NEIL YOUNG
Rolling Stone
The filament tethering Neil Young to the actual world is delicate. One is aware almost on meeting him that nobody else appears to be quite as real to him as he is to himself, and that behind his seerlike eyes is a capacious landscape that is just as absorbing as the one that he sees in front of him. He doesn't seem so much defended or reserved as singularly constituted, one of the small tribe of artists for whom responsiveness is a creed. He receives songs as much as he writes them. The exchange is a mystical one, and mysticism, as G.K. Chesterton somewhere remarks, keeps people and cultures sane. Logic, too emphatically embraced, is what undoes the mind.
In the past few months, Young has released a CD of new songs, Prairie Wind, and with Jonathan Demme has made a movie, Heart of Gold, that will be released on February 10th. The movie features Young performing most of the CD's songs. Both projects record the deeply felt testimony of a maverick mind that has been at work for forty years. The songs' arrangements are restrained and unembellished; not a note is played for show. The themes are those of mature life, both backward-looking and hopeful, the expression of a sensibility determined to preserve its integrity. They are suffused with mortality and with ardent feelings for his wife and family and his friends. In the movie, he talks disarmingly about his love for his daughter, a college student, and because his manner is typically so subdued, even remote, the profound sentiments have the quality of being nearly a revelation.
It is well known that Young's circumstances while writing and recording Prairie Wind were dire. Last spring he had an episode of blurred vision, which turned out to be the result of a migraine. In performing tests to arrive at the diagnosis, however, doctors in New York discovered that he also had a cerebral aneurysm. It had likely been in place for years, but it might fail at any time. Surgery was scheduled to take place in four days. The procedure was not notably ambitious, but any invasion of the brain includes the possibility that a person might not wake up as who he was before he went under the knife. Young and his wife, Pegi, a singer, flew from New York to Nashville and stayed at the Hermitage, a hotel Young likes especially. On an old guitar that had belonged to Hank Williams, he began writing songs and recording them with musicians he had played with for years. He recorded three or four songs a day, then came back to the hotel and wrote three or four more. They appear on the record in the order in which they were written. Young says that he has never been very good at determining the sequence of songs on a record -- "too impatient," he says. He finished all but one song, "When God Made Me," a hymn, then had the operation. He was to play at a Canadian awards show in Winnipeg, where he was partly raised. Several weeks before the show, he was walking with a friend when blood appeared on his pants leg. He began to bleed heavily from an incision made in his leg to remove a blood vessel used to patch the aneurysm. When he came to, he was staring into a bright white light. He was in an ambulance, but for a moment he thought he might have gone to glory. Needing more time to heal meant missing the awards show, and canceling meant having to explain his absence. Otherwise, he wouldn't have let anyone know.
Young's father, Scott, a sportswriter famous in Canada, died last year, in his eighties, after a period of dementia. As a child, Young would watch his father writing. On those occasions when he pointed out to his father that he appeared to be doing nothing, his father would say, "That's when I get my best ideas." Waiting for an idea is a hallmark of Young's method. His father's death was not unexpected, but it haunted Young, especially in light of his own mortality. He felt blessed to have escaped any lasting consequences and fortunate to have discovered his problem by means of an MRI and not as the result of having a stroke in a backstage hallway of a stadium.
Young lives in Northern California, south of San Francisco, on property he calls the Broken Arrow Ranch. On the Rand McNally Road Atlas, a small fir tree appears more or less where the ranch is. He bought the place thirty-five years ago. Before moving to it, he lived in Los Angeles, in Topanga Canyon. Leaving L.A., he drove through a brush fire. "The freeway was in the middle of it," he told me. "Both sides of the road were in flames. It was very dramatic. I was driving out of town, and the place was burning up."
Young said this a few weeks ago, in Northern California, while we were riding in an old Plymouth he owns and more or less widely circling the borders of the ranch. He has a fleet of cars from the era of his childhood -- he is sixty. His fascination with cars has its genesis in an early misfortune. When he was six, he went swimming with his father in the Pigeon River and woke that night with his shoulder hurting. Before the morning was through, he was so stiff that his father described him as moving like "a mechanical man." In Shakey, Young's biography, written by Jimmy McDonough, there is a description of his being taken to the hospital and how the polio he'd contracted in the river nearly killed him. When his parents came to take him home, he said, "I didn't die, did I?" The nurses sang "Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes" to him, and he wept. He had lost so much weight, his mother told McDonough, that "he looked like hell on the highway. Skin and bones." He had been a fat baby, as wide as he was tall, she said. When she played "Boogie-Woogie," by Pinetop Smith, he would stand up in his playpen and hold on to the rails and dance. A family friend described him as "a sullen, fat, dark-eyed little baby. Not a happy baby, not a smiler, not a joiner." Young has an older brother, Bob, who is a former club golf pro in Florida. Their parents, absorbed with the difficulties of a failing marriage, sometimes overlooked them, so Neil "became a little watcher," the friend said. He liked turtles and fishing. He liked to draw trains, and he could do so with either hand. His mother predicted that he would become an architect or a musician. His father used to take him and his brother for rides in the car and sing "Bury Me on the Lone Prairie." A relative said he was "a droll little boy."
After the polio, he remained permanently skinny. He walked awkwardly. ("I had to learn to walk again," he said in the car. "That was interesting.") Having set his mind on something, his mother said, he couldn't be deterred. He insisted on walking the few blocks to the doctor's office by himself. He would sometimes fall on the way, and people would come out of their houses and help him.
His body seemed too frail for winter clothes, so his parents took him to Florida. He loved the cars in America. The ones in Canada were older and tended not to have as many accessories. When the family returned to Canada, they lived in the country outside Toronto, and Young raised chickens and had a paper route. "When I finish school I plan to go to Ontario Agricultural College and perhaps learn to be a scientific farmer," he wrote in a school essay. He was ten when he began listening to rock & roll. By himself in the house, he would dance to his parents' records and pretend that he was winning a contest. The first instrument anyone remembers him playing was a plastic ukulele from his Christmas stocking. His father's family included farmers who were musicians. When rain kept them from the fields, they sat in the living room and played. He had three girl cousins who sang harmony parts, a scene he describes in "Far From Home," on Prairie Wind.
Young was thirteen when his parents separated. His brother went with his father, and Young lived with his mother. One of Young's friends of the period recalls that Young was much affected by the collapse of the household and that when he talked about it, which was often, his face would flush. His mother moved him to Winnipeg, on the prairie. If he could manage on the way there in the car not to bite his nails for an hour, she let him play the guitar.
The first song he wrote was called "No." It had a chorus that went, "No, no, no." A friend from this period told McDonough, "Looking back at it, I think he was alone more than he should have been."
In 1962, Young was a member of a band called the Squires, which another member said was the third-best band in the city. The first single he released was on V Records, a polka label. "At that point I was different," he said while we drove. "I wasn't into sports. I wasn't an exceptionally good student -- I didn't have the focus for it. I was a musician. I was more concerned with playing shows on the weekends, and I missed a lot of the social aspects growing up. Instead of thinking about who was I going to pick up at the dance, who was I going to be with or what was I going to do, I was thinking about playing. That whole part of me was put on the back burner until my twenties. I was late that way. I think I moved at a slower rate. In my own head, a lot of times, I'm still twenty. When I dream, I'm very young. I feel that way and I see things that way -- it's my outlook in the dream. I don't see things as a mature person. I feel like everybody's doing this; the human condition is not really understood on the surface; the waking, walking person and the sleeping person are completely different. That's why we need sleep; that's how the soul develops, in sleep."
In his twenties, from an instinct for self-preservation, Young avoided psychedelic drugs. "I was too scared, because my thoughts were already there," he said in the car. "People were talking about what happens to them when they're tripping, and I'd think, 'That's what happens to me all the time.' I was warned by neurologists, 'Don't do these drugs -- you won't be able to come back.' I was already having enough trouble." As a boy, he had mild seizures that became severe as he got older. Playing with Buffalo Springfield, he would often have a seizure that would begin during the last song of the night and have just enough time to escape the stage before it became pronounced. McDonough writes that while in the grip of them, Young would see other people, as if in another world. They would ask how he was and where he had been, and they would call him by a different name. His identity would return to him slowly -- it was as if he were putting himself back together a piece at a time.
Also from Rolling Stone:
with comments by me
Part of being a Neil Young fan is trolling through his bad albums in search of buried treasures. So here's the ultimate Neil Young mix CD -- seventy-eight minutes of stellar songs on not-so-stellar albums. Remember: It's better to burn CDs than fade away.
1. "I'm the Ocean"
Mirror Ball, 1995
A heavy-stomping nightmare about Nineties psychosis from a session with Pearl Jam, with Young ranting about Kurt Cobain, O.J. Simpson and Bill Clinton. One of his strongest and scariest songs ever. I agree with this selection. I remember vividly buying this record in Leicester Square, London England, while I was travelling through Europe in 1995. I also remember beginning to love this song in particular while visiting the Cinque Terre in Italy.
2. "Razor Love"
Silver and Gold, 2000
This much-beloved ballad has been bootlegged since the mid-Eighties. So, naturally, when Young decided to make it available, he buried it at the end of a twee country-rock album. This is why fans treasure bootlegs. One of my all-time favourites, a song about love maturing...
3. "Big Time"
Broken Arrow, 1996
A lost classic from an album everybody hated at the time: Crazy Horse thuds away, as Young sings a sad, lazy yarn about his lost youth in "the land of suntan lotion." I bought this CD at the Winnipeg Folk festival in 1996. I listened to it for a month, maybe, and don't think I have again. My memories of this song are of a big rumbling messy rock song. Certainly it's not of the calibre of the first two.
4. "Captain Kennedy"
Hawks and Doves, 1980
After the blood and thunder of Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust came a throwaway folk record, but among the gems was this acoustic ditty about a young terrorist who sings, "I hope that I can kill good." My introduction to this song was the version by Nikki Sudden and the French Revolution on a Neil Young tribute record. I loved the melody instantly. Later, after buying a record player at A&B Sound, and plastering it with Whistler Mountain and Grateful Dead stickers, I bought the Hawks and Doves LP. I always loved the first side, with Little Wing, Old Homestead, etc. This song seems like the more cynical older brother of Cortez the Killer.
5. "Will to Love"
American Stars 'n Bars, 1977
Young uses his boombox to overdub his voice into a happy glee club, chirping about how he's a salmon swimming upstream in search of love. Another of my all-time favourites. You can hear the crackling of the fireplace in the background of his Topanga Ranch. I always love Neil's free-flowing slower pieces; this is a perfect example of that style: "If we meet along the way, Please sway beside me, let us sway together, Our tails together, and our fins and mind, We'll leave this water, and let our scales shine, In the sun above, and the sky below, So all the water, and earth will know."
6. "Slowpoke"
Looking Forward, 1999
How bad was this CSNY reunion album? Personally I would replace this one with Feel Your Love from American Dream. I remember listening to that one a lot in undergrad.
7. "Soldier"
Journey Through the Past, 1972
This harrowing piano lament is stuck on the butt-ugly soundtrack to a self-directed movie nobody ever saw. He later put it on Decade, but the damage was done. Another good, short slow song.
8. "Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze"
Re-ac-tor, 1981
The album was just a bunch of synthed-up, mechanical feedback jams, but this record-company complaint stands out as first-rate crackpot fury. Shots was way better than this song.
9. "Mideast Vacation"
Life, 1987
If Young sounds like he's stuck in Eighties overproduction hell, that's because he is. But at least he has Crazy Horse to keep him company, and they blow off steam in a nutty bad-politics travelogue. This album, except maybe Inca Queen, sucks from beginning to end.
10. "Kinda Fonda Wanda"
Everybody's Rockin', 1983
Young in a string tie and pompadour, imitating the Stray Cats with a band called the Shocking Pinks? You have to hear "Kinda Fonda Wanda" to believe it really happened. Wonderin' had the video but this song had the lines: Did the bop with Miss Ann, The swim with Mary Ann, The stroll with Betty Lou, Screwed runaround Sue, But she wasn't as good as Wanda, No, she'll never be as good as Wanda. I'm kinda fonda Wanda 'cause Wanda always wannda, wannda, wannda."
11. "Goin' Home"
Are You Passionate?, 2002
One Crazy Horse song pops up in the middle of this Sixties R&B tribute and blows the rest of the record away. I really didn't like this record.
12. "Slip Away"
Year of the Horse, 1997
Just another live album -- he's got six of them -- until you hit this track: the Horse in total slow-motion clod mode, with a strange grandeur staggering out of the guitar fuzz. Ralph Molina drums like an old horse put out to pasture. Another example of this, though I enjoyed the concert from this tour.
13. "Out of My Mind"
Buffalo Springfield, 1967
Not nearly as famous as "Mr. Soul" and "Expecting to Fly." Just so beautiful it hurts. My friend Tim Dolden introduced this to me via vinyl, and I remember listening to this and Stills' Long Time Gone in his sunny living room in Horseshoe Bay.
14. "Stringman"
Unplugged, 1993
Unplugged sets are just a way for rock stars to resell some oldies, right? Wrong, if you're Neil Young: It's where you unveil one of your most haunting piano ballads, dating back to 1976 but never released until now. Not that anybody noticed. A typical Neil Young mind-fuck and the perfect place to end this journey through his past. Not a favourite, but a nice treat on that CD at the time.
I would also consider: Albuquerque, Crime in the City, Thrasher, Don't Be Denied, Change Your Mind...
THE STROKES: FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF EARTH
Rolling Stone
The Strokes making a third album? That wasn't supposed to happen. After all the tricks they stole from their 1970s New York rock heroes, they seemed destined to blaze out in a storm of booze and leather and Danish strippers, preferably in a five-room suite at the Chelsea Hotel, with a neon sign out the window flickering the words too much too soon. But look at them now. Julian Casablancas got married, reportedly quit drinking, and now he's writing songs about God and fate and the meaning of the universe. They go for a heavier, beefier, louder sound, recording with L.A. studio-rock pro David Kahne, the guy who produced the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian." There are songs on this album with titles like "Vision of Division" and "Electricityscape." "Don't be a coconut/God is trying to talk to you" -- this is the Strokes? Hard to explain, dude.
Fortunately, maturity hasn't slowed the Strokes down. It hasn't even matured them all that much -- they're just learning some new tricks to go with the adolescent faster-louder-more-now stomp of Is This It and Room On Fire. They earned a place in the heart of jaded rock & roll trollops with Is This It, the 2001 debut that shocked the world with the revelation that music should be crass and speedy and flashy and slutty. They tightened the trousers of a whole generation -- even the Swedish guys who wrote Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" admit they were just trying to copy the Strokes. But some fans thought Room On Fire was too exactly like the first album -- OK, everybody thought that, even the band. Song for song, it was almost as excellent, and some of us secretly like it even more, but you can't blame them for trying new moves.
First Impressions of Earth is different; it's ambitious, messy, nearly as long as the first two records combined. Guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. get to show off, while drummer Fab Moretti provides the forward momentum that makes the Strokes a killer groove band. They've never kicked harder than "Juicebox," which turns the old "Peter Gunn" riff into a surf-metal snarl, or "Heart in a Cage," which jumps like Iggy Pop in "The Passenger." But the music is full of beard-stroking classic-rock flourishes. "Razorblade" has twin-guitar leads straight from Thin Lizzy, and in "Juicebox," Nikolai Fraiture demonstrates that he can do a frighteningly accurate simulacrum of Yes bassist Chris Squire circa Fragile, though why anybody would want to demonstrate this remains a mystery.
Casablancas' voice is still a panty peeler, especially in "Razorblade," where he wails a melody nicked from Barry Manilow and makes it sound soulful. He pouts and moans in fine mod form, as if he realizes his lyrics need all the help they can get. The guy has an uncanny ear for the did-he-say-that? moment, when a dumb bar-stool monologue veers into a brilliant little haiku. He achieves that effect with lines like "I love you more than being seventeen." But man, if you thought he was ridiculous when he was chasing girls, wait till you hear him contemplate mortality in "Ize of the World," as in "modernize," "terrorize," "desensitize," etc. It's like he's challenging Interpol to a poetry slam.
Like most rock bands, the Strokes are better at rocking than not rocking, so ravers like "You Only Live Once" beat failed experiments like the synth-strings ballad "Ask Me Anything" or the Pogues-ish waltz "15 Minutes." Really, this could be the excessive, erratic second album Room On Fire wasn't; if you switched the order of the two albums, Room On Fire would undoubtedly get hailed as their return to form. But as maturity moves go, First Impressions proves what the Strokes set out to prove: They're a serious band of dedicated craftsmen, a band that is here to stay. It also proves they could steal your girlfriend without even trying. But you already knew that.
Rolling Stone
The filament tethering Neil Young to the actual world is delicate. One is aware almost on meeting him that nobody else appears to be quite as real to him as he is to himself, and that behind his seerlike eyes is a capacious landscape that is just as absorbing as the one that he sees in front of him. He doesn't seem so much defended or reserved as singularly constituted, one of the small tribe of artists for whom responsiveness is a creed. He receives songs as much as he writes them. The exchange is a mystical one, and mysticism, as G.K. Chesterton somewhere remarks, keeps people and cultures sane. Logic, too emphatically embraced, is what undoes the mind.
In the past few months, Young has released a CD of new songs, Prairie Wind, and with Jonathan Demme has made a movie, Heart of Gold, that will be released on February 10th. The movie features Young performing most of the CD's songs. Both projects record the deeply felt testimony of a maverick mind that has been at work for forty years. The songs' arrangements are restrained and unembellished; not a note is played for show. The themes are those of mature life, both backward-looking and hopeful, the expression of a sensibility determined to preserve its integrity. They are suffused with mortality and with ardent feelings for his wife and family and his friends. In the movie, he talks disarmingly about his love for his daughter, a college student, and because his manner is typically so subdued, even remote, the profound sentiments have the quality of being nearly a revelation.
It is well known that Young's circumstances while writing and recording Prairie Wind were dire. Last spring he had an episode of blurred vision, which turned out to be the result of a migraine. In performing tests to arrive at the diagnosis, however, doctors in New York discovered that he also had a cerebral aneurysm. It had likely been in place for years, but it might fail at any time. Surgery was scheduled to take place in four days. The procedure was not notably ambitious, but any invasion of the brain includes the possibility that a person might not wake up as who he was before he went under the knife. Young and his wife, Pegi, a singer, flew from New York to Nashville and stayed at the Hermitage, a hotel Young likes especially. On an old guitar that had belonged to Hank Williams, he began writing songs and recording them with musicians he had played with for years. He recorded three or four songs a day, then came back to the hotel and wrote three or four more. They appear on the record in the order in which they were written. Young says that he has never been very good at determining the sequence of songs on a record -- "too impatient," he says. He finished all but one song, "When God Made Me," a hymn, then had the operation. He was to play at a Canadian awards show in Winnipeg, where he was partly raised. Several weeks before the show, he was walking with a friend when blood appeared on his pants leg. He began to bleed heavily from an incision made in his leg to remove a blood vessel used to patch the aneurysm. When he came to, he was staring into a bright white light. He was in an ambulance, but for a moment he thought he might have gone to glory. Needing more time to heal meant missing the awards show, and canceling meant having to explain his absence. Otherwise, he wouldn't have let anyone know.
Young's father, Scott, a sportswriter famous in Canada, died last year, in his eighties, after a period of dementia. As a child, Young would watch his father writing. On those occasions when he pointed out to his father that he appeared to be doing nothing, his father would say, "That's when I get my best ideas." Waiting for an idea is a hallmark of Young's method. His father's death was not unexpected, but it haunted Young, especially in light of his own mortality. He felt blessed to have escaped any lasting consequences and fortunate to have discovered his problem by means of an MRI and not as the result of having a stroke in a backstage hallway of a stadium.
Young lives in Northern California, south of San Francisco, on property he calls the Broken Arrow Ranch. On the Rand McNally Road Atlas, a small fir tree appears more or less where the ranch is. He bought the place thirty-five years ago. Before moving to it, he lived in Los Angeles, in Topanga Canyon. Leaving L.A., he drove through a brush fire. "The freeway was in the middle of it," he told me. "Both sides of the road were in flames. It was very dramatic. I was driving out of town, and the place was burning up."
Young said this a few weeks ago, in Northern California, while we were riding in an old Plymouth he owns and more or less widely circling the borders of the ranch. He has a fleet of cars from the era of his childhood -- he is sixty. His fascination with cars has its genesis in an early misfortune. When he was six, he went swimming with his father in the Pigeon River and woke that night with his shoulder hurting. Before the morning was through, he was so stiff that his father described him as moving like "a mechanical man." In Shakey, Young's biography, written by Jimmy McDonough, there is a description of his being taken to the hospital and how the polio he'd contracted in the river nearly killed him. When his parents came to take him home, he said, "I didn't die, did I?" The nurses sang "Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes" to him, and he wept. He had lost so much weight, his mother told McDonough, that "he looked like hell on the highway. Skin and bones." He had been a fat baby, as wide as he was tall, she said. When she played "Boogie-Woogie," by Pinetop Smith, he would stand up in his playpen and hold on to the rails and dance. A family friend described him as "a sullen, fat, dark-eyed little baby. Not a happy baby, not a smiler, not a joiner." Young has an older brother, Bob, who is a former club golf pro in Florida. Their parents, absorbed with the difficulties of a failing marriage, sometimes overlooked them, so Neil "became a little watcher," the friend said. He liked turtles and fishing. He liked to draw trains, and he could do so with either hand. His mother predicted that he would become an architect or a musician. His father used to take him and his brother for rides in the car and sing "Bury Me on the Lone Prairie." A relative said he was "a droll little boy."
After the polio, he remained permanently skinny. He walked awkwardly. ("I had to learn to walk again," he said in the car. "That was interesting.") Having set his mind on something, his mother said, he couldn't be deterred. He insisted on walking the few blocks to the doctor's office by himself. He would sometimes fall on the way, and people would come out of their houses and help him.
His body seemed too frail for winter clothes, so his parents took him to Florida. He loved the cars in America. The ones in Canada were older and tended not to have as many accessories. When the family returned to Canada, they lived in the country outside Toronto, and Young raised chickens and had a paper route. "When I finish school I plan to go to Ontario Agricultural College and perhaps learn to be a scientific farmer," he wrote in a school essay. He was ten when he began listening to rock & roll. By himself in the house, he would dance to his parents' records and pretend that he was winning a contest. The first instrument anyone remembers him playing was a plastic ukulele from his Christmas stocking. His father's family included farmers who were musicians. When rain kept them from the fields, they sat in the living room and played. He had three girl cousins who sang harmony parts, a scene he describes in "Far From Home," on Prairie Wind.
Young was thirteen when his parents separated. His brother went with his father, and Young lived with his mother. One of Young's friends of the period recalls that Young was much affected by the collapse of the household and that when he talked about it, which was often, his face would flush. His mother moved him to Winnipeg, on the prairie. If he could manage on the way there in the car not to bite his nails for an hour, she let him play the guitar.
The first song he wrote was called "No." It had a chorus that went, "No, no, no." A friend from this period told McDonough, "Looking back at it, I think he was alone more than he should have been."
In 1962, Young was a member of a band called the Squires, which another member said was the third-best band in the city. The first single he released was on V Records, a polka label. "At that point I was different," he said while we drove. "I wasn't into sports. I wasn't an exceptionally good student -- I didn't have the focus for it. I was a musician. I was more concerned with playing shows on the weekends, and I missed a lot of the social aspects growing up. Instead of thinking about who was I going to pick up at the dance, who was I going to be with or what was I going to do, I was thinking about playing. That whole part of me was put on the back burner until my twenties. I was late that way. I think I moved at a slower rate. In my own head, a lot of times, I'm still twenty. When I dream, I'm very young. I feel that way and I see things that way -- it's my outlook in the dream. I don't see things as a mature person. I feel like everybody's doing this; the human condition is not really understood on the surface; the waking, walking person and the sleeping person are completely different. That's why we need sleep; that's how the soul develops, in sleep."
In his twenties, from an instinct for self-preservation, Young avoided psychedelic drugs. "I was too scared, because my thoughts were already there," he said in the car. "People were talking about what happens to them when they're tripping, and I'd think, 'That's what happens to me all the time.' I was warned by neurologists, 'Don't do these drugs -- you won't be able to come back.' I was already having enough trouble." As a boy, he had mild seizures that became severe as he got older. Playing with Buffalo Springfield, he would often have a seizure that would begin during the last song of the night and have just enough time to escape the stage before it became pronounced. McDonough writes that while in the grip of them, Young would see other people, as if in another world. They would ask how he was and where he had been, and they would call him by a different name. His identity would return to him slowly -- it was as if he were putting himself back together a piece at a time.
Also from Rolling Stone:
with comments by me
Part of being a Neil Young fan is trolling through his bad albums in search of buried treasures. So here's the ultimate Neil Young mix CD -- seventy-eight minutes of stellar songs on not-so-stellar albums. Remember: It's better to burn CDs than fade away.
1. "I'm the Ocean"
Mirror Ball, 1995
A heavy-stomping nightmare about Nineties psychosis from a session with Pearl Jam, with Young ranting about Kurt Cobain, O.J. Simpson and Bill Clinton. One of his strongest and scariest songs ever. I agree with this selection. I remember vividly buying this record in Leicester Square, London England, while I was travelling through Europe in 1995. I also remember beginning to love this song in particular while visiting the Cinque Terre in Italy.
2. "Razor Love"
Silver and Gold, 2000
This much-beloved ballad has been bootlegged since the mid-Eighties. So, naturally, when Young decided to make it available, he buried it at the end of a twee country-rock album. This is why fans treasure bootlegs. One of my all-time favourites, a song about love maturing...
3. "Big Time"
Broken Arrow, 1996
A lost classic from an album everybody hated at the time: Crazy Horse thuds away, as Young sings a sad, lazy yarn about his lost youth in "the land of suntan lotion." I bought this CD at the Winnipeg Folk festival in 1996. I listened to it for a month, maybe, and don't think I have again. My memories of this song are of a big rumbling messy rock song. Certainly it's not of the calibre of the first two.
4. "Captain Kennedy"
Hawks and Doves, 1980
After the blood and thunder of Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust came a throwaway folk record, but among the gems was this acoustic ditty about a young terrorist who sings, "I hope that I can kill good." My introduction to this song was the version by Nikki Sudden and the French Revolution on a Neil Young tribute record. I loved the melody instantly. Later, after buying a record player at A&B Sound, and plastering it with Whistler Mountain and Grateful Dead stickers, I bought the Hawks and Doves LP. I always loved the first side, with Little Wing, Old Homestead, etc. This song seems like the more cynical older brother of Cortez the Killer.
5. "Will to Love"
American Stars 'n Bars, 1977
Young uses his boombox to overdub his voice into a happy glee club, chirping about how he's a salmon swimming upstream in search of love. Another of my all-time favourites. You can hear the crackling of the fireplace in the background of his Topanga Ranch. I always love Neil's free-flowing slower pieces; this is a perfect example of that style: "If we meet along the way, Please sway beside me, let us sway together, Our tails together, and our fins and mind, We'll leave this water, and let our scales shine, In the sun above, and the sky below, So all the water, and earth will know."
6. "Slowpoke"
Looking Forward, 1999
How bad was this CSNY reunion album? Personally I would replace this one with Feel Your Love from American Dream. I remember listening to that one a lot in undergrad.
7. "Soldier"
Journey Through the Past, 1972
This harrowing piano lament is stuck on the butt-ugly soundtrack to a self-directed movie nobody ever saw. He later put it on Decade, but the damage was done. Another good, short slow song.
8. "Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze"
Re-ac-tor, 1981
The album was just a bunch of synthed-up, mechanical feedback jams, but this record-company complaint stands out as first-rate crackpot fury. Shots was way better than this song.
9. "Mideast Vacation"
Life, 1987
If Young sounds like he's stuck in Eighties overproduction hell, that's because he is. But at least he has Crazy Horse to keep him company, and they blow off steam in a nutty bad-politics travelogue. This album, except maybe Inca Queen, sucks from beginning to end.
10. "Kinda Fonda Wanda"
Everybody's Rockin', 1983
Young in a string tie and pompadour, imitating the Stray Cats with a band called the Shocking Pinks? You have to hear "Kinda Fonda Wanda" to believe it really happened. Wonderin' had the video but this song had the lines: Did the bop with Miss Ann, The swim with Mary Ann, The stroll with Betty Lou, Screwed runaround Sue, But she wasn't as good as Wanda, No, she'll never be as good as Wanda. I'm kinda fonda Wanda 'cause Wanda always wannda, wannda, wannda."
11. "Goin' Home"
Are You Passionate?, 2002
One Crazy Horse song pops up in the middle of this Sixties R&B tribute and blows the rest of the record away. I really didn't like this record.
12. "Slip Away"
Year of the Horse, 1997
Just another live album -- he's got six of them -- until you hit this track: the Horse in total slow-motion clod mode, with a strange grandeur staggering out of the guitar fuzz. Ralph Molina drums like an old horse put out to pasture. Another example of this, though I enjoyed the concert from this tour.
13. "Out of My Mind"
Buffalo Springfield, 1967
Not nearly as famous as "Mr. Soul" and "Expecting to Fly." Just so beautiful it hurts. My friend Tim Dolden introduced this to me via vinyl, and I remember listening to this and Stills' Long Time Gone in his sunny living room in Horseshoe Bay.
14. "Stringman"
Unplugged, 1993
Unplugged sets are just a way for rock stars to resell some oldies, right? Wrong, if you're Neil Young: It's where you unveil one of your most haunting piano ballads, dating back to 1976 but never released until now. Not that anybody noticed. A typical Neil Young mind-fuck and the perfect place to end this journey through his past. Not a favourite, but a nice treat on that CD at the time.
I would also consider: Albuquerque, Crime in the City, Thrasher, Don't Be Denied, Change Your Mind...
THE STROKES: FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF EARTH
Rolling Stone
The Strokes making a third album? That wasn't supposed to happen. After all the tricks they stole from their 1970s New York rock heroes, they seemed destined to blaze out in a storm of booze and leather and Danish strippers, preferably in a five-room suite at the Chelsea Hotel, with a neon sign out the window flickering the words too much too soon. But look at them now. Julian Casablancas got married, reportedly quit drinking, and now he's writing songs about God and fate and the meaning of the universe. They go for a heavier, beefier, louder sound, recording with L.A. studio-rock pro David Kahne, the guy who produced the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian." There are songs on this album with titles like "Vision of Division" and "Electricityscape." "Don't be a coconut/God is trying to talk to you" -- this is the Strokes? Hard to explain, dude.
Fortunately, maturity hasn't slowed the Strokes down. It hasn't even matured them all that much -- they're just learning some new tricks to go with the adolescent faster-louder-more-now stomp of Is This It and Room On Fire. They earned a place in the heart of jaded rock & roll trollops with Is This It, the 2001 debut that shocked the world with the revelation that music should be crass and speedy and flashy and slutty. They tightened the trousers of a whole generation -- even the Swedish guys who wrote Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" admit they were just trying to copy the Strokes. But some fans thought Room On Fire was too exactly like the first album -- OK, everybody thought that, even the band. Song for song, it was almost as excellent, and some of us secretly like it even more, but you can't blame them for trying new moves.
First Impressions of Earth is different; it's ambitious, messy, nearly as long as the first two records combined. Guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. get to show off, while drummer Fab Moretti provides the forward momentum that makes the Strokes a killer groove band. They've never kicked harder than "Juicebox," which turns the old "Peter Gunn" riff into a surf-metal snarl, or "Heart in a Cage," which jumps like Iggy Pop in "The Passenger." But the music is full of beard-stroking classic-rock flourishes. "Razorblade" has twin-guitar leads straight from Thin Lizzy, and in "Juicebox," Nikolai Fraiture demonstrates that he can do a frighteningly accurate simulacrum of Yes bassist Chris Squire circa Fragile, though why anybody would want to demonstrate this remains a mystery.
Casablancas' voice is still a panty peeler, especially in "Razorblade," where he wails a melody nicked from Barry Manilow and makes it sound soulful. He pouts and moans in fine mod form, as if he realizes his lyrics need all the help they can get. The guy has an uncanny ear for the did-he-say-that? moment, when a dumb bar-stool monologue veers into a brilliant little haiku. He achieves that effect with lines like "I love you more than being seventeen." But man, if you thought he was ridiculous when he was chasing girls, wait till you hear him contemplate mortality in "Ize of the World," as in "modernize," "terrorize," "desensitize," etc. It's like he's challenging Interpol to a poetry slam.
Like most rock bands, the Strokes are better at rocking than not rocking, so ravers like "You Only Live Once" beat failed experiments like the synth-strings ballad "Ask Me Anything" or the Pogues-ish waltz "15 Minutes." Really, this could be the excessive, erratic second album Room On Fire wasn't; if you switched the order of the two albums, Room On Fire would undoubtedly get hailed as their return to form. But as maturity moves go, First Impressions proves what the Strokes set out to prove: They're a serious band of dedicated craftsmen, a band that is here to stay. It also proves they could steal your girlfriend without even trying. But you already knew that.
posted by D @ 5:53 AM
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