Written by bnbrainer on 30 October 2012
October 26, 2012, After the Gold Rush
By HOWARD HAMPTON
WAGING HEAVY PEACE
A Hippie Dream
By Neil Young
Illustrated. 502 pp. Blue Rider Press. $30.
Neil Young is the kind of cantankerous, multitasking rocker Preston Sturges would have dreamed up, if Sturges had lived to see hippies descend on the Sunset Strip. There’s Young the sloppy musical perfectionist, the ebullient fatalist, the inscrutable dreamer, the misanthropic man of the people. There’s the earnest entrepreneur trying to launch a high-fidelity digital alternative to tinny-sounding MP3s, the occasional movie director with roughly the aesthetic disposition of Bigfoot, the hobbyist so smitten with model trains he bought a piece of the Lionel company, a collector so crazy for cars he’s sunk a fortune into developing an eco-friendly hybrid version of a 1959 Lincoln Continental. He’s a devoted, profoundly protective family man and benefit-giving solid citizen who somehow smoked enough dope, snorted enough coke and drank enough spirits to keep pace with his generation’s most renowned substance abusers.
Sued by his own record company for making “uncharacteristic” music, he has burned through genres like a prairie fire: psychedelia, Americana, grunge, alt-country, freak folk, supermarket MOR, he was there and back before they were even categories.
One minute Young’s the unsurpassed master of guitar feedback, the next he’s cooing sappy ditties under bucolic studio moonlight. Restless and overproductive, he has vaults full of unreleased music; he’s toured widely and often (the now-defunct custom bus he called Pocahontas was straight out of “Sullivan’s Travels”), briefly passing through greener commercial pastures on his way to the deepest ditch or most imposing cliff he can find (goodbye “Harvest”and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, hello “Tonight’s the Night”and “Ragged Glory”).
read more on NY Times.
Tags: Waging Heavy Peace
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Written by bnbrainer on 27 October 2012
first images from bh are on Human-Highway.org — Voodoo Fest from BH – Gallery of a good time
2012-10-26
City Park, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Voodoo Experience
w/ Crazy Horse
01. Love And Only Love
02. Powderfinger
03. Born In Ontario
04. Walk Like A Giant
05. The Needle And The Damage Done
06. Twisted Road
07. Ramada Inn
08. Cinnamon Girl
09. F*!#in' Up
10. Psychedelic Pill
11. Mr. Soul
12. Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)
---
13. Like A Hurricane
Tour: 2012 Alchemy Tour With Crazy Horse
Band: Crazy Horse, Line Up 3
Neil Young - vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar
Frank Sampedro - electric guitar, keyboards, vocals
Billy Talbot - bass, vocals
Ralph Molina - drums, vocals
-- setlist courtesy of bh
Tags: NOLA, zombie
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Written by bnbrainer on 24 October 2012
PSYCHEDELIC PILL will be available for streaming exclusively at http://neilyoung.com beginning October 24th until its October 30th release date.
Tags: Psychedelic Pill
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Written by bnbrainer on 24 October 2012
Helpless: On the Poetry of Neil Young
October 23, 2012 | by Brian Cullman
[see original post about the The NewYorker review]
There was a fascinating if incomplete musing on theNew Yorker website this week regarding Neil Young’s insularity and on the incomprehensible idea that he never reads. It seemed strange that someone who doesn’t read would decide to write a book, though it’s often true that writing and reading aren’t necessarily two sides of the same coin. They are often very different coins, operating in very different currencies. When you go to a bank to make change, the exchange rate is never in your favor.
I forwarded the piece to my friend Bill Flicker, out in Los Angeles, who wrote back that he never listens to Neil Young’s words, that they are simply placeholders or crumbs that are scattered on a walk through a musical forest. Actually, I do listen to his words. Not always. But when I listen, they’re remarkably visual and evocative:
Blue blue windows behind the stars.
Yellow moon on the rise.
Purple words on a grey background
To be a woman and to be turned down
How did those windows get behind the stars? I don’t know, but I can see them clearly. Sometimes as a child’s drawing. Sometimes as a reflection on an airplane window. There may not be logic involved, but there is something deeper than that. As for those purple words, they shine against the grey background much as Matisse’s goldfish shine through the water they swim in. I can see them clearly reflected on the surface of being turned down. Turned down like a bed, like a stereo, like a deal. A woman turned down. I can see that reflection even if I can’t explain it. If I could, the song might not be as powerful as it is.
What is the color
When black is burned?
What is the color?
I know what that color is but I’m not permitted to say. Joy Williams once wrote that “the children had told her once that the sun was called the sun because the real word for it was too terrible.” She was listening to Neil Young when she wrote that.
Shelter me from the powder
and the finger
Cover me with the thought
that pulled the trigger
Cover me with the thought that pulled the trigger. Not cover me with earth. Not cover me with death. But cover me with the very impulse behind my death. Cover me with the will that I should die, that I should cease. That idea, that line, is worthy of anyone you can name. Anyone. It’s large as the sky. Yet small enough to fit into a song. That’s the terrible beauty of it.
Not all of Neil Young’s songs are as evocative or as powerful. Songs pour out of him at an alarming rate, and for better and for worse they are part of an enormous work that’s still in progress, that keeps expanding. There are songs that seem ungainly or odd, that seem to have their gears showing, but I tend to think of these the way I think about those extra widgets or metal bits that come with a Swiss Army knife. I don’t know why they’re there, but they seem like they’re there for a reason, part of a larger scheme. Sometime much later, when you’re lost in the forest of the night, that useless whatsit might be the only thing that could save your life. You never know.
The elegant simplicity of Young’s songs does not seem manufactured. There’s neither a faux primitivism nor a childlike celebration of the obvious a la, say, the venerable comic strip Nancy. Rather, they combine a child’s focus and need to meet ideas head on with a zen equanimity. The sense of foreboding we feel isn’t necessarily in the songs but in us. These are reports sent back from a place beyond judgement. from a weatherman used to the cold:
Wind blowing through my sails
It feels like I’m gone
See the sky about to rain
broken clouds and rain
Big bird flying across the sky
>>throwing shadows on our eyes
According to Alec Wilkinson, who wrote the New Yorker piece, Young has missed out on “examples of language carrying complicated thoughts or feelings, the way they are carried in the poems of writers such as Philip Levine or William Butler Yeats or the prose of a writer such as Isak Dinesen.” Well, yes. And no.
We’d all be better off for having Philip Levine and W. B.Yeats and Isak Dinesen in our libraries and in our heads. But Neil Young operates in a very different and a very special arena. His songs seem to be both post-literate and preliterate in a powerful and distinctly modern way, leapfrogging over logic and seeming to come straight from the unconscious. Maybe not even his unconscious, more out of a collective yearning or out of some deep and mostly hidden national or international dream state. If swamps or lagoons could hum, they’d probably hum Neil Young songs.
Brian Cullman is a writer and musician living in New York City. He last wrote for the Daily on Nick Drake.
theparisreview.org/blog/2012/10/23/fang-song-on-the-poetry-of-neil-young/
___________________________________
thanks go to dwight c. donovan.
Tags: Neil Young lyrics
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Written by bnbrainer on 23 October 2012
On Thursday Carradine Narrates Neil Young was a top story. Here is the recap: (Gibson) Neil Young’s memoir Waging Heavy Peace is already acclaimed. An audiobook version is out also, read by actor Keith Carradine, brother of David and part of the Carradine acting dynasty. Carradine may seem an odd choice to some, but he’s long been a musicianhimself. In 1975, he performed his own song “I’m Easy” in the movie Nashville – it won a Golden Globe and an Oscar.
Rolling Stone says, “Waging Heavy Peace isn’t a traditional rock memoir. Written throughout 2011, it addresses everything from the recent Crazy Horse reunion back to the formation of Buffalo Springfield – but it’s presented in a completely non-linear way. Young also stops the narrative from time to time to complain about the audio quality of MP3s and go into detail about his on-going electric car project. The end result is a glimpse right into Young’s brain.” – Listen to Keith Carradine reading Neil Young by following [this link on antimusic.com].
Tags: Waging Heavy Peace
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