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Strobe Lights Flashin’ on the Overpass

Landing on Water, Life, Muddy Track, and the Bridge School

Although Neil Young’s next two albums for Geffen Records—1986’s Landing on Water and 1987’s Life—signaled a return to the more familiar, commercially viable rock sound everyone from the fans to the record label claimed to have been waiting for, both landed with the record-buying public with a resounding thud.

To put it in the vernacular of the record industry weasel, Landing on Water—Young’s attempt at duplicating the commercially then in vogue “big drum” sound of eighties pop and rock records by using studio musicians and “modern” digital recording technology—was a big stiff.

Peaking at a dismal #58 on the Billboard charts, Landing on Water holds the dubious distinction of being the first “rock” record of Young’s career to fail to crack the top fifty of Billboard’s top 200 albums chart (although its predecessor Old Ways only made it to #75 on that chart, the fact that this was a country album excludes it from consideration on this list). Despite the return of Crazy Horse to active duty, the very next Neil Young album, Life, did even worse, stalling at #75.

When viewed in retrospect all these years later, both of these albums would have to place pretty high on an all-time “hall of shame” within the Neil Young canon. As often as the goofy Everybody’s Rockin’ has been cited as being among his worst albums ever, it often gets a pass anyway because it represents such a great punch line to an otherwise brilliant career. Today, many fans tend to view Young’s fifties rockabilly album as a joke at best and an insignificant knockoff at worst.

Not so with Landing on Water.

A Funny Thing Happened Yesterday, I Felt the Pressure in a TV Way

For Landing on Water, Young ditched his usual band of cronies (David Briggs, Crazy Horse, Ben Keith, etc.), and chose instead to work with L.A. studio veterans Danny Kortchmar and Steve Jordan.

Kortchmar’s studio credits at the time included hits for artists like Don Henley and Jackson Browne, both as a producer and as a studio musician. Jordan, on the other hand, was widely regarded at the time as one of the most bad-ass drummers around. His name had in fact come up several times in the past, specifically in discussions with David Briggs and others as a drummer Young might want to consider working with.

Kortchmar, on the other hand, was the sort of studio pro whose glossy approach to making records by Henley and others was about as far removed from Young’s more spontaneous method of flying by the seat of your pants in the recording studio as it gets. The funny thing about this is that in retrospect, Kortchmar’s slicker approach to recording may have been exactly why Young recruited him for the project.

But there was absolutely no doubt as to why he recruited Jordan.

Like many artists in the mid- to late eighties, Young had drums on the brain—or more specifically, a particular drum sound. Previous attempts to capture this sound in the studio with Crazy Horse had resulted in a dead end, but had left Young undeterred in what ultimately became a fool’s quest to find it.

His continued fascination with synthesizers and electronic sounds, as well as the then just emerging new digital recording technology of the day, are among the chief factors that, when taken together, conspired to make Landing on Water one of his more curiously bad recordings ever.

The end result is arguably the worst album of Young’s career. If nothing else, Landing on Water certainly stands alone as the least timeless-sounding of all his albums—including the early eighties, time-stamped techno of Trans. Listening to this album today feels like walking through a minefield of bad eighties musical clichés. This becomes even more evident when watching the video clips from the album, but we’ll get to more on that in a minute.

Concert T-shirt for the annual Bridge School Benefit shows in Mountain View, California. Neil Young headlines the show every year, and Pegi Young sits on the Board of Directors.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

The songs on Landing on Water were mostly made with a core trio of Young on guitar, Jordan on drums, and Kortchmar playing bass parts mostly through various synthesized keyboards. With Kortchmar—a name synonymous with the often criticized, soulless L.A. sound of the eighties—credited as album producer, there has been a perhaps unfair tendency over the years to lay blame for the ultimate dud that was Landing on Water squarely at his doorstep.

But according to most insider accounts, it was in fact Neil Young himself who was responsible for calling the shots on this album. Those loopy-sounding synthesizers that make “People on the Street” sound like a bad outtake from a rejected Queen record? That oddly misplaced boys’ choir heard on “Violent Side”? All of these were Young’s ideas, according to those present, along with all of those excessive vocal overdubs. One interesting side note here is the fact that his fascination with the new digital recording technology of the day is something he would come to quite vociferously disassociate himself from in later years.

But in the end, Landing on Water is all about the drums.

Steve Jordan’s playing on the record certainly can’t be faulted here—he is as steady as a rock, even if it is in a robotic, metronomic sort of way. But the sound itself—rather than appropriating the big boom of Phil Collins, or the heavy percussive drone heard on Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham’s productions for early U2 and XTC—is instead an irritating, tinny sound. Basically, the drums on Landing on Water sound like they are being played on trash can lids.

Unfortunately, these same drums ultimately overwhelm everything else on Landing on Water—including the lead guitar, which should be the focal point of any rock album by Neil Young.

Many of the songs that wound up on the album, such as “Violent Side” “Hard Luck Stories,” and “Touch the Night,” were in fact leftovers from the blazing set of shows Young had played with Crazy Horse a few years earlier. But where the original power of those songs is on full display on bootlegs like Catalytic Reaction (from the legendary 1984 shows at Santa Cruz’s Catalyst Club), on Landing on Water they simply collapse under the weight of all the excessive production. The drums in particular sound like the snap, crackle, and pop of Rice Krispies swirling in a pool of stale milk.

Capsized in Excess, if You Know What I Mean

Since this is the eighties we are talking about, Young also made a number of promotional videos for Landing on Water. Although you probably have to figure that given the opportunity, he might want to take some of those clips back now, they are also quite hilarious when viewed today.

The video for “Touch the Night” is in particular, a classic.

When “Touch the Night” made its debut at the 1984 shows with Crazy Horse at places like the Catalyst, the song played like a sequel to “Like a Hurricane,” complete with Young’s blazing guitar playing against a swirling keyboard arrangement.

In the version heard on Landing on Water, some of his original guitar attack remains intact, although much of it is blotted out by an arrangement typical of this album. There are more of those irritating choir vocals, and the drums are again a major point of distraction.

The funniest thing, though, is seeing him in the video—looking not unlike Clark Kent with slicked-back hair and thick, black rimmed glasses—as an obnoxious television reporter covering the aftermath of a traffic accident (the “strobe lights flashin’ on the overpass” referenced in the song lyrics).

Directed by Tim Pope, who made several of Young’s eighties videos including those on Landing on Water and earlier clips like “Wonderin’,” recalled the making of “Touch the Night” in a post on his blog (misspelled and non-capitalized words are uncorrected here, in order to maintain the integrity of the original posting):

working with neil was always fun, and he liked me to speak to him “in character,” this one being “george.” after the police car screeches off, my voice says two things to george—an expletive, at the speed of its departure, and then i mention a “restaurant up the road.” i only decided to use the ambience of the live sound later to make things feel edgier. similarly, i shot on video and hanheld camera to make things real and edgy. considering i had not, at this time, watched too much yank t.v., not a bad parody, i’d say and perhaps even foerunner to cop reality shows you now see two-a-penny. the mustachioed cop and the other were real cops and this for me was a real eye-opener, culturally—that cops in america could “act cops” just as well as actors could. i believe we were the first people after sly stallone to close down a freeway for filming purposes whey-hey!

The video for “Weight of the World” is likewise atrocious. As if the synthesizers weren’t bad enough, seeing Neil Young dancing through this mess in matching white suit and ducktails is simply hilarious. Both of these videos can be found online by doing a search for them on YouTube. Bad as they are, they also have an endearing quality to them as fairly classic eighties period pieces.

However, not everything about Landing on Water is overproduced drums and bad videos. One of the album’s few highlights is the very underrated “Hippie Dream.”

In this song, Neil takes direct aim at his friend and former CSN&Y bandmate David Crosby—who, at the time was deeply mired in a series of very public, self-destructive incidents linked to his severe addiction to crack cocaine. Young’s lyrics in the song about how the “Wooden Ships were a hippie dream” and how they were “capsized in excess, if you know what I mean” may have seemed harsh at the time. But behind the scenes, he was also reaching out to his friend to clean himself up, including a promise to re-form CSN&Y once he did.

Another bright spot during the Landing on Water period was Young’s introduction to Niko Bolas, who was a recording engineer on the album.

During the Landing on Water sessions, Bolas endeared himself to Young almost immediately. As a newcomer to Neil Young’s world, Bolas quickly gained respect as someone who could be counted on for direct, honest opinions that were unclouded by any type of starstruck idol worship. Working together as the “Volume Dealers” (named for Bolas’s tendency to shred speakers), Young and Bolas would go on to record several more albums together—a collaboration that would bear particularly significant rewards on Neil’s 1989 “comeback” album, Freedom.

That’s Why We Don’t Wanna Be Good

One of the most interesting—and encouraging, at least if you are a fan—things about Young’s next album (which proved to be his last for Geffen Records) is the fact that even though he had yet to completely shake the digital technology bug that bit him so hard during Landing on Water, he did seem to be interested in making actual rock music again.

Single release of “Weight of the World” from Landing on Water. This single was one of many from the mid-eighties period to be accompanied by an embarrassing video.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

Life is an album that was made against the backdrop of the impending end of Young’s often contentious relationship with Geffen Records. With the lawsuits settled, and both sides looking for a mutually acceptable way out, he closed out his commitment to the label with an album made up of live recordings of new material with Crazy Horse.

Not that there weren’t any problems.

The tour was by most accounts a total disaster. With advance billing as “the third best garage band in the world,” Young took Crazy Horse out on the road with a wild show that at least attempted to recapture some of the crazy vibe from Rust Never Sleeps.

The biggest problem by this point was that all of his musical schizophrenia the past several years had resulted in a general loss of good will between artist and audience. For a fan base whose patience had been severely tested in the eighties, many felt Young had simply used all of that up. All of the goofy props in the world (which included giant mechanized cockroaches for this tour) no longer mattered to an audience who had long since grown indifferent to Young’s ever-shifting genre experiments.

Complicating matters further was Young’s stubborn insistence on duplicating the studio sounds of Landing on Water onstage, using much of the same gadgetry he had employed in the recording studio.

As a result, Crazy Horse’s normally jam-happy rhythm section Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina were forced to adapt to a new environment of drum machines and the like. The newest member of Crazy Horse, guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, fared slightly better, which probably explains how he ended up sticking around to play in bands like the Bluenotes after Young sacked the rest of Crazy Horse for the umpteenth time.

Tempers during the tour also flared frequently. Some of these incidents are captured to quite hilarious effect on Muddy Track, Neil Young’s home movie document from the tour. Muddy Track has never been released, and few have seen it. But portions of the film—including some of those knock-down backstage fights and arguments—can be seen in Jim Jarmusch’s Crazy Horse documentary, Year of the Horse, made roughly a decade later.

Live from a Rusted Out Garage

A much better, but equally hard-to-find document of the 1986 tour, however, is Larry “L.A.” Johnson’s excellent Live from a Rusted Out Garage, which many fans maintain is the best Neil Young and Crazy Horse concert film ever made.

Originally made as a special for the premium cable network Showtime, Rusted Out Garage captures a rare night on the tour where both Young and the rest of the Horse have recaptured the spook. His guitar shredding on “Down by the River” and “Like a Hurricane” is a particular highlight, and there are also some very funny bits with the late comedian Sam Kinnison as the stereotypical pissed-off neighbor of the “third best garage band in the world.” Other highlights include the return of “Trans TV” intermission emcee Dan Clear (Newell Alexander).

It’s Such a Long Walk Home

Despite all of the problems with a tour that nearly everyone agreed was a piece of shit, somehow an album was still salvaged from the mess. Like Rust Never Sleeps before it, 1987’s Life was conceived as a live recording containing all new original material. But even though the album was made with what is arguably Neil Young’s greatest band, and with David Briggs back in the producer’s chair, the results were far less successful.

Like Landing on Water immediately before it, Life sinks under the weight of excessive studio tinkering and overproduction. It has rightfully become all but forgotten by fans. The album does, however, contain a handful of decent tracks that nonetheless stand out.

“Prisoners of Rock ’n’ Roll” is a raucous little number that takes dead aim at David Geffen in lyrics like “We never listen to the record company man, They try to change us and ruin our band,” not to mention the humorously honest observation “that’s why we don’t wanna be good.” “Inca Queen” is another of Young’s many Indian-themed songs, and a worthy, if less spectacular successor to songs like “Pocahontas” and “Cortez the Killer.” On “Last of a Dying Breed,” he continues to proudly wave the Farm Aid banner.

“Road of Plenty,” another great song from the period (which inexplicably didn’t make it onto the record), would eventually morph into “Eldorado” on 1989’s spectacular return to artistic form with the Freedom album.

When a Child Is Born to Live

On October 13, 1986, Young performed the first of what has become a mostly annual tradition of concerts benefiting a cause that hits very close to home. Although he missed the next year in 1987, he has performed at the annual Bridge School concerts at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, every single year since.

For that first year, Young was joined onstage by a reunited CSN&Y, as well as an all-star lineup including the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Don Henley, and Tom Petty. Over the years, the annual concerts (which have since been expanded into a two-day event) have brought together a staggering array of talent ranging from David Bowie, Patti Smith, Wilco, and Elvis Costello to repeat performers like Pearl Jam. Young has also performed at the shows with nearly all of his many bands, including CSN&Y, Crazy Horse, the Stray Gators, and in 2010, a reunited Buffalo Springfield.

Single release of “When Your Lonely Heart Breaks” from the Life album.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

Founded in part by Pegi Young (along with Jim Forderer and Dr. Marilyn Buzolich), the Bridge School grew at least in part out of Neil and Pegi’s own painful experiences finding a good therapy program for their son Ben. The Bridge School’s mission, simply put, is to help children afflicted with severe disabilities like Ben to achieve their fullest potential through a combination of education and technology. Pegi Young continues to sit on the Bridge School’s board of directors to this day.

We Don’t Wanna Be Watered Down, Takin’ Orders from Record Company Clowns

As 1987 drew to a close, the acrimonious situation between Neil Young and his record label Geffen also finally came to a merciful end. Although conventional wisdom over the years maintains that Young was simply dropped by the label once the legal problems were finally sorted out, the truth is that Elliot Roberts had been in negotiations with both Geffen and the head of Young’s former label Mo Ostin for a return to Reprise Records.

Single release of “Long Walk Home” from the Life album.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

As part of the deal, Young delivered Lucky Thirteen, a collection of his hits, misses, and outtakes from the troubled years with Geffen to the label for free. But not before threatening—possibly out of spite or as one final, grand “f-you” gesture—to give them what Sampedro called an album of “crickets farting” called Meadow Dusk. The album has been alternately described as either resembling a quieter version of Arc—Young’s album of nothing but feedback from the Ragged Glory tour—or as a recording of the ambient, atmospheric instrumental noodlings most often referred to as “New Age.”

Geffen eventually released the Lucky Thirteen album several years later in 1993, after Young’s star was on the rise once again following the comeback albums Freedom and Ragged Glory.

Meanwhile, the seeds of Young’s next musical direction were busy being planted on the 1987 Crazy Horse tour, where he had taken to performing short sets of blues material with Sampedro on organ and guitar tech Larry Cragg on sax. Young would eventually expand this concept to become a ten-piece band, including as many as six horn players, called the Bluenotes.

Although the resulting album represented yet another eighties Neil Young genre experiment, it was also one that drew a surprisingly positive response. No one could have predicted it at the time, but 1988’s This Note’s for You, while hardly a Harvest-level smash, was in fact about to become a moderate hit for Neil Young.

But not before first stirring up a fresh new shitstorm of controversy.