Music |
Neil Young
By
Published: Jan 01, 2006
Category:
Rock
There’s big excitement among Neil Young fans this Spring. At 61, the ragged-rock troubadour has done something that seems to have eluded all other musicians: He’s taken his feelings about the war in Iraq and made a CD — Living with War — that’s a "metal folk protest" suite. Its mere existence is exciting; it’s nice to see an artist on fire. And Young is. He wrote three songs in a day, recorded at warp speed, and got the music out so fast it’s like a broadside.
Young has some experience with this kind of thing. After the National Guard fired on students at Kent State University in 1970, Young — then singing with Steve Stills and David Crosby — had "Ohio" on the radio in a matter of days. The start of that song still chills me:
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Saying Nixon’s name in the lyrics, David Cassidy said, was "the bravest thing I ever heard."
I’m writing about him now because I don’t want his political music to be the only Neil Young music you hear. The fact is, he’s got three decades of achingly beautiful songs in his catalogue. And because those are the songs I keep coming back to, I want to give you a small tour of them here.
What’s "beauty" when we’re talking about a guy with a ragged voice and a willingness to make music that ranges from techno to folk? Well, this:
There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.
Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless
Put a modest band behind that, all some glorious harmonies, and you’ve got yourself a classic.
Maybe I’m doomed to be a prisoner of my generation, but I’m fondest of the songs Young recorded in the late 1960s, when he was just making his name. He was in Buffalo Springfield then. Talk about a doomed enterprise. Four guys could sing lead, two played lead guitar. And the egos — Steve Stills, Richie Furay and Neil Young — were not small. The group split up after three records.
Of the Buffalo Springfield releases, I’m partial to the second, Buffalo Springfield Again. It has three songs by Young. "Mr. Soul" is a rocker, and leads off the album; it’s a West Coast idea of a Rolling Stones song, complete with buzzing guitar. "Broken Arrow" is like something from Sgt. Pepper; it’s a story of operatic proportions, with movements that drift in and out. And then there’s "Expecting to Fly," a portrait of a young woman of infinite sensitivity:
There you stood
on the edge of your feather,
Expecting to fly.
I find that line poignant and then some. But then, the through line of Young’s music is its tenderness. And its beauty. And its delicacy. This grunge thing of Young’s, those deliberately ragged performances — I’m not fooled. This is a lyric poet. And a durable one. I gulp to say this: He’s our Yeats.
What to buy? I usually hate Greatest Hits. But I’m amused that Young waited until 2004 to produce his. And though there’s nothing after 1992 and nothing from the Springfield period, you can’t argue with the 17 songs he included.
Other CDs? There are so many. I chose a few. They’re practically random — fans, there’s no need to remind me I cobbled together a skimpy list. But there’s a reason: If you’re not familiar with the body of his work, he’s yours to discover. And how lucky is that? To hear Neil Young for the first time: if that’s where you are, I envy you.
"Better to burn out than to fade away," he once sang. There’s no danger. Of either.
To buy ‘Living with War’ from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy ‘Buffalo Springfield Again’ from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy Neil Young’s ‘Greatest Hits’ from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy Crosby Stills & Nash ‘Greatest Hits,’ click here.
To buy ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy ‘After The Gold Rush’ from Amazon.com, click here.
Click NeilYoung.com for Neil’s web site.
