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Broken Arrow, Dead Man, and Year of the Horse
If there is such a thing as making peace with a man like David Briggs, Neil Young can rest easy, knowing that he did so just days before the producer behind many of his greatest records died. In the days leading up to his death at age 51 on November 26, 1995, after a battle with lung cancer, Briggs and Young reconciled following the latest of their many separations over the course of a long and often volatile personal and working relationship.
The latest schism came when Young left both Briggs and Crazy Horse in the dust yet again in order to follow his latest artistic whim. This time around, he ditched his musical comrades to make Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam, a record Briggs reportedly threw in the trash can when Young sent him a copy. Besides recording and then touring Europe (along with a few select American dates) with Pearl Jam, Young had also been busy with a number of other projects, including buying the Lionel Train Company and making a soundtrack album for Jim Jarmusch’s psychedelic western Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp.
Dead Man
Although many of his hardcore fans swear by it today, the music on Dead Man can be challenging for novice listeners even by Neil Young standards.
The album intersperses mostly short, abstract instrumental passages played by Young on electric guitar and the occasional pump organ (the 1:33 “organ solo” bears more than a slight resemblance to the intro of Mirror Ball’s “Peace and Love”), with actual dialog from the movie.
Many of these tracks are simply labeled as numbered guitar solos. Of these, the fourteen-minute “Guitar Solo No. 5” is probably the most interesting. For all of its New Age meanderings, Dead Man also has a quietly desolate feel that, taken in short doses anyway, can be quite beautiful (even if in a dreamy but unsettling way). In other respects, the solo electric guitar and accompanying feedback of Dead Man foreshadows Young’s much more focused work years later with producer Daniel Lanois on the 2010 album Le Noise.
Still, one has to wonder if this is what Neil Young actually had in mind for Meadow Dusk—the unreleased New Age album he once considered making for David Geffen as his beleaguered contractual relationship with the music mogul neared its merciful end in the late eighties.
Dead Man is also notable for being Young’s lone solo release on his own Vapor Records imprint. The independent record label launched by Young and Elliot Roberts later became noteworthy as home to a variety of eclectic artists ranging from Vic Chesnutt, Tegan and Sara, and Jonathan Richman, to longtime Neil Young confidants like his wife Pegi and Ben Keith.
I’m Still Living in the Dream We Had
If any good came out of the death of David Briggs, and from Neil Young’s final reconciliation with him, it was Young’s subsequent rededication to working with Crazy Horse. The initial result of this rebirth was a misguided attempt to put together a Crazy Horse “solo album”—produced by Young under the pseudonym of Phil Perspective. This ultimately proved to be a dead end.
However, a short series of mostly unannounced concerts with Crazy Horse played in small venues proved to be far more successful.
Playing under assumed names like the Echos, these summer 1995 “roadhouse” shows included gigs performed at nontraditional venues like their extended residency at the Old Princeton Landing. Those fans fortunate enough to hear about it were treated to three sets a night at the tiny venue for the bargain price of twenty bucks a head. The loose set lists leaned heavily on the obscure, including a healthy dose of material from the underrated 1975 album Zuma. In a touch that David Briggs would have no doubt appreciated, Poncho also brought along the producer’s spirit to the club gigs by keeping some of his ashes hidden inside the amps onstage.
In between these small, informal gigs, Neil Young and Crazy Horse also kept busy recording new material at his Broken Arrow Ranch. However, the album that emerged from the sessions, 1996’s Broken Arrow, was greeted with something of a collective yawn, both by critics and the record-buying public. Where its predecessor Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam was a top five chart hit, Broken Arrow didn’t even crack the top thirty, peaking at a dismal #31 on Billboard. The comeback streak Young had been riding since 1989’s Freedom appeared to be over.
Played a Game in the Music Arcade
Despite its flaws (which are many), Broken Arrow may very well be one of Neil Young’s most underrated records. Like many of his other albums that were dismissed at the time of their original release (the albums comprising the Ditch Trilogy and Trans come most immediately to mind here), this is one of those records that grows on you considerably over time.
The movie poster for Jim Jarmusch’s concert film Year of the Horse urges fans to “Crank it up.” The accompanying live album, one of several over the years featuring Neil Young and Crazy Horse, is not among their best.
Courtesy of Noah Fleisher/Heritage Auctions
Depending on who you talk to, Broken Arrow either offers a rare glimpse of Neil Young and Crazy Horse truly in their element by playing at their rawest, or it is just an uneven, sloppy mess. In truth, the album captures a little of both extremes, and probably falls somewhere in the middle. While Broken Arrow is far from being flat-out Everybody’s Rockin’ awful, there is also no getting around the fact that it represents a slight letdown following the streak of commercial and critical successes that Young had been consistently cranking out during the first half of the nineties.
Even so, Broken Arrow is certainly not without its moments.
In typical Crazy Horse fashion, four of the tracks—accounting for roughly half of the album—play out at seven minutes or longer, with varying degrees of success. With its overall loose and even sloppy feel, the album it most compares to would probably be Time Fades Away.
The opening “Big Time” sets the tone of Broken Arrow right out of the gate. This lyrical reaffirmation of purpose between Neil Young and his often abused bandmates plays out to the sort of twangy, guitar-driven country-rock groove that could fit right alongside something like Rust Never Sleep’s “Powderfinger.”
Although the playing here is unquestionably relaxed, on tracks like the meandering, nearly ten-minute jam “Loose Change,” Crazy Horse also sound much more like an actual band than just Neil Young’s sidemen. Even so, the seemingly endless E chord during the midsection of “Loose Change” might seem like a bit much to the uninitiated ear. And although “Slip Away” contains some truly amazing guitar passages structured around a melody so simple as to be somewhat misleading, the murky-sounding mix also manages the trick of completely burying the song’s equally gorgeous lyrics.
Speaking of simple, “Music Arcade” contains the starkest arrangement of the entire record—it’s basically just Neil and his acoustic guitar. It is also one of the album’s most powerful songs. Here again, the lyrics seem to be about Young’s reunion with Crazy Horse and the joy he experienced as he “kept winnin’ while the band played.” In another key metaphor, he compares this feeling to “a comet in the sky tonight, makes me feel like I’m alright” (interestingly, another of Broken Arrow’s songs, “Scattered,” also makes reference to “a comet painted on the sky”). By contrast, the stripped-down arrangement of the song—and especially Neil’s more whispered than fully sung vocal—recalls the desolate musical landscape last heard on 1974’s On the Beach.
Broken Arrow also contains the throwaway tracks “Changing Highways” and “This Town.” A live version of Jimmy Reed’s blues standard “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” taken from the Old Princeton Landing residency, likewise comes across as a particularly ill-conceived idea—the recording is so bad it’s barely listenable (although it does effectively capture the boozy, bar band ambience of Young’s brief “roadhouse tour” of 1995).
The now rare vinyl-only version of Broken Arrow also features the even rarer track “Interstate.”
Calling Me to Bring My Guitar Home
Somewhat surprisingly, and in a break from his usually clockwork prolific routine of putting out one new album every year, 1996’s Broken Arrow turned out to be Neil Young’s final solo album of studio recordings in the nineties.
In an even bigger surprise, he closed out the decade by reuniting with Crosby, Stills, and Nash for the 1999 album Looking Forward.
Although he continued to record off and on during this period, his next few years were primarily spent on the road. A series of tours with Crazy Horse included jaunts across Europe, as well as shows in Canada and back home in the States as part of the traveling hippie fest H.O.R.D.E., which Crazy Horse co-headlined with second-generation jam bands Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Toad the Wet Sprocket, and Squirrel Nut Zippers.
Returning the Dead Man soundtrack favor, director Jim Jarmusch documented a number of Crazy Horse shows from this period on film, and eventually released them as the 1997 concert rockumentary Year of the Horse. The resulting movie is mostly a mixed bag combining 1996–97-era concert footage of Neil and Crazy Horse, backstage interviews, and even some of the leftovers from the aborted late eighties Muddy Track film. It does, however, contain the now classic scene of Young responding to a heckler from the audience yelling “they all sound the same” with the deadpan line “it’s all the same song.”
Neil Young performs live in Sedona, Arizona, during a benefit show with Jackson Browne.
Photo by Mary Andrews
The live soundtrack album accompanying the film is not one of his stronger concert recordings, although it is significant for having one of the more interesting set lists on a live Neil Young album. Rarities like “When Your Lonely Heart Breaks” and an even rarer full-band version of “Pocahontas” from the acoustic side of Rust Never Sleeps all make appearances here, as does the infrequently performed “Danger Bird” from Zuma.