stadiums—which they also mostly sold out.

As enormous and ambitious as this undertaking was—and it needs to be noted here that this was long before superstar rock stadium tours became the summer norm that they are today—the tour was also plagued by problems ranging from the four singers’ blown-out voices to the sort of drug-fueled, rock-’n’-roll excess and ego you would pretty much expect. Even so, I have to confess that the four-hour, opening night set of the tour that I witnessed as a thirteen-year-old boy at the Seattle Center Coliseum was a show I’ll never forget.

Although there were numerous attempts over the years to follow up the Déjà Vu album, it would be eighteen years before 1988’s largely disappointing American Dream, and yet another decade before the equally tepid-sounding Looking Forward.

Sheet music for “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.”

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

The band have yet to make another studio record together, although there have been several of the high-priced reunion tours that every band from roughly the same era seems to be doing these days after following the lead of the Eagles’ Hell Freezes Over tour.

The most recent of these tours has also produced another live CSN&Y album in the form of 2008’s Déjà Vu Live—which also serves as the soundtrack to Young’s “Shakey Pictures” film record of CSN&Y”s 2006 Freedom of Speech tour. Rumors of a forthcoming live document of CSN&Y’s 1974 stadium tour have also been fueled in 2010, based primarily on comments made in interviews with Graham Nash.

In the meantime, Crosby, Stills, and Nash continue to roll on as a trio, making albums on a sporadic basis but hitting the outdoor amphitheatres as a concert act every summer like clockwork. Another eventual tour featuring all four original members is almost certain to happen at some point, and another album has to likewise be considered a distinct, if not inevitable possibility.

The Stray Gators—1973–?

Neil Young (vocal, guitar, piano, harmonica), Ben Keith (pedal steel guitar), Jack Nitzsche (piano, vocal), Tim Drummond (bass), Kenny Buttrey (drums), Johnny Barbata (drums)

When Young began the sessions in Nashville for what would end up being his commercial breakthrough album Harvest, he drew from among the cream of that city’s session veterans, including pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith, bassist Tim Drummond (who had also logged time on the road with James Brown), and drummer Kenny Buttrey.

Even though Keith and Drummond remained fixtures on Neil Young’s albums for years and decades to come, the marriage between this group of seasoned Nashville cats and L.A. rocker Young (and especially his looser, one-take approach to recording) was anything but an ideal mix at first.

Buttrey in particular was dissatisfied with the arrangement, complaining first about the way Young made his records (“He hires some of the best musicians in the world, and then has them play as stupid as he possibly can”), and then later about how much the musicians were paid to play (or perhaps more appropriately weren’t) on the tour behind Harvest.

Enlisting the support of the other hired help, Buttrey won the latter battle but was nonetheless eventually replaced by CSN&Y drummer Johnny Barbata in the band that had by now been dubbed the Stray Gators (after a reference to the stoned musicians Drummond encountered on the tour bus with Brown).

Filling out the Stray Gators for the shows (which began supporting the massive hit album Harvest but eventually carried over into concerts featuring the newer material that wound up being documented on Time Fades Away) was Crazy Horse holdover Jack Nitzsche on keyboards. Fellow Crazy Horse member Danny Whitten had also been invited to join but was subsequently fired by Young due to his ongoing drug problems, which ended up killing him in an overdose soon after.

By the time the Stray Gators hit the road in support of Harvest, Young had already grown bored with much of the material on the album, choosing instead to test out new material (in what became a long-standing pattern of frustrating concert audiences), while stubbornly, if perhaps selfishly following his own artistic muse.

The resulting live album from the tour, 1973’s Time Fades Away, documents these shows, consisting entirely of new material and songs with darker lyrical themes than ever. The far less radio-friendly songs on Time Fades Away sound markedly different from the comparatively commercial-sounding So-Cal folk-pop of Harvest, represented as they are by the loose and lazy groove of the eight-minute “Last Dance” and the only slightly more accessible rough garage funk of “Don’t Be Denied.”

Coming after the worldwide #1 album Harvest, Time Fades Away proved to be a commercial stiff at the time, peaking at a dismal #22 on the Billboard albums chart.

Time Fades Away has today, however, gained a semimythical status amongst hardcore Neil Young followers, making up fully one-third (along with 1974’s On the Beach and 1975’s Tonight’s the Night) of what many of these same fans now revere as the Ditch Trilogy.

As one of only two Neil Young albums (the other being the soundtrack to Journey Through the Past) that remains unavailable today as a commercial CD release (despite an ongoing petition effort spearheaded by the Neil Young fan site Thrasher’s Wheat), Time Fades Away has also grown in status as something of a lost classic amongst the fans who prefer the rawer edges of Young’s sound. Even so, by most accounts the album’s rough recording isn’t favored at all by Neil Young today (which most likely explains why it has never officially been reissued on CD).

Although the Stray Gators’ only official shows together were those behind Harvest and the subsequently documented Time Fades Away, Young would reconvene the band two decades later for the Harvest “sequel” album, Harvest Moon.

Ben Keith and Tim Drummond were back (along with original drummer Kenny Buttrey). Spooner Oldham (who had become a fixture in Young’s bands later on beginning with the International Harvesters) replaced Jack Nitzsche on keyboards (although Nitzsche is still credited with the arrangement on the Harvest Moon track “Such a Woman”). Once again, however, when it came time to take the shows out on tour, the Stray Gators were derailed by money issues (raised mainly by Drummond this time around), and Neil Young toured the album as a solo acoustic show.

Regardless of this, various combinations of the Keith/Drummond/Oldham lineup have long since become identified with the mellower folk-pop and country terrain Young has explored from time to time on albums ranging from Comes a Time and Old Ways to Prairie Wind. They may not always be the Stray Gators in actual name, but to fans around the world, they have rightfully come to be known as the closest thing to a full-time band for Neil Young, outside of Crazy Horse.

Sadly, Ben Keith—who, in addition to being the musical core of the group (and co-producer of Harvest Moon along with Young himself), also was a full-time member of Pegi Young’s band—passed away on July 26, 2010, at the age of seventy-three.

The Santa Monica Flyers—1973

Neil Young (vocal, guitar, piano, harmonica), Ben Keith (pedal steel guitar, piano, vocal), Nils Lofgren (guitar, piano, accordion, vocal), Billy Talbot (bass, vocal), Ralph Molina (drums, vocal)

Although the album wouldn’t actually be released for another two years, Young decided to take the bleak new songs of Tonight’s the Night—an audio outpouring of raw emotion and grief inspired by the artist’s reaction to the drug overdose deaths of his close associates Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry—and try them out before live audiences on the road almost immediately.

The songs had been recorded in a series of all-night, tequila-fueled sessions at Studio Instrument Rentals, the Los Angeles rehearsal space owned by Berry’s brother Ken. Strange even by Neil Young standards, the Tonight’s the Night shows—which usually began with Young welcoming his audience “to Miami Beach” (regardless of what city they were actually performing in)—commenced toward the end of 1973, barely four months after what began as the Harvest tour had ended with the ragged-sounding shows documented on 1973’s Time Fades Away.

The band Young assembled for the tour, consisting of Ben Keith and guitarist Nils Lofgren, along with surviving Crazy Horse members Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina, played a total of thirty shows between August and November 1973, beginning with a string of dates at small venues in California and Canada. From there, the band headed to Europe, before finally coming back to America for a series of more club shows. The makeshift band was dubbed the Santa Monica Flyers.

In one of the many times over the course of his career that Young would be accused of committing career suicide, the shows consisted of the Santa Monica Flyers performing the as-yet unheard Tonight’s the Night album in its entirety, played in sequential front to back order.

This even included the reprise of the title track at the show’s end, which Young seemed to seize on as an opportunity to further confound the already frustrated audiences who had paid their hard-earned money to either see Neil Young sing the folk-pop songs of his hit album Harvest, or perhaps to hear some good old-fashioned blazing guitar jams from Young on Old Black.

When it came time to play “Tonight’s the Night” for a second time at most of these concerts, Young would first tease his already frustrated audience by promising “something you’ve heard before” before launching into the same previously unheard song that had already opened most of the shows.

Taken together with the abrupt, artistic about-face heard on Time Fades Away, and following the smoother Southern California folk-pop of the megahit album Harvest, Young’s apparent new artistic direction left even many of his most devoted fans scratching their heads in apparent bewilderment.

The tour was also poorly received by critics, some of whom also began to openly question Young’s state of mind (rumors of him suffering his own addiction to heroin—which he has never once used—began to surface at about the same time). This would only be the first of many such premature pronouncements of his impending demise as a commercially viable artist.

Atlantic Records promo-only LP celebrating “Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young month.” Side one features solo tracks from Crosby, Stills, and Nash, while Neil Young (who was under contract to Reprise) is mysteriously absent. Neil appears on three tracks on side two as part of CSN&Y.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

Stills-Young Band—1976

Neil Young (vocal, guitar, piano, harmonica), Stephen Stills (vocal, guitar, piano), Jerry Aiello (organ), George Perry (bass), Joe Lala (piano), Joe Vitale (drums)

Depending largely on who you talk to, Long May You Run, the lone album from the Stills-Young Band, was originally intended as one of the many aborted attempts over the years to record a second full-on Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young studio album, or simply as an excuse for the two long-standing primary musical foils involved to flex their own muscles on more of the famous guitar duels they had long since made famous with both CSN&Y and the Buffalo Springfield.

The resulting album turned out to be neither, as David Crosby and Graham Nash’s vocal contributions were unceremoniously removed (by Neil Young himself according to most accounts, although some say Stills may have had his own hand in the decision as well), and the blazing guitar interchanges many had hoped for and expected, for the most part never materialized.

The most memorable song from Long May You Run is probably the title track, a Neil Young–written folk-pop number inspired by “Mortimer,” the hearse he once famously and fatefully traveled cross-country from Canada to L.A. in, and that he was driving when he met Stills in that legendary traffic jam on Sunset Boulevard. Young most recently performed the song on Conan O’Brien’s final broadcast as host of the Tonight Show in 2010.

The Stills-Young Band also played eighteen shows together before Young abruptly left without warning. Traveling aboard a bus headed toward the next stop on the tour in Atlanta, Young instead instructed the driver to instead take him to Memphis where he caught a plane and went home. His only explanation came in the form of a cryptic note that was sent to Stills and the other band members. The message simply read, “Dear Stephen, funny how things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat A Peach, Neil.”

Stills was forced to play out the remaining shows of the tour, at least the ones that weren’t cancelled altogether, as a solo act.

In addition to on-again, off-again musical partners in crime Young and Stills, the short-lived Stills-Young Band was rounded out by members of Stills’s touring outfit at the time, Mannasas.

The Ducks—1977

Neil Young (vocal, guitar), Bob Mosley (bass, vocal), Jeff Blackburn (guitar, vocal), Johnny Craviotto (drums)

Neil Young released two records in 1977. American Stars and Bars was made up of a combination of tracks that had been recorded for Chrome Dreams (another projected album that never actually materialized) as well as a handful of new songs recorded in a single day at his ranch with a cast of players including Ben Keith, members of Crazy Horse, and backup vocalists Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson. Young also finally released his long-delayed three-record anthology set Decade in October of that year.

That summer, Young also played a handful of local club dates in Santa Cruz, California, with the Ducks, a group that also featured ex-Moby Grape bassist Bob Mosley, drummer Johnny Craviotto, and singer-songwriter/guitarist Jeff Blackburn. During their brief time together, the Ducks would regularly play gigs at local Santa Cruz venues like the Crossroads and the Catalyst for as little as a cover charge of three dollars—essentially becoming the town of Santa Cruz’s best-kept little secret (at least until word eventually leaked out via the rock music press).

With the Ducks, Young found himself in the rare position of simply being one of the guys in the band. This was reflected in the band’s set lists, which were equally divided between cover songs by artists ranging from Chuck Berry to Ian and Sylvia (“Four Strong Winds”), originals by Blackburn and Mosley, and a handful of Young’s own tunes like Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul” (Young famously claimed the Ducks’ version was superior to the one by his original band) and early versions of “Comes a Time” and “My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue)”—which was actually co-written by Blackburn.

As word about them got out, the Ducks soon attracted a group of fans from outside the area who earned the nickname of “Duck Hunters.” These fans would appear at the shows with duck whistles and boisterously holler out requests for Neil Young material during the songs by the less famous members of the group. While it isn’t completely clear why Young eventually left the band (never to return)—and it’s entirely probable that he never considered the Ducks anything more than a temporary diversion in the first place—this resulting, but of course inevitable, circus atmosphere probably was at least a contributing factor in his decision to do so.

Today, the Ducks are regarded as more of a footnote in Young’s career than anything else. But for a heady, brief few months in the summer of 1977, it was actually possible to see international rock-’n’-roll superstar Neil Young for the same couple of bucks you might pay to see any other local bar band at the corner beer joint—at least if you happened to live in or around Santa Cruz.

Trans Band—1982–83

Neil Young (vocal, guitar, piano, vocoder), Ben Keith (pedal steel guitar, lap steel guitar, keyboards, vocal), Nils Lofgren (guitar, accordion, keyboards, vocal, vocoder), Joe Lala (piano), Bruce Palmer (bass), Larry Cragg (banjo), Ralph Molina (drums, vocal)

Of the numerous albums Neil Young has released over the course of his career that have confused and at times even angered his fans—and there have been just as many of these abrupt and often strange shifts in artistic direction as there have been the hits like Harvest and Rust Never Sleeps—perhaps the one that stands out as the most notoriously perplexing of them all was and still is 1982’s Trans.

By the same token, this experimental, odd-sounding synthesizer- and vocoder-dominated album may also be among Young’s least understood recordings.

At the time of its release, Young had just left Warner/Reprise Records after an association with the label that had lasted nearly two decades. Most agree that he was lured away from the Bunny at least in part by his own frustration with the lack of promotional efforts for his previous album, Re-ac-tor, but also by the creative freedom promised by his new label, Geffen Records.

When Geffen rejected his very first new album for the label—the so-called water album Island in the Sun (one of Neil’s many unreleased recordings)—Young responded with the most abrupt shift in artistic direction of his entire career—at least up to that point.

Seen at the time by many of his older fans as a classic case of the artist selling out to that era’s synthesizer-driven “new wave” sound (popularized by such bands as the Human League and Soft Cell, and heavily favored by both MTV and the emergent “rock of the eighties” radio format of the time)—the cold electronically altered vocals and synthesizer-driven beats of Trans certainly must have been something of a shock.

Reprise records 45 for “Hey Babe” featuring Neil Young with Crazy Horse and the Bullets.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

What wasn’t common knowledge back then, however, was that the emotional detachment and metronomic repetition of songs like “Transformer Man” were at least partially inspired by the heartbreaking condition of Young’s youngest son, Ben, and how he was dealing with it as his father.

Like Young’s older son, Zeke, Young suffered from cerebral palsy—only Ben’s condition was far more severe, leaving him severely handicapped, particularly when it came to his ability to communicate. As a result, Ben’s condition required nearly twenty-four-hour, round-the-clock attention from Young and his wife, Pegi. The parents also consulted with a number of different therapists, particularly with regard to Ben’s communication issues.

True to his artistic vision as ever, Neil Young saw the more synthesizer-driven songs of Trans as a further expression of the push-button sort of technology he was then experiencing in his own personal life, both in the therapy used to treat his own son and in his efforts to communicate with him.

And in typical “fuck all” fashion, he stubbornly took this to its furthest extreme when he took the Trans album out on the road.

The “Trans Band” assembled for the tour combined some of Young’s most reliable “go-to” musicians—guys like Ben Keith, Nils Lofgren, and Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina—with a number of names from his distant past including CSN&Y/Stills-Young Band keyboardist Joe Lala and original Buffalo Springfield bassist Bruce Palmer.

Palmer was a particularly interesting choice for the gig, given the newly “Trans-ized” version of “Mr. Soul” performed both on the album and at the shows. But he was eventually dismissed from the tour due to his excessive boozing.

The first shows of the tour, which took place in Europe, were by most accounts a total disaster.

One of the biggest problems was that Young’s artistic vision for the shows probably far exceeded his actual reach. Looking back on the period now, it also probably represents one of his very few actual missteps in that regard.

The staging was also bigger than it had ever been before. The mountains of electronic equipment and technology required to pull it all off—including the synthesizers perhaps more suited to a prog-rock band like Emerson Lake and Palmer or Yes, as well as the backing tapes later favored by pop acts of the time like Michael Jackson and Madonna—had to seem rather off-putting to Young’s core audience as well.

Mostly, though, the audience just didn’t quite get the strange (at least by the standards he had set up to this point) new material Young chose to make the focus of these shows. A significant number of the European concerts were cancelled, and by the time the tour finally made it back to the States, the production values had been scaled down considerably. Neil also worked more of his crowd-pleasing hits back into the show, particularly with an opening acoustic set.

One of the more interesting factors introduced in the American shows of the Trans tour, though, was the use of something called “Trans TV.”

Through the use of a roving camera, the audience was able to follow the action occurring backstage in between sets and even while the band was actually playing. A feed to the big overhead screens (which were just beginning to become standard practice with the biggest rock shows back then), provided an instant playback, and was hosted by emcee Dan Clear (in a role portrayed by actor Newell Alexander). In addition to the backstage and audience interaction, there was even a nightly interview with Young himself during the intermission, where he would critique how the evening had gone so far.

The only officially released document of the Trans Band in concert is a DVD recorded during the European tour called Live Berlin. Although somewhat rare and hard to find today, it provides a rare glimpse into one of the more bizarre chapters of Neil Young’s concert performing career.

If nothing else, those wraparound shades will certainly take you back.

As for the Trans album itself, it actually holds up far better today than one might expect. Although it admittedly sounds somewhat dated now, in between the synthesized bleeps, blurs, and burps and the electronically altered vocals of songs like “Sample and Hold” and “Computer Cowboy,” you can still hear brief flashes of the explosive guitar blasts Young is famous for.

Leftovers from the original Island in the Sun sessions that made the final cut like “Little Thing Called Love” and “Like an Inca” also stand up remarkably well.

The Shocking Pinks—1983

Neil Young (vocal, guitar, piano, harmonica), Ben Keith (guitar), Larry Byron (piano, trumpet, vocal), Anthony Crawford (marimba, tambourine, vocal), Rick Palombi (piano, vocal), Craig Hayes (baritone saxophone), Tim Drummond (bass), Karl T. Himmel (drums)

For Young’s next record following Trans, the artist made another 360-degree turn and released Everybody’s Rockin’, a slapdash rockabilly record whose ten songs clock in at about 25 minutes total, making it the shortest album of his career. As the story goes, Young had originally planned to follow Trans with Old Ways, a country album that Geffen subsequently rejected (a revamped version of Old Ways was later released after Everybody’s Rockin’).

Neil Young and Graham Nash “solo single” “War Song.” CSN&Y worked as a band, as solo performers, and in numerous combinations.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

When the label strongly suggested Neil instead needed to make a “rock-’n’-roll” record, Neil decided he would respond by literally giving them exactly what they asked for.

Whether or not Young took any of this seriously is open to conjecture. Either way, of all his various genre experiments in the so-called lost eighties, Everybody’s Rockin’ is easily among the most forgettable. To no one’s surprise, the album was also a spectacular commercial flop, even by Young’s newly established standards for alienating the fan base. Still, when he briefly toured the album with the Shocking Pinks, the group he assembled specifically for the project, he seemed to fully embrace the concept.

Adding a small horn section to the mix for the first time, the Shocking Pinks were a combination of longtime musical cronies like Ben Keith and Tim Drummond, along with new additions like sax player Craig Hayes, trumpet player Larry Byron, and multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Anthony Crawford. When the band took to the road, they not only played the part, but dressed for it as well—complete with loud fifties-style pink jackets and greased-back duck-billed hair.

If Young ever regarded the Shocking Pinks as anything more than a joke, he certainly wasn’t letting on. To this day he has yet to reveal what possessed him to make the album.

Everybody’s Rockin’ has long since become something of the punchline in any serious discussion of Young’s artistic output during those “lost eighties.”

The International Harvesters—1984–85

Neil Young (vocal, guitar, harmonica), Ben Keith (pedal steel guitar), Anthony Crawford (guitar, banjo, fiddle, vocal), Rufus Thibodeaux (fiddle), Spooner Oldham (piano), Tim Drummond (bass), Karl T. Himmel (drums), Harold “Pig” Robbins (piano), Joe Allen (bass), Matraca Berg, Tracy Nelson (backup vocals)

Following the commercial flops of Trans and Everybody’s Rockin’, Young continued his wildly genre-hopping ways with a newly revamped version of Old Ways, the country-influenced album that had already been rejected by his record label once before. If anything, the new version of the album represented an even more hardcore country direction than the original (which Young once described as something more like a “Harvest II”).

Before long, he had booked another series of shows fronting yet another new band assembled for the tour, which had been dubbed the International Harvesters.

As with the album being supported, the International Harvesters’ sound was pure country—eschewing big rock-’n’-roll guitars in favor of country fiddles and banjos. Many of the subsequent shows were also booked on the country circuit as Young performed alongside acts like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson at venues like the Grand Old Opry and at county fairs. The band also featured a number of seasoned Nashville pros alongside Young mainstays like Keith, Drummond, and Oldham.

Although his brief flirtation with straightforward country music only lasted about as long as his previous experiments with syntho-pop and rockabilly had before it, Young seemed more determined than ever to alienate his more traditional fan base. In published interviews at the time, he all but denounced his rock-’n’-roll past and also began to embrace the Republican politics of the Reagan era—quite possibly the ultimate sin coming from the former sixties hippie rocker who had once written about “tin soldiers and Nixon coming” in the song “Ohio.”

By this time, the relationship between Young and his record label Geffen had also become more contentious than ever as the label filed a lawsuit against him citing his failure to deliver any commercial product—or what they described as more traditional-sounding “Neil Young albums.”

One of the more notable developments that came out of the country period with the International Harvesters, however, was Young’s friendship with Willie Nelson. This led to their partnership in the Farm Aid benefit concerts. Along with John Mellencamp (and later on, Dave Matthews), Young and Nelson have headlined the annual shows benefiting American family-owned farms ever since. Today, Young also sits on the board of directors of Nelson’s Farm Aid foundation along with Mellencamp and Matthews.

The International Harvesters’ live performances remain the greatest legacy of Young’s short-lived country band, and many of these are documented on the live recording A Treasure, released nearly thirty years after the fact in June 2011 as part of his Archives Performance Series. The release unearths some of the better performances of the period (1984–1985), including a combination of rare, unreleased songs like “Grey Riders” as well as countrified remakes of Neil Young songs like “Southern Pacific.” Young preceded this release with a goofy promotional video, which includes him rambling on about the inclusion of half-completed performances, and a particularly hilarious voiceover whenever he references the “Blu-ray” version of the album.

The Bluenotes/Ten Men Working—1987–88

Neil Young (vocal, guitar, harmonica), Ben Keith (alto saxophone), Larry Cragg (baritone saxophone), Steve Lawrence (tenor saxophone), Claude Cailliet (trombone), Tom Bray (trumpet), John Fumo (trumpet), Frank “Poncho” Sampedro (organ), Rick Rosas (bass), Chad Cromwell (drums)

Although Young’s return to full-on commercial and critical prominence was still a year away, This Note’s for You certainly seemed to be a huge step in the right direction at the time. The album was released by Reprise Records in 1988.

True enough, This Note’s for You represented yet another genre experiment—this time around, Young was embracing the blues—and after a decade of similar artistic diversions, his once huge audience had shrunk considerably. The album peaked at a disappointing #61 on the charts.

But unlike most of his other eighties albums, radio seemed willing to give this one a chance. The title track—a brassy R&B number that blasted the willingness of rock-’n’-roll artists at the time to sell out their songs for use in product endorsements and commercials—became a minor hit. MTV, which had originally resisted playing the video (perhaps because the network itself was one of the primary targets of Young lyrical venom in the song), also eventually relented. The video was added to MTV’s playlist after he took his “music or money” campaign to the network public. The video also eventually won the MTV Video Music Awards prize for video of the year.

But the real signs that Young was on the verge of a true return to his former greatness came in the form of his live shows with the Bluenotes, the nine-piece band he had assembled for both the album and its accompanying tour.

In typically over-the-top fashion, Young adopted a new persona for the concerts—a bluesman he dubbed with the moniker of “Shakey Deal.” The concerts also featured a full six-piece horn section just as the album had, augmenting a core unit consisting of Rick “the Bass Player” Rosas, drummer Chad Cromwell, and Frank “Poncho” Sampedro from Crazy Horse on guitar.

Perhaps it was as a result of his nearly decade-long string of bad experiences with Geffen Records finally being put behind him (Young re-signed with Reprise for the album). But for the first time in nearly that long, he also really seemed to be enjoying playing again, and the concerts were by all accounts his best in years.

Most significant to fans was the reemergence of a Neil Young who was as willing to crank up the amps and get down and dirty with Old Black as he had been at anytime since the heyday of Crazy Horse.

Toward the latter part of this tour cycle, the Bluenotes morphed into a band renamed Ten Men Working (after a track from This Note’s for You of the same name). It was on these latter shows that new songs like “Sixty to Zero (Crime in the City)” and “Ordinary People” began showing up in the sets.

Each of these became vehicles for the blazing, lengthy Neil Young guitar jams that fans had so longed for since what seemed like forever. They often stretch to up to twenty minutes in concert. Both tracks would also eventually show up on future Young albums. The former came just a year later (albeit in a much shorter and considerably turned-down version) on Freedom, while the latter wasn’t officially released until two decades later on Chrome Dreams II.

These shows, documented on a number of bootleg recordings, have long since gone down as a legendary chapter in the Neil Young story. And the best was still to come …

Young and the Restless/The Restless/Lost Dogs—1989

Neil Young (vocal, guitar, piano, harmonica, banjo), Frank “Poncho” Sampedro (guitar, keyboards), Ben Keith (pedal steel guitar, dobro, vocal), Rick Rosas (bass), Chad Cromwell (drums)

Young’s next move in 1989 was perhaps the most shocking of anything he had done in the preceding ten years. He made what the more litigiously minded folks at his previous label Geffen might call an actual Neil Young album.

For many long-weary fans, the 1989 album Freedom must have seemed to have arrived out of nowhere. Who knew that this once trailblazing artist who had spent the past ten years wandering through a seemingly endless series of genre experiments actually had a record this great still in him? But there was no denying it. Freedom was the best Neil Young album since Rust Never Sleeps.

Yet for those fans with the patience to continue patiently following Young closely, and who had witnessed the shows over the previous year leading up to this great record, it was already obvious that something rather big was coming.

Perhaps because he was feeling artistically emancipated from his experiences at Geffen (the album title Freedom is probably no coincidence), the shows Young played that year must have seemed like reunions with a long-lost friend who had never really been away. What became obvious to anyone fortunate enough to see him throughout 1989 was that Neil Young—yes, that Neil Young—was clearly back.

Lyrics to Neil Young’s “Ohio” and Stephen Stills’s “Find the Cost of Freedom” as seen on the sleeve of a rare CSN&Y 45 featuring two non-LP tracks.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

For these shows, he ditched the horns and pared the Bluenotes/Ten Men Working lineup down to a raw core of Keith, Sampedro, Rosas, and Cromwell. Originally dubbed “Young and the Restless,” this leaner and meaner lineup would eventually come to be known as simply the Restless.

Young’s first attempt to capture the raw power of his newly pared-down band came with a never-released album called Times Square, recorded at New York’s Hit Factory in 1988. By all accounts, this album featured some of the loudest, fiercest guitar shredding he had ever committed to tape up to that point. However, it was pulled by the artist himself due to what he perceived as a lack of anything close to a radio-friendly single.

Oddly enough, a five-song E.P. from the sessions survived and was issued in a run limited to five thousand copies in Japan called Eldorado. A highly coveted collector’s item today, the Eldorado E.P. features earlier and much rawer versions of the songs that would eventually emerge on Freedom like “Don’t Cry” and a paint-peeling cover of the standard “On Broadway,” as well as the still officially unreleased B-side “Cocaine Eyes.”

As the shows with the Restless progressed, a brilliant new song called “Rockin’ in the Free World” was premiered in Seattle on February 21, 1989.

This anthemic rocker, which included lyrics critical of the senior George Bush’s presidency like “we got a thousand points of lights for the homeless man, we got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand” (Young had by now apparently abandoned his brief flirtation with Republican politics), would become the centerpiece of the Freedom album, which was finally released that fall.

As was the case with “My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue)” ten years prior on the Rust Never Sleeps album, “Rockin’ in the Free World” bookended Freedom with both acoustic and blasting, cranked-to-eleven electric versions.

Not only was Neil Young back—in Freedom he was back with the sort of instant classic fans believed he was capable of delivering at any point all along.