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Freedom and Redemption for Neil in the Nineties
Throughout much of the eighties, David Geffen—Neil Young’s boss at his record label for most of that decade—had lamented openly both in court and in public interviews about why his artist couldn’t bring himself to make an album of actual “Neil Young” music. In the fall of 1989, a little more than a year after leaving that label to return to Reprise, Young finally did it.
Freedom proved to be just the beginning, too. The well that so many felt had run dry for so long suddenly began to burst forth with one amazing Neil Young record after another. Indeed, his creative juices during the nineties seemed to overflow in such a way as to prove Geffen’s oft-stated claim that the artist was capable of making great records (that were also commercial hits) “at will” essentially true.
Viewing Young’s nineties output today, one has to wonder if Geffen could have actually been right all along.
The floodgate first opened by the release of Freedom continued right up through about 1996, before slowing down (at least a little) toward the end of the decade. Along with Freedom (as the album that started this creative tidal wave), subsequent albums Ragged Glory, Harvest Moon, Mirror Ball, and Sleeps with Angels make up what many feel is the artist’s strongest, most consistent string of great work since the mid- to late seventies period that produced the Ditch Trilogy and Rest Never Sleeps. Some fans argue that Young’s nineties work as a whole, album for album, is even stronger than that. And in terms of overall consistency, they may have a point.
After the commercial disappointments of the eighties, Freedom was a renewed artistic validation for Neil Young. Although he has cranked out more than a few more clunkers in the years and decades since, his place as one of the all-time creative giants of rock ’n’ roll—the same status so many had questioned during the so-called lost eighties—has to this day never again been seriously challenged.
In much the same way that Bob Dylan’s late nineties creative resurgence (beginning with 1997’s Time out of Mind) provided ample cause for a critical reassessment of his career, such has likewise been the case with Neil Young. Like Dylan, when it comes to putting out the occasional stiff these days, Young largely gets a pass.
It goes without saying that both of these great artists have, of course, earned it.
All the Children Were Killers
But even more than Dylan, Neil Young’s music has struck a particularly resonant chord with a younger generation of both his more modern artistic peers and with listeners and fans.
The modern folk-rock sound of Americana bands like Fleet Foxes, Wilco, and the Jayhawks owes more than a little to albums like Harvest, for example—a fact that Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris don’t bother denying.
If anything, both artists wear these comparisons as a badge of honor. For proof of this, look no further than Wilco’s letter-perfect cover of “Broken Arrow” from the 2010 concert honoring Young as MusiCares Person of the Year (the entire concert is available on the excellent 2011 A MusiCares Tribute to Neil Young DVD).
However, Young is just as often cited as a key influence on the alternative rock genre that rose to prominence in the nineties. “Alternative,” at least by its modern definition, grew out of the ashes of seventies and eighties punk, and hit its commercial peak with the early nineties grunge sound associated with Seattle bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam (both of whom have their own unique connections to Young).
In addition to the Seattle grunge acts, Young has also been acknowledged as a key influence by alternative bands ranging from Radiohead to Sonic Youth.
If one chooses to trace the genesis of this bridging of musical generations—an attitude that is unique in all of rock amongst younger musicians who otherwise tend to view artists from Young’s generation with both suspicion and mistrust—you could probably track its beginnings back to Rust Never Sleeps, with its lyrical references to Johnny Rotten, and to Young’s collaborations with Devo before that.
But 1989’s Freedom album was the moment of artistic vindication, where this unlikely marriage was first fully consummated.
Send Me a Songwriter Who’s Drifted Far from Home
On a first appraisal, Freedom seems almost like a sequel to Rust Never Sleeps in a lot of ways. The similarities between the two are certainly striking. Released almost exactly ten years apart, both albums were certainly perceived as a return to artistic form at the time (probably most dramatically in the case of 1989’s Freedom).
But there are other parallel lines that can be drawn between the two albums.
Like Rust, the album art for Freedom features the title scrawled on the cover in Neil Young’s own handwriting. The album is also bookended by acoustic and electric versions of a single song (“Rockin’ in the Free World”) that sets the tone for the entire record.
The fact that Freedom’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” is probably Neil Young’s most overtly anthemic song since Rust’s “Hey, Hey, My, My” only reinforces the similarities between the two.
Like their counterparts on Rust Never Sleeps, the louder songs on Freedom also serve to (once again) establish Young’s status as a pivotal link (and perhaps the only one) between the hippie psychedelia of the sixties and the soon-to-explode post-punk and alternative rock of the nineties.
It’s no accident that the tribute album The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young was also released the same year as Freedom in 1989. That album, which benefited the Bridge School, features covers of Young songs from a variety of alternative rockers including Sonic Youth, the Pixies, and Dinosaur Jr. (whose J. Mascis is a particularly devout student of the Neil Young school of guitar distortion).
There’s Colors on the Street
However, despite Freedom’s well-earned reputation in the years since its initial release as a weighty entry in the overall canon of Neil Young’s greatest work, not everyone was initially sold. Despite receiving near universal critical acclaim as a return to artistic form, the album was only a modest hit at the time, peaking at #35 on Billboard. Neil wouldn’t enjoy a return to Billboard’s top twenty again until the release of Harvest Moon—his long-awaited sequel to Harvest—in 1992.
Of Young’s three collaborations up to that point with co-producer Niko Bolas, there is little doubt that Freedom is the one where the “Volume Dealers” mostly got it right. The album has a warm, organic sound to it that stands in sharp contrast to the manufactured drum sounds heard on late eighties efforts like Landing on Water.
Complaints about the album most often center on Bolas decision (supported by both Frank “Poncho” Sampedro and Young himself at the time) to tone down some of the more abrasive guitar sounds heard on the leftover tracks from the Times Square/Eldorado sessions that eventually made the final cut on Freedom.
This is most often cited in the case of “Don’t Cry.” Listening to versions from both recordings back to back, however, the differences are largely miniscule and the wash of reverberated feedback between verses that gives the song much of its power is really barely touched.
There is also a school of thought out there amongst hardcore Neil Young fans that the abridged version of “60 to 0” (retitled “Crime in the City” for Freedom) barely holds a candle to the fifteen-minute-plus opus he routinely performed in concert during the Bluenotes period.
As great as those versions (mostly captured on bootlegs) were, it is the contention of this writer that the admittedly toned-down, jazzier version of the song heard on Freedom adds considerable mood to the seedier, inner-city ambience that the song’s lyrics about sleazy record producers and ten-year-old drug lords so vividly describe.
Single picture sleeve 45 of “Someday” from Neil Young’s 1989 “comeback album” Freedom.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
In other words, by tightening this cinematic lyrical opus down to a more concisely told story, the Volume Dealers largely got it right.
Got a Man of the People, Says Keep Hope Alive
Neil Young’s status as an icon amongst the alternative generation wouldn’t fully manifest itself until a few years after, once Seattle grunge bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam broke that scene wide open commercially with albums like Nevermind and Ten (although the movie had already been made some years before, 1991 was really “the year that punk broke”).
By that time, grunge bands from Seattle seemed to be appropriating everything about Young from their sound to their look (in truth, the flannel-and-ripped-jeans fashion of grunge probably owes as much to the weather in Seattle as it does to Young’s more originally grungy sense of a funkier anti-style).
Even so, bands like Pearl Jam made no secret of their fandom, first by including a cover of “Rockin’ in the Free World” in their own set lists, and later performing the song with Young himself at the 1993 MTV Music Awards. Eventually, Pearl Jam and Young would record an entire album together (1995’s Mirror Ball, as well as the accompanying Pearl Jam E.P. Merkin Ball) and even do a joint tour of Europe. It was also Pearl Jam vocalist Eddie Vedder who made the speech inducting Young into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (also in 1995).
“He’s taught us a lot as a band about dignity and commitment and playing in the moment and when I hear, you know, the speeches and inducting Janis Joplin and Frank Zappa, I get, uh, I’m just really glad he’s still here” Vedder said in his induction remarks. “And I think I’m gonna have to say that I don’t know if there’s been another artist that has been inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame to commemorate a career that is still as vital as he is today. Some of his best songs were on his last record.”
Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain also acknowledged his artistic debt to Neil Young—although he would do so most tragically in the suicide note he left behind after shooting himself in his Lake Washington home in 1994, quoting “Hey, Hey, My, My.”
Single release of Freedom’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” one of the greatest and most recognizable rock anthems of all time.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
It is widely believed that Young was first referred to as the “Godfather of Grunge” in a 1991 article for Tower Records Pulse! magazine (by writer Steve Martin). Ironically, there is also a very early song recorded by Nirvana from 1988 also called “Godfather of Grunge” (although there is no real indication the song is actually about Young).
Since its initial release in 1989, Freedom has been often cited as one of the ten most influential alternative rock albums of all time, with at least one publication (Pagewise) going so far as to name it number one and to call “Rockin’ in the Free World” the first true alternative rock song.
The definitive performance of that song remains the incendiary, off-the-rails version Young did with a makeshift band assembled at the last minute by Bolas consisting of Young, Poncho, drummer Steve Jordan, and bassist Charley Drayton on the September 30, 1989, broadcast of NBC’s Saturday Night Live.
It was the only recorded performance by YCS&P (short for Young, Charley, Steve, and Poncho), and would also be Niko Bolas’s last stand with Shakey for nearly two decades (until 2006’s Living with War).
With his best album in a decade now behind him, Young started the nineties a few months early. If nothing else, Freedom marked a clear and bold statement for the artist, that he was separating himself from the missteps that had marked so much of the previous decade. Neil Young was back.
His next move would continue this artistic revitalization, as he reconnected with two of the primary forces behind some of his greatest work. For Ragged Glory, Young would reunite with both producer David Briggs and his greatest band, the mighty Crazy Horse.