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The Bluenotes, American Dream, Ten Men Working, and the Road Back Home
Ask any hardcore Neil-phyte what they most remember about the Bluenotes period, and they are likely to talk your ear off about the amazing live shows produced by Young’s infamously short-lived but audacious ten-piece blues band with the six-piece horn section.
The Bluenotes never released an official live album (although there was briefly talk of one, with This Shit Don’t Sell being among the funnier working titles reportedly considered). But live audience recordings from the period are among the most coveted bootleg tapes still traded today amongst hardcore fans.
While the lone studio album from Neil Young and the Bluenotes, 1988’s This Note’s for You, represented a minor commercial comeback (it peaked at #61 on Billboard, largely on the strength of the title track and its clever, controversy-generating video produced by Julien Temple), it also still suffered from the same tinny-sounding production that had plagued Young’s final albums with Geffen. The horns on the album have a particularly shrill sound, as it seems the Volume Dealers (Young and his newest running buddy, co-producer Niko Bolas) hadn’t quite yet exorcised the digital bug from their systems.
But by most accounts, the live shows were barn burners.
By this time, the Bluenotes had renamed themselves Ten Men Working (after a song from the This Note’s for You album), following a legal injunction by R&B singer Harold Melvin (of certain fame with his own Bluenotes) over the name.
When Young wasn’t playing his latest character creation onstage—bluesman Shakey Deal—he was otherwise busy melting faces with Old Black on new songs that could extend to twenty minutes and beyond like “Ordinary People” and “60 to 0” in concert.
What made both songs stand out as something new and noteworthy wasn’t so much their length as their break in format from previous Neil Young opuses like “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand.”
Lengthy songs were certainly nothing new to his fans, especially in concert.
But where previously long songs like “Cortez” and “Cowgirl” served as showcases for electrifying guitar solos sandwiched in between short verses, on these new songs the reverse was true. The instrumental breaks were exactly that—short interludes in between new songs with as many as ten or more verses.
On the instrumental portions of “Ordinary People,” Young’s guitar shredding was augmented by the surprisingly tight Bluenotes horn section. But it was the lyrics—signaling a move away from the Republican politics Young had so curiously identified himself with since the Old Ways period, and a reacquired kinship with working-class Joes—that stood out as something new, including lines about a man with a “big fat cigar” who was “ripping off the people.”
“60 to 0,” on the other hand, could change radically from night to night.
On one night, this new song could be an acoustic piece with as many as eleven verses, detailing a nightmare world of crooked cops and ten-year-old drug lords. On another, it became a full on electric assault, backed only by the new rhythm section of bassist Rick “the Bass Player” Rosas and drummer Chad Cromwell (both of whom had been recruited from Joe Walsh’s band after Young had sacked Crazy Horse stalwarts Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot yet again). It is these early electric versions of the song that are most coveted by diehard fans, as Young’s guitar soars to new heights over a rhythm section that is as razor sharp as Crazy Horse could be loose and funky.
Rosas and Cromwell would soon go on to become a cornerstone of Neil Young’s full-on career resurgence a few months later, with some of his loudest music in over a decade. Among those recordings would be a curiously quieter version of “60 to 0” (retitled “Crime in the City” for the Freedom album).
“Ordinary People” (complete with the obligatory horns), on the other hand, wouldn’t show up on an officially released Neil Young album until Chrome Dreams II some twenty years later.
And the Dollar’s What It’s All About, Hard-Workin’ People
This Note’s for You, Young’s lone 1988 album with the Bluenotes, is not exactly one of his more remarkable works. If anything, his return to Reprise Records—home of his greatest triumphs in the seventies—probably seemed more like an extension of his genre-shifting, artistic years in the wilderness with Geffen than anything else.
But the album’s title track was and is, without a doubt, a remarkable song.
At a time when rock-’n’-roll artists from Eric Clapton to the Rolling Stones to Michael Jackson were selling their artistic souls out wholesale to the highest corporate bidder, Young’s initially tongue-in-cheek song took direct aim at all of them and ended up ruffling more than a few feathers in the process.
When MTV—then a crucial cog in the hit-making machinery of the record business, prior to their current incarnation as the home of reality shows like Jersey Shore—refused to air the video, Young instantly regained all of the outlaw cred he had lost during his disastrous years with Geffen.
“This Note’s for You,” with its references to heavily played MTV artists like Clapton and Jackson hawking Michelob beer and Pepsi cola, and its rallying cry of “sponsored by nobody,” became an instant cause célèbre. Young suddenly had more publicity than all of the maximum MTV and radio rotation in the world could ever hope to buy.
Neil Young and Rick Rosas onstage in 1985. Rosas became a mainstay of Neil Young bands like the Restless on bass during this period, beginning an association that continues to the present day.
Photo by Kim Reed
The standard line of MTV’s dreaded standards and practices division—that they couldn’t air the video due to its references to commercial products—smacked of the worst type of corporate bullshit, and everybody knew it. This was especially true given the fact that both the artist and the label had offered to edit the video in order to meet said standards and practices.
By the time the video channel was forced into issuing what amounted to a nationally televised apology, Young—an artist long since deemed as irrelevant and over the hill—was doing something he hadn’t done in several years. He was actually selling records.
The end result, and the ultimate irony in all of this, was when “This Note’s for You” was finally named as video of the year at MTV’s Video Music Awards that year. Not surprisingly, the audio mysteriously cut out during Neil Young’s televised acceptance remarks. Young’s videos have rarely been played on the channel since.
Midnight, That Old Clock Keeps Ticking
Meanwhile, Young fulfilled a promise to his old friend David Crosby by participating in a CSN&Y reunion album, once Crosby had finally kicked the drug habit that very nearly killed him.
To say the resulting American Dream album—nearly twenty years in the making as it was, and despite the inclusion of no less than three new Neil Young songs including the title track, “This Old House,” and “Name of Love”—failed to live up to expectations would to be put it politely. Although the return of the supergroup once deemed the “American Beatles” did make it to a respectable #16 on the Billboard charts, it sank just as quickly.
For his own part, Crosby, though finally clean and sober, was still in bad shape physically. Stephen Stills, who had really been the driving force behind CSN, was also mired in his own substance abuse issues.
But Young also brought his own creative issues to the table, by insisting on Niko Bolas to oversee the engineering of the much-ballyhooed reunion album. The spark between the four famously harmonizing voices was largely gone anyway, but the flat-sounding digital production that still had both Young and Bolas under its spell didn’t help matters at all.
Although CSN&Y would eventually go on to several successful reunion tours, they would never make a decent record together again, despite a number of attempts. American Dream remains a particularly embarrassing blemish on the legacy of both CSN&Y and Neil Young.
However, and completely unbeknownst to anyone involved, Young was about to quite unexpectedly make some of the most amazing, ferocious music of his entire career.