[RandyS reports: This article on Relix from Jaan Uhelszki mentions our own Thrasher by name. ]
From Relix magazine:
Published: 2012/01/18
by Jaan Uhelszki Gleaning Gold: Neil Young’s Harvest Turns 40
[Ed2 notes: Glad that Jaan U is still around. One of the first to report
in Internet magazines about Neil Young. The latter which should not die out or censored
because of SOPA or PIPA]
I have always had dark heroes.
Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Brian Jones all captured my imagination.
Their deep mysteries, their devotion to otherworldly muses, their
wrecked cool and even their idiosyncratic clothing kept me enthralled as
I pored over the exoticism of their guitar excursions like they were
consecrated texts concealing some code that would reveal the profundity
of a great unseen world.
And in some ways, they did. This unholy trinity opened up whole vistas
of thought and sensations, allowing me to develop what Ralph Waldo
Emerson referred to when describing transcendentalism: “an original
relation to the universe.” It was both music and extra-musical—but at
the heart of it, what they were imparting obscured more than it revealed.
I liked the idea that rock stars were not like the rest of us. That they
existed in some alternative universe breathing in saffron-scented air,
wearing tight velvet stovepipe pants, riding in chauffeur-driven Aston
Martins—all while thinking great thoughts of profundity and consequence
and consorting with woman who resembled The Beatles wives and
girlfriends, or winsome fashion models.
But if I am entirely honest with myself, my greatest mystery has always
been Neil Young. And unlike the aforementioned guitar gods, his mystery
wasn’t as occult or obvious—but rather more homegrown and inexplicable
because it occupied that unsettling juncture between the familiar and
the unknown, like a human manifestation of Shirley Jackson’s short story
“The Lottery.”
Neil Young may look like the rest of us—may even appear to act like the
rest of us—but at the core, you know he really isn’t. That’s even before
we get to the Pontiac hearse that he drove from Toronto to Los Angeles
in 1966, or how the Buffalo Springfield came into being because all the
members just happened to be stuck in the same LA traffic jam—in a moment
that seemed to momentarily subvert the law of physics and geography to
make musical history.
At the center of my devotion to Young is his emotional austerity and
loneliness that has always mirrored my own. I have a theory that the
artists that you most revere are the ones that reflect something of
yourself back to you, to show some wound or strength in a more
exaggerated form, allowing you to understand yourself better. For me,
that has always been Young and never so much as on his fourth album,
1972’s Harvest —with its trajectory of wanting love but not quite
knowing how to give into it wholly; looking for a heart of gold, but
finding a heart of darkness.
There are few places as uncomfortable as the full surrender of your
affections—for me, anyway.
And for Young, I suspect.
At least back in 1972.
***
Beyond Neil Young’s ability to manipulate events, traffic conditions,
overcome health concerns or be my own personal mirror, I think his
greatest gift is his unfathomable, often wary imagination.
Do words descend on him like Jeanne d’Arc’s visions, fueled by his (and
her suspected) epilepsy? How can one explain where a song like Buffalo
Springfield’s “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” comes from, with images
that feel pulled from Greek tragedy with an economy of language that
brings Ernest Hemmingway to mind?
Part poetry, part obfuscation, Young has always created a culture of
unease, first witnessed here, oddly asking, “Who’s putting a sponge in
the bells I once rung?” then demanding, “Whose seeing eyes through the
crack in the floor?”—an early reveal of his incipient paranoia and
ability to sense some threat that the rest of us are only dimly aware of.
Whether paranoia is heightened awareness or just acute self-awareness,
it’s something that Young has honed to high art, allowing him to pull
things out of the ethers—seemingly ordinary images—and put a slight
counter-clockwise twist on them, transforming the commonplace into
something unruly and unexpected.
That and his dedication to never do the expected, even in small ways.
From changing band members and configurations at will to making a
rather straightforward record after four albums which showed him to be
the inscrutable loner, often injured by love and loss. From the
bewildered recriminations of “What Did You Do To My Life” to the wistful
longing of “I’ve Loved Her So Long,” to asking for a woman to save his
life in “I’ve Been Waiting for You,” all on his eponymous debut in 1968,
to the elusive females of “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Cinnamon
Girl”—dream girls from his second record, 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is
Nowhere, the lyrics and images are intangible and anticipatory.
By the time that Young released his third record After The Gold Rush in
1970, he appears to have had a deep experience of love, loss and
romantic redemption. But the best song from that disc, “Only Love Can
Break Your Heart,” is about his Crosby Stills Nash &Young bandmate
Graham Nash’s break-up with Joni Mitchell. Though Young had married
Susan Acevedo in 1968 (and divorced her by 1970), the song’s lyrics
suggest that Young had yet to allow himself to become totally lost in a
relationship.
It’s not until he became smitten with actress Carrie Snodgress after
seeing her in the film Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) that he let
himself be more forthcoming, autobiographical and less oblique than he
had been on record—chronicling the beginnings of his
romance-cum-conquest of Snodgress in the third verse of “A Man Needs a
Maid,” which was slated for the forthcoming Harvest .
A while ago somewhere I don’t know when
I was watching a movie with a friend.
I fell in love with the actress.
She was playing a part that I could understand
That is, of course, after expounding in the first lines that all he
really needed was “someone to keep his house clean, fix my meals and go
away” —lines much more indicative of the character of the relationship
than anyone would have suspected in those early days of 1971 when the
couple met.
It’s exhilarating for the listener to be able to crack open the
backstage door into the personal life of this brooding, dashed
romantic—even approaching rock soap opera. But if it was intoxicating
for fans to find him documenting the history of his relationship, then
it was more intoxicating for the actress who didn’t have any idea who
Neil Young was at the time of Harvest’s release. “I wasn’t a rock and
roll girl,” she told the New York Times in 1990. “I said, ‘Neil Young.
Neil Young. Where do I know that name from?’”
Nevertheless, she said, she fell “madly and immediately” in love with
Young and abandoned Hollywood, walking out on her contract in order to
travel with the rocker and share his Northern California ranch. In 1972,
she gave birth to their son Zeke. As for her career, “I decided that I
was going to be in love, I was going to give it everything I had.”
Unfortunately, Young wouldn’t or couldn’t do the same. It was as if he
had one eye fixed on the exit door—or as he so poetically put it in
“Alabama,” as he was speaking about the intersection of the then-new
South and the old South and the problems that it posed: “Your Cadillac
has got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.” He could have
just as easily been speaking about himself in this relationship, which
ended in 1977.
What I find most unnerving is that after the ambiguity of “A Man Needs a
Maid” and his rather offhanded declaration love for Snodgress, Young
follows the song with “Heart of Gold,” signifying—like Bono a decade
after him—that he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.
Neil Young scholar Keith Bonney, founder of the preeminent Neil Young
fan site, thrasherswheat.org, contends that, “It is the search for love
that drove his songwriting.” But I’m not certain that’s correct; the
greater quest might be for something altogether different and more
elemental.
There aren’t any accidents in an album’s sequencing and Young had to
have thought hard about where he wanted to place “Heart of Gold” in
respect to the rest of the songs. Was its placement a message to
Snodgress or to himself? Perhaps the “heart of gold” that he’s searching
for is his own, given the use of the personal pronoun: “I’ve been in my
mind and it’s such a fine line that keeps me searching for a heart of
gold.” This particular journey is the search for self.
Young first met (the then) Nashville, Tenn.-based Harvest producer
Elliot Mazer at a party that Mazer had thrown for Johnny Cash. It would
be the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.
“I love albums that take you to different places song by song.” Mazer
says today from England of Harvest . “I mixed the entire album but
really mixed each song as a song.” The stark collection, recorded at
various locations—ranging from Jan. 30, 1971 at UCLA’s Royce Hall (“The
Needle and The Damage Done”) to the February and April sessions at
Mazer’s Quadrafonic studio to the two songs recorded with keyboardist
and arranger Jack Nitzche and the London Symphony in March 1971 to the
September sessions at a barn-turned studio at Broken Arrow ranch in
Woodside, Calif.—presented Mazer with a challenge.
“The fewer instruments and voices that are in a mix, the harder it is to
make a complete and cohesive sound,” he says. “There is no compression
or limiting on Harvest . We wanted the full sonic and dynamic ranges of
those instruments and voices.”
Those voices include Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor providing back up
vocals for “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man.” Young also convinced his CSN
compatriots to appear on the record in different configurations,
prompting David Crosby to comment, “Neil needs us about as much as a
stag needs a coat rack.” However, their appearances imbue “Are You Ready
for the County,” “Alabama” and “Words” with a richness and depth, and at
times, a lightness that the songs wouldn’t otherwise possess.
“His songs imply those parts,” Mazer says of the various personnel’s
contributions to the record. “Sometimes he would tell [drummer]Kenny
[Buttrey] to not play a high-hat. On one song, Kenny sat on his right
hand. Neil also met [guitarist] Ben Keith on these sessions. The two of
them bonded, which turned out to be a continual working relationship
between them until Ben passed away last year.” Other contributors
included pianists John Harris and James McMahon and guitarist Teddy Irwin.
When asked if Young was going for a particular concept, Mazer says that
they never discussed anything. “The songs are the album and they spoke
loudly when he played them,” he says in a producer-like way. “He played
us a song, which for the most part, spoke to what was to be played and
how it would sound. Neil is an amazing and physical guitarist. His
movements imply the rhythms.”
Simply put, says Mazer, “The music flowed and we all did what we did the
best.”
Harvest quickly reached the top of the Billboard charts, giving Young
his only No. 1 record in his long career, but also making him back away
from his fame, all but disowning it, denigrating the song in the liner
notes for his 1977 retrospective, Decades. “This song put me in the
middle of the road,” he reflected. “Traveling there soon became a bore
so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting
people there.”
The most revealing part of Harvest —in regard to where Young’s emotional
compass was pointed to at the time—is in on the title track “Harvest,”
where he sings, “Dream up, dream up/ Let me fill you with the promise of
a man,” rather than the man himself.
While that signals an enormous amount of self-awareness about his
limitations, it doesn’t absolve him of the responsibility of giving the
relationship all he has, something made material when he sings, “Will I
see you give more than I can take? Will I only harvest some?”
What did Carrie Snodgress think about when she heard that line? Was it a
portent of a rocky future?
I don’t know about her, but I saw red flags.
***
It wasn’t until 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps that Neil Young even got close
to emotional surrender. The idea of harvest, however, would haunt him
for years after, as he named his 1992 album Harvest Moon and his band
(during his 1984-85 tour) the International Harvesters, silently begging
the question of the one-time teenage egg farmer: What is it that he is
harvesting or wants to harvest?
As for the actual song, “‘Harvest’ is one of my best songs,” Young
admitted to his biographer Jimmy McDonough in 1993’s Shakey , seemingly
reversing his original verdict of it. “That’s the best thing on Harvest . ”
“I was in love when I first made Harvest , ” he went on to tell
McDonough. “With Carrie. So that was it. I was an in-love and
on-top-of-the-world type guy.”
“All those relationships songs—it’s ‘I want to, but I can’t,’” suggested
McDonough.
“Right. Good thing I got past that stage,” Young responded.
“How did you do it?” asked McDonough.
“Time, I guess,” Young initially surmised. “Getting the right woman.
That was a good thing.”
Even so, there is still the taint of “The “Loner” about Young even
today. The early song that first appeared on his 1968 self-titled solo
album revealed an unapproachable heart, and an emotional stoicism,
perhaps from the early wounds suffered by his parents’ divorce that
never seemed to heal—and something that would fester in what is probably
the second best song on Harvest , “Old Man.”
Shortly after becoming the owner of Broken Arrow, a 1,500-acre ranch
located in the hills south of San Francisco, Young penned “Old Man,”
inspired by the Louis Avila, the caretaker of the ranch.
In the first line, he sings, “Old man, look at my life. I’m a lot like
you are.” Given Young’s age and his place in Toronto’s social
stratum—his mother, Rassy, a TV presenter; his father, Scott, a
celebrated sports journalist—the comparison seems forced.
In fact, for quite some time, Young’s father was under the assumption
that the song was about him—something he addressed in his book Neil and
Me (2009):
In March of 1972, I took my family for a month in Florida, and was there
just after Neil’s new album, Harvest, was released and went straight to
the top of the charts within two weeks. Every time I turned on my car
radio in Florida, I heard “Heart of Gold,”the first single released from
that album. Then, almost as often I would hear another from that
album,“Old Man.” Well, sure, “Old Man pleased me a great deal. In
Florida and back in Canada during the many months while “Old Man” was
well up on the charts, people would mention it to me as if I were some
sort of co-proprietor, at which I would just nod and smile like Mona
Lisa. Never question a compliment is my motto. “Old Man” was also such a
nice change from some of the songs whose accusatory gist I had applied
to myself years earlier.”
A few months later, Neil was in Toronto and the father and son met up.
After a walk, Neil said to the elder Young:
“[There’s] something I should clarify,” his father recalls his son
telling him. “You know that song, ‘Old Man?’”
“Yeah, I love it.”
“It’s not about you,” Young told him. “I know a lot of people think it
is. But it’s about Louis, the man who lives on the ranch and looks after
things for me—the cattle and the buffalo and the food and all that. A
wonderful guy.”
So at the end, what binds Neil Young with Louis Avila—his aging
caretaker—and not to his father? The need for love—the underlying
premise of this entire album that was released on Valentine’s Day in 1972.
In the second verse, he sings, “Old Man, take a look at my life. I’m a
lot like you are/ I need someone to love me the whole day through/ Oh,
one look in my eyes and you can tell that’s true.”
It was as if the 18 months that it took to record the album—a process
hampered by Young injuring his back while trying to move a piece of wood
at Broken Arrow—allowed him to be as contemplative and as transparent as
he ever had. To use those hooded slate blue eyes as a portal into his
psyche, instead of as dual weapons capable of pinning hapless listeners
to the wall. Was it the pain pills that he was forced to take that
causing him to drop his guard, or was it something else all together?
“I was in and out of hospitals for the two years between After The Gold
Rush and Harvest , ” he revealed in 1975. “I recorded most of Harvest in
a brace. That’s a lot of reason it’s such a mellow album. I couldn’t
physically play an electric guitar.”
Perhaps the confined, broken body set something free in him. Maybe
that’s what allowed him to publicly declare his affection and issue a
cautionary tale—more a naked plea—to Crazy Horse guitarist Danny
Whitten, when he penned “Needle and the Damage Done.” True prophesy is
embedded in the anxious words and sharp rhythmic breaks. Although
Whitten would live for another nine months and four days after the
release of the album, Young knew that he had already lost him.
It wasn’t only Whitten’s death that unsettled Young; Harvest represented
a loss of much greater magnitude. Suddenly the success of the
album—which topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic—thrust him
into superstardom, even eclipsing CSN’s fame. He claimed to reporters
that having a chart-topping single made him feel “empty.”
“I tried to stay away from the success as much as possible,” Young told
Cameron Crowe in 1979. “And being laid up in bed gave me a lot of time
to think about what had happened. I thought the popularity was good, but
I also knew that something else was dying.”
Dramatic? Perhaps. Dark? Certainly. But my heroes have always been dark,
and Neil Young is probably the darkest of them all—even when back lit by
a Harvest moon.
_________________________________________
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