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Falling Off the Face of the Earth

Prairie Wind and Heart of Gold

The long shadow of death and mortality is something that has closely followed Neil Young throughout the whole of his career—from the way the departed souls of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry permeate his dark masterpiece Tonight’s the Night, to how Kurt Cobain’s spirit—and his quoting of “My, My, Hey, Hey” in the suicide note he left behind—haunts 1994’s Sleeps with Angels.

But never did the ominous reach of the Grim Reaper strike as close to home as it did in 2005. Shortly after losing his father, Canadian author and journalist Scott Young, to Alzheimer’s disease that year, Young had his own close encounter with death.

One day after inducting his friend Chrissie Hynde and her band the Pretenders into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Young was startled to find an image of what appeared to be broken glass in the mirror, clouding his field of vision while he was shaving. Except, in this case, the glass wasn’t broken at all, nor did the image vanish once he looked away from it. A subsequent trip to the doctor revealed that the optic anomaly was the result of a brain aneurysm that, according to his physician, he “had probably had for a hundred years.”

Even so, corrective brain surgery would prove to be necessary. So Young made an appointment to have the non-invasive neuroradiological procedure done at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

In the days between the initial diagnosis and the procedure needed to correct it, Young carried on as though it were business as usual. In fact, the very next day he flew out to Nashville for work on his next album, initially projected as the latest of his folk-pop successors to Harvest, with the by now usual cast of supporting players like Ben Keith and Spooner Oldham. Prairie Wind eventually proved to be much more.

In an interview with writer Richard Bienstock conducted shortly after one of the shows premiering this album at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium (beautifully documented in Jonathan Demme’s Heart of Gold film), Young explained his own seemingly casual attitude toward this potentially life-threatening situation by saying that he went to the recording studio because that was where he felt the safest. A few days later, he collapsed on a New York street due to complications from his brain surgery (there was bleeding from the femoral artery). Although this setback temporarily sidelined him, he was soon back performing, most notably at Bob Geldof’s worldwide Live 8 concert telecast.

Whether or not his 2005 brush with fate informs the songs of the Prairie Wind album has been a subject of considerable debate in the years since. Young himself has been typically coy when asked about it, saying that although the death of his father and his own recent health scare were certainly on his mind at the time, he had no specific strategy going into Prairie Wind.

But there is no denying that Prairie Wind stands out as perhaps the most deeply introspective, personal-sounding album that Young has ever made—at least up until 2010’s Le Noise.

On songs like “Falling Off the Face of the Earth” and “When God Made Me,” the normally guarded Young confronts the issues of his own faith and personal mortality in ways only offered up in glimpses over the entirety of his previously recorded work. Other songs like the starkly autobiographical “Far from Home” find him reminiscing back to his earliest childhood days in Canada. In between such weighty subjects, he also provides some much-needed levity with lighter tributes to his influences like Elvis (“He Was the King”) and Hank Williams (“This Old Guitar”).

Original Reprise Records promotional ad for Prairie Wind touting it as “the album of the year.”

Courtesy of Robert Rodriguez

The result is one of the finest of all Young’s latter-day albums, and certainly one of his more heartfelt.

I Want to Live, I Want to Give

For the official promotional rollout of Prairie Wind, Young chose to play a special series of concerts at Nashville’s grandest old building, the historic Ryman Auditorium.

The shows were filmed by his longtime confidant and legendary director Jonathan Demme, and released in 2006 as Heart of Gold. It is arguably the best of Neil Young’s many official concert films, and certainly the warmest and the most sublime.

The film is beautifully shot, and finds the musicians accompanying Young—who number as many as forty for some of the songs—bathed in warm, pastel shades set against the panoramic images of heartland prairies adorning a series of gorgeous backdrops on the stage. Perhaps due to the personal nature of the songs performed and the circumstances surrounding them, or because of the historical significance of the venue, Heart of Gold has an uncommonly warm and even reverent sense about it. Of all the Neil Young concert documents over the years, this one just feels the most special.

Neil Young’s guitars photographed during a 2007 performance at the Keller Auditorium in Portland, Oregon.

Photo by Anthony Stack

The visual warmth of this film is equally matched by the performances, with songs mostly drawn from Prairie Wind and Harvest. Young comes off as particularly relaxed and unusually engaged with his audience considering his recent near meeting with his maker (who probably would get a kick out of the Prairie Wind song “When God Made Me”). The songs are accompanied by several anecdotal stories, including the tale of how Young came to acquire Hank Williams’s guitar, and a touching moment where he reveals the pride of a father witnessing the blossoming of his daughter into a fully grown woman.

Heart of Gold also proved to be the first of a projected trilogy of Demme/Young concert film collaborations including the subsequent Neil Young Trunk Show (filmed in 2007 on the Chrome Dreams II tour and released theatrically in 2010) and Neil Young Journeys, which documents his return to Massey Hall during the Twisted Road tour.

It’s a Dream, Only a Dream, and It’s Fading Now

In purely musical terms, if there is a true standout player on Prairie Wind—an album characterized by stellar musicianship on the part of everyone involved from the subtle keyboard flourishes of Spooner Oldham to the oddly haunting backing vocals of Emmylou Harris—it is probably Ben Keith. Not coincidentally, Keith also shares a credit with Young as co-producer of the album.

Though his parts on dobro and pedal steel are often understated (wherein lies much of their beauty), Keith’s accents on songs like “The Painter” often add just the right amount of color to Young’s heavier-sounding guitar (even when playing acoustically, he tends to hammer the crap out of the fretboard).

Fortunately, the magic of Ben Keith’s playing can be seen in a way never before experienced on a Neil Young record with the DVD accompanying Prairie Wind (something that Young would continue to utilize on many of his subsequent recordings). Using multiple split screens, this rather astonishing DVD reveals every layer of the songs, by drawing focus to each of the players’ individual parts—whether it be Ben Keith’s lonesome pedal steel on “The Painter” or his funky dobro slide on the bluesy, Elvis-influenced stomp of “He Was the King.”

Another of the things revealed on this DVD is how multitextured these songs are, despite the initial, quite deceptive illusion presented on the audio CD. In contrast to Young’s studio reputation as a one-take, spur-of-the-moment musician, the full complement of strings, horns, and backing voices on Prairie Wind reveals quite another story—especially when the DVD breaks each section down by its individual parts.

Stylistically, the songs on Prairie Wind are also a lot more varied than their surface appearance suggests, ranging from the prayerful gospel of “When God Made Me” (where the DVD again reveals the thought that went into its backing choir vocals) to the flat-out Cajun funk of “Far from Home.”

This also reveals its fair share of warts, however. For example, as beautifully reverent as something like “Falling Off the Face of the Earth” sounds—with its understated arrangement and haunting background choir vocals—the words read with the trite sentiments of a Hallmark Greeting card. Fortunately in this case, the song is so damn pretty, the moon-and-June nature of the lyrics can be overlooked.

On Prairie Wind’s DVD, the direction is credited to Young’s cinematic alter ego Bernard Shakey. But it is the simple yet effective camera work of Larry “L.A.” Johnson that brings home just how deceptively intricate a record this is. It is probably Johnson’s best work as Neil Young’s semiofficial videographer.