16

Dancing on the Night from Star to Star

Chrome Dreams, American Stars and Bars, the Ducks, Decade, and Comes a Time

For the next several years, Neil Young went on something of a creative tear.

During this unprecedented flurry of near nonstop recording activity, he rejected nearly as much of his finished work as he ultimately released.

There were solo recordings made by no one but himself “alone at the microphone,” as well as sessions with Crazy Horse, and with trusted partners in musical crime like Ben Keith, Spooner Oldham, and Tim Drummond. There were recordings made in locales ranging from Indigo Studios and Broken Arrow in California, to Nashville and at Triad Studios in Miami.

This wave of creative activity was so intense, it soon became little more than a blur to many of the participating musicians, who had to do all they could just to keep up with the seemingly endless string of songs pouring out like water from Neil Young’s brain.

Still, many of these same players, such as Crazy Horse’s Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, for example, were often unaware which record would feature the tracks they had worked on, or if they would even end up being released at all.

In Jimmy McDonough’s Shakey, Sampedro recalls this period:

“We just played and recorded,” the Crazy Horse guitarist says. “Every once in a while Neil would say ‘Hey man, I sent in a record,’ and I remember it shocking us. I said ‘Oh Yeah? What was on it?’”

Some of the best music produced during this period came from the mostly solo acoustic sessions made over the course of several weeks during occurrences of the full moon showing itself at Indigo Studios in Malibu, California.

The sheer number of great songs committed to tape during this time—songs like “Powderfinger,” “Pocahontas,” and “Will to Love” that have long since gone down as classics in the Neil Young canon—was nothing short of mind blowing.

For those who were there, Young’s songwriting and recording process has been described with such colorful adjectives as the “demon taking control” of him. For those who witnessed the sessions, it was as though he was magically grabbing all of these great new songs from somewhere out of thin air. Recording during the full moon has long since become standard operating procedure whenever Neil Young makes records.

Of course, there were also concerts during this period.

Among them were a series of shows in California where Neil Young and Crazy Horse would essentially just show up at a small club and proceed to blow the roof off of the joint.

There was also a 1976 tour of Japan. One of these shows, which took place at the Nippon Budokan Hall on March 11, has become legendary among fans. Although there were mistakes such as blown vocal cues and the like, and at least two of the musicians—Sampedro and Billy Talbot—were flying high on acid, the Horse were said to have scaled new heights of garage rock nirvana that night.

The show was both filmed and recorded, but as has so often been the case with many of these mythically great, lost Neil Young performances, no film or album ever came of it. However, rumors of an eventual release of the Nippon Budokan show—most likely as part of the Archives Performance Series—continue to make the rounds at websites and amongst the Neil Young fan network. One can only hope.

You Put the Load Right on Me

Perhaps the best known of his concert performances during this period was his appearance as part of The Last Waltz, the extravagant and elegant farewell gala at Bill Graham’s Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, organized as a swan song to the career of the Band.

Performing alongside an all-star lineup of rock royalty that included the likes of Dylan, Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and a somewhat out of place Neil Diamond (whose Beautiful Noise album had just been produced by the Band’s Robbie Robertson), Young’s performance of “Helpless” is probably not among the highlights of the Martin Scorsese film document of the legendary event.

A lesser-known fact about the film is that there was a close-up shot of Young during the performance where an enormous rock of cocaine could be seen dangling precariously from out of his nose. Although both Scorsese and Robertson lobbied Young and Elliot Roberts hard to keep the offending footage in the film—citing, among other things, its rock-’n’-roll immediacy in their arguments—it was mercifully removed from the final cut.

The Ducks

During the summer of 1977, Neil Young also performed a handful of shows with a short-lived band he assembled along with Moby Grape bassist Bob Mosley and guitarist Jeff Blackburn (who Young knew from the Springfield era) called the Ducks. Blackburn also shares a writing credit with Young on the latter’s “Hey, Hey, My, My (Out of the Blue)” from the classic Rust Never Sleeps album.

Single release of the title track from Comes a Time. Neil Young was so disappointed with the album’s sound that he famously bought back 200,000 copies of the initial pressing and shot bullet holes through them.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

The makeshift group mostly played small, unannounced gigs at bars in Santa Cruz, California, like the Crossroads and the Catalyst, performing a mix of older rock covers, along with a small handful of originals—the most noteworthy of which was a Neil Young instrumental called “Windward Passage.” The cover charge to see Young playing with the Ducks at these tiny dives was usually around three bucks. But the Ducks were not so much another Neil Young project as a case of the rock superstar simply slumming with a bunch of other guys as just another member of the band.

Although the Ducks were supposed to be Santa Cruz’s best-kept little rock-’n’-roll secret, word inevitably leaked out (mentions of the gigs in magazines like Rolling Stone probably didn’t help), and before long, the small but rabidly devoted group of fans known as the “Duck Hunters” had plenty of unwanted company at the gigs. Shortly after the beach house he was renting in Santa Cruz was broken into and several guitars and other items were stolen, Young bolted the scene without so much as a warning.

Through Nets, By Hooks, and Hungry Bears

The Indigo sessions produced an astonishing array of great new original Neil Young songs, including those that eventually made their way to albums that were still to come, like Rust Never Sleeps (“Pocahontas,” “Sedan Delivery,” and “Powderfinger”) to Decade (“Campaigner”).

The bulk of these were at one point compiled for an album scheduled for release called Chrome Dreams.

Although this album has, at least to this date, never officially been released, it has since seen fairly wide distribution amongst fans as a bootleg. Most who have heard the recordings agree that it could have been one of Neil Young’s finest albums.

With songs like “Pocahontas” and “Campaigner” placed right alongside barn burners such as “Like a Hurricane,” the unreleased Chrome Dreams album actually flows far better as a whole than does American Stars and Bars, which ended up being released in its place.

For anyone in doubt of this, just do a quick Google search for “Chrome Dreams.rar” on the Internet, download the album and listen to it, and I can pretty much guarantee that any lingering questions about it will be answered convincingly.

Even so, it’s hard to imagine hearing a classic album like Rust Never Sleeps now without the inclusion of such key songs as “Pocahontas” and “Powderfinger.” In the case of the latter, however, the rawer, more stripped-down take heard on the Chrome Dreams bootleg is in many ways the more powerful version of the song.

American Stars and Bars combines songs from the Indigo sessions—and in particular the amazing three-song punch of “Star of Bethlehem,” “Will to Love,” and “Like a Hurricane” that kicks off side two of the album—with the more country-flavored songs made with Crazy Horse, Ben Keith, and backup vocalists Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson (with whom Young would enjoy a brief romantic fling) at Young’s Broken Arrow ranch in April 1977.

American Stars and Bars lacks the more cohesive feel of Chrome Dreams—the album really feels more like two unfinished halves than a complete whole. But the second side of this album ranks right up there with some of the most amazing sides of Neil Young’s career.

Sandwiched in between the tranquil, almost sanguine-sounding “Star of Bethlehem” and the frenzied, over-the-top electric guitar harmonics of Old Black on “Like a Hurricane,” “Will to Love” is really the centerpiece of this remarkable series of songs. It also stands out as one of the most beautiful songs Young has ever recorded, and certainly as one of his most unique.

Recorded over a discarded cassette tape of a Stills-Young Band recording, and complete with Young’s fireplace cracking loudly in the background throughout, “Will to Love” has a dreamy, atmospheric quality that is only further amplified by the lyrics equating the lonely journey of a fish swimming (or perhaps spawning) his way upstream to the impossible yearning and loneliness associated with the “Will to Love.”

The song has a beautifully haunting, impossibly detached sound to it, and is quite possibly the nearest Young has ever come to the sort of ambient New Age soundscapes made back then by people like Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream (with the possible exception of his unreleased and unheard “New Age” album Meadow Dusk). “Will to Love,” to this day, stands as one of Young’s greatest recorded achievements.

The haunting ambience of “Will to Love” segues effortlessly into the electrified harmonic blast of “Like a Hurricane,” a song that legend has it came to Young after spotting a beautiful girl in the “crowded hazy bar” quoted in the lyrics. But even more than the lyrics of the unrequited love that comes at closing time after last call (and that serve as such a perfect complement to “Will to Love” immediately before it), “Like a Hurricane” is a showcase for what is arguably Young’s greatest recorded electric guitar solo ever.

Rich with piercing notes that “dance upon the night from star to star” and that reach higher into the upper harmonic stratosphere, “Like a Hurricane” is the sort of song that should be part and parcel of any course in Rock-’n’-Roll Guitar 101. Along with “Cortez the Killer,” it is one of Young’s signature guitar solos, and is again, arguably one of the single best rock guitar songs ever made.

Even Richard Nixon Has Got Soul

Young’s next move was the release of the expansive three-disc set anthology Decade.

Although his more devoted fans have long since gone on record with their vociferous bitching about the lack of unreleased goodies and extras included on the original set—their wish lists for these same rarities would be granted some three decades later with the first volume of the Archives series—Decade holds up remarkably well even today as a summation of Neil Young’s career up to that point.

To this day, along with albums like Harvest and Rust Never Sleeps, Decade remains one of the strongest, most consistent sellers of Young’s entire catalog.

Perhaps most importantly, what Decade did at the time of its original October 1977 release was to firmly establish Young as a major artist with marquee value on a par with the likes of Bob Dylan. Dylan’s own career-spanning retrospective, Biograph, which came a few years later in the early eighties, in fact followed the template set by Decade to the letter in many ways.

As a retrospective set covering Young’s career up to that point, Decade does in fact hit on all of the major points, even while throwing in a few rarities like “Campaigner” (from the aborted Chrome Dreams album), which is best known for the famous line “even Richard Nixon has got soul.”. One of his best-known songs, “Sugar Mountain,” also makes its first official appearance on a Neil Young album with Decade.

Beyond the inclusion of its few select rarities, Decade covers the high points of Young’s career up until its 1977 release very well. The lack of any depth covering the Ditch Trilogy—where are the deeper cuts from Time Fades Away and On the Beach anyway?—represents the only really glaring major omission.

Outside of this, Decade hits on all the major points from his work with Buffalo Springfield (“On the Way Home,” “Expecting to Fly,” “Broken Arrow,” “Mr. Soul”) and CSN&Y (“Ohio,” “Helpless”) all the way through to “Love Is a Rose” (which became a hit for Linda Ronstadt) and “Long May You Run.” In the case of the latter, it also provided a much-needed way to get that particular song without having to buy the actual album (sorry, Stephen).

The Springfield and CSN&Y tracks are all there (well at least mostly—just where the heck is “Country Girl” anyway?), as are the best of Young’s recordings as a solo artist, from “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Down by the River” to “Cortez,” “Tonight’s the Night,” and “Like a Hurricane.”

As career retrospectives go, I’d rank Decade as one of the better ones, and the sort of album I’d point anyone toward who was looking for a worthy introduction to the early career of Neil Young.

This Old World Keeps Spinning Round

Comes a Time is a particularly strange standout amongst the ranks of Young’s latter seventies releases.

At the time of its 1978 release, it was his biggest commercial success since Harvest—having outsold all of his albums from that point forward. Over the longer haul, however, it has maintained nowhere near the staying power with hardcore fans that originally lesser-selling albums like On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night have enjoyed.

Originally recorded as a solo acoustic album at Miami’s Triad Studios, when Neil Young played the original Comes a Time for label executives at Warner Brothers, they responded by telling him to try out the same songs again with a band. In a rare show of willingness to let the label dictate his artistic vision, Young agreed and gathered up a crew of the usual suspects like Ben Keith and Tim Drummond, along with newcomers Karl Himmel, Spooner Oldham, and Rufus Thibodeaux. Of these musicians, the great R&B songwriter and keyboard player Spooner Oldham in particular would play a significant role on many of Young’s future recordings (as would drummer Karl Himmel and fiddler Rufus Thibodeaux, although to a lesser degree).

Perhaps as a joke playing on the southern geography of the sessions, Young dubbed the loose aggregation the Gone with the Wind Orchestra.

The resulting sessions were reconvened in Nashville, site of Young’s biggest hit, Harvest, and, not surprisingly, the resulting Comes a Time album shares much of that album’s smooth folk-pop feel.

Among the many things that stand out most about Comes a Time is the fact that the album has a studio sheen not seen on a Neil Young album since Harvest. Many of the tracks are overdubbed, which is kind of strange since he has historically favored a rawer, less produced sound on his records. It also stands in sharp contrast to the way the songs had originally been recorded in Miami, for the acoustic version of the album that was never released.

There has been some loose talk of late about finally putting out this lost album, called Oceanside, Countryside, as part of the next volume in the Archives series.

The biggest difference on Comes a Time, however, was Nicolette Larson, whose backing vocals were by now taking on much more prominence than they had on American Stars and Bars. Her presence is felt all over the Comes a Time album, on tracks like “Goin’ Back,” a beautiful cover version of Ian and Sylvia Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds” (the same song Young has called the greatest he has ever heard), and of course “Lotta Love,” one of the album’s two tracks cut with an uncharacteristically laid back-sounding Crazy Horse (the other being “Look Out for my Love”). “Lotta Love” would also be a surprise top ten hit for Larson as a solo artist.

Ben Keith in particular has been unwavering in his praise for Larson’s work on Comes a Time. In Jimmy McDonough’s Shakey, Keith says she “tracked him perfect” and calls her “the best harmony singer I’ve ever heard.” Comes a Time also roughly coincides with Young’s brief romantic relationship with Larson, which ended shortly before he met and married Pegi Morton.

Japanese pressing of Reprise Records 45 “Lookin’ for a Love.”

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

With the exception of “Motorcycle Mama,” a raunchy but equally goofy send-up about biker babes that sounds somewhat out of place on this album, Comes a Time mines much of the same familiar-sounding folk-pop terrain.

Lyrically, the songs seemed to indicate that Young was also moving on from the sometimes bitter tone of the songs that came in the wake of his split from Carrie Snodgress. Nearly every song on Comes a Time approaches the subject of love in a warm and fuzzy way that is about as far a cry from songs like Zuma’s “Stupid Girl” as it gets. “Already Gone,” a warm, loving tribute to his son Zeke, and the aforementioned “Motorcycle Mama” are really the only songs on Comes a Time that don’t fall into this category.

Now, My Name Is on the Line

A humorous footnote to the Comes a Time story is the fact that Neil Young himself bought back two hundred thousand copies of the album when a recording flaw was discovered. As the story is told by his father Scott Young in his book Neil and Me, Neil actually shot bullet holes into every copy of the record, rendering them unplayable.

Remember that this was also right around the same time that the Bee Gees’ colossal flop remake of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper was the subject of industry jokes that it had gone platinum in returns. In the case of the first pressing of Comes a Time, the reality wasn’t too far off from the punchline of that particularly inside music industry joke.

Another important development in the evolution of rock music at the time of the release of Comes a Time was the growing rise of punk rock.

Although it would be several more years before the influence of bands like the Ramones, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols would translate into an actual impact in the commercial marketplace, the changing direction of rock ’n’ roll was something that was not lost on Neil Young. Punk rock in general, and the Sex Pistols in particular, would in fact play a major role in the direction of Neil Young’s very next record.