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dollarbin · 4 months

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Shakey Sundays #1:

Neil Young's Neil Young

My buddy Greg asked me last weekend, very earnestly, why Neil Young? Why is he your favorite artist? Why?

Greg likes Neil. But he doesn't own 38 different Neil records which are what he'd grab, along with his kids and, I guess, the cat, if the house was on fire; nor has he temporarily and blissfully lost all sense of hearing after seeing Neil in concert eight glorious times, once driving 7 hours each way on a work night to do so; nor did he sing each of his safe-from-the-fire kids to psychedelic sleep every night of their childhoods with a steady diet of Powderfinger (my son always insisted the first line was "look out Momma, there's a white bird coming up the river"; if I sang boat instead of bird he'd sit up in bed, his doll Carson cradled in his arms, and howl in indignation), Lost in Space and Little Wing.

(By the way, that fire scenario really happened: long ago, when the kids were still little and there was no room whatsoever left in our tiny home, all my records were stored in a family cabin in the woods; one time I watched the backside of the ridge behind that cabin going up in flames and then rushed home to get everyone, and all of my Neil, into the car so we could get the hell out of there. Everyone/thing made it out just fine.)

In other words, Greg's not me. Plus, he grew up a Pearl Jam guy so we were listening to Mirror Ball as a common ground of sorts when the question, Why Neil Young?, was asked. At that point Neil was hollering about the place called downtown, where the hippies all go, so my first, slightly inebriated, explanation - "dude, I don't know, he's just the best" - didn't really fly. After all, the hippies were dancing the Charleston; they were doing the limbo.

Greg's question is a good one. What attribute can you insert after the statement "Neil Young is the best _____" that adequately describes his odd and supreme genius?

"Poet" doesn't work. Sure, Neil can write about roads stretching out like healthy veins and wild gift horses that strain the reins, but he can also dedicate a ten minute song entirely to describing one person's surplus of mashed potatoes.

Nor can you get away with "he's the best songwriter" when he's released at least 6 different versions of the song Dance, Dance, Dance and much of his oeuvre from the past 10 years spews hot, Promise of the Real sized chunks.

Even Neil's newest robot will probably concur: there isn't any single thing that Young is the stand-alone-best at. (Well, maybe he is the best at screaming into his guitar's pickups...)

And yet, for me, the truth has never been in doubt since I first heard Side 2 of On the Beach over thirty years ago: Neil Young is, and always will be, my favorite musician.

So I think it's about time this blog started wrestling with Neil "Shakey" Young himself. That's why I'm kicking off this weekend with the first of many Shakey Sundays: I'm gonna write about every one of Neil's studio albums, in order.

Those of you who only show up to see if I have more to say about John Darnielle's cooking skills: relax. I'll continue to post Dollar Bin posts on other artists alongside this new project. I promise. But be warned, Young currently has 45 studio albums to his name and I have a ton to say about all of them. So this will take awhile.

I'm not making any promises of the real here: I'll surely take some Sundays off, these posts will often appear, like this one, in truly Shakey fashion, on the wrong day of the week, and I may keel over or get a life before I ever write about Storytone or Fork in the Road. But it's time to give this Neil Young thing a shot, a shot that will ring all around the border, like a venom in the sky. Will we make it? Hey, who knows where or when. But let the Dollar Bin's Shakey Sundays begin.

Here we go:

Neil Young did not yet know how to be NEIL YOUNG in 1968. When putting together his debut solo album he:

Overdubbed instruments and vocals alike instead of leaving everything as live and raw as an octopus that's just been tossed up On The Beach;

Brought in ace session musicians and back up vocalists instead of the wandering cast of reckless, drunken fools who he's been working with ever since;

Boxed up (nearly) every raggedy edge of his sound into tiny, bite-sized morsels instead of pummeling us into submission;

Bounced around from one real studio to the next over three months instead of doing it all in a barn or in front of a crackling fire in the night;

Waffled between, and deferred to, three different producers instead of ordering everyone around like they were his private army of Jawas; and finally,

He recorded while sober.

And yet the end result is a lovely, under-appreciated record, one you're fairly likely to pick up in any Dollar Bin to this day. I suspect a lot of casual collectors have bought Neil Young in the last 55 years based on the twin false assumptions that Joni Mitchell painted the cover (she didn't) and that it'll sound, you know, like Heart of Gold. Lucky for you, those buyers listened to the album once, understood none of it, then chucked it. So go get it already.

I remember picking up my own copy for a buck or two. It was the summer of 1992 and I had a bus ticket to take me from my grandmother's house in North San Diego all the way to my buddy Ned's parent's house in Coronado. I was 16 and had the day off from my summer camp job. Every cent of my huge $46/week salary was in my pocket and I had zero bills to pay nor any responsibilities to speak of. That sounds so awesome.

Anyway, there I was on the bus, feeling groovy. I'm not too spontaneous a guy but I saw a record store along the way and got out; there was yet another shop across the street. Encinitas, CA, was a cool place to be 30+ years ago; today I'm sure those store fronts are both dedicated to the kind of high end vegan yoga wear I'd need to take out a home loan to get into. But oh boy, just imagine how good I'd look...

Neil Young was included in my Dollar Bin haul from that afternoon, as was Time Fades Away. Who knows what else; who knows why I remember any of this.

Then again, I know exactly why I remember this: it was one of the funnest days of my life. I showed up at Ned's a few hours later and showed off my new records to a pretty big swath of 16 year old boys. No one was impressed; at that point Neil's only real claim to fame with grungy white kids was that Sonic Youth had opened for Neil the previous year. No one really cared about Sonic Youth; they only cared that Nirvana had once opened for Sonic Youth.

Poor Kurt was still alive and well at that point; he was the most famous musician on the planet. Everyone wanted to talk about him, not speculate with me about the fact that one single song seemed to take up nearly all of Neil Young's B Side.

So, instead of talking about Shakey, we spent the rest of the day, and night, driving from one 7-11 to another all over San Diego county, hunting for the most mythical of Slurpee flavors: Cinnabomb. That's a quest that I suspect a lot of 16 year old boys could still passionately get behind. Sadly, we never found Cinnabomb, but I did learn how to jump out of Ned's Vanagon with everyone else at red lights and make a lap around the car while screaming.

Good times. No, Great Times.

At that point I liked Neil but was still a year away from lifelong devotion. In a future post about Weld (uh oh, maybe I will need to do all the live records too?) I'll describe what it was like seeing him live for the first time a year earlier; I think it permanently altered the shape of my face. But I was too young to really know it yet.

After 31 years of pretty regular listening to Neil's debut, I'd argue that it demonstrates just how many different paths were open to him as he transitioned away from what was essentially a big deal boy band, Buffalo Springfield.

Neil Young opens with The Emperor of Wyoming, one of the most unique tracks Young's ever produced. As the strings play toss with Neil's slick guitars, opening a comfortable prairie scene to the sun, the wind and to our cheerful gazing eyes, we're given the immediate sense that Young could have wound up becoming a proper musician: scoring films, producing for others, you know, making music for normal people.

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Missing entirely from the track is any sense of underlying menace, and menace is always a hallmark of Young's best work. Rather, it sounds as though the fine people of Wyoming are all holding hands and working together to build their Emperor a lovely barn, a barn no one will ever convert into a recording studio. Rather, everyone will have access; the people's grain will be safe and the Emperor will bestow handfuls of flowers upon every last one.

It's an instrumental track, and how many of those are on all 45 of Neil's albums? There's all of Dead Man, of course, but that's a soundtrack album. Side 2 of Neil Young opens with another instrumental, as well, one that he seemingly had absolutely nothing to do with. And I think that's it! Neil put this great track together, then never made music like this ever again. Wow.

But there's a back story of course: I think The Emperor of Wyoming is a sequel of sorts to a track Young didn't release, in his classic, mercurial fashion, for another 40+ years. Take a listen to Slowly Burning, recorded under the Buffalo Springfield moniker a year earlier. In actuality it's Young in the studio with session musicians, teaching himself how to make beauty.

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Next up on Neil Young is The Loner, and we start to hear the Neil Young we know. There's plenty of that menace I was talking about in the song's titular character: this guy is watching you, probably right now, and if you get off the train at your station alone, he'll know that you are.

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But Neil wasn't ready to unleash such menace sonically: every sense of the chaos he'd tapped into on Mr Soul a year and half earlier is immediately strangled off on The Longer, leaving room for full strings. Young was ready to sing about creeps. But he had not yet decided to sound like one.

The drums suck on this track; the guy responsible would go off and found the band Poco, together with the album's primary bass player, Jim Messina, who is the sole member of Buffalo Springfield that Young welcomed into this project (and Messina was barely a member of the band, only playing on their last record). My famous brother will probably soon tell me that Poco is a a big deal band I ought to get into. He's wrong; I know this even though I have never listened to a Poco record; I simply have intuited that they are un poco terrible.

But back to Buffalo Springfield. I debated starting this entire project with their first record. After all, that's the first thing Neil properly released. That record is great for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it demonstrates that Stephen Stills, at least for a moment, didn't suck. But Neil Young is where we're starting!

The most important hold-over from the Springfield era on this record is producer and pianist Jack Nitzsche, one of Neil Young's three outside producers. Nitzsche is a figure of significant folklore: he's like Phil Spector's mini-me: almost as prolific, almost as genius, almost as nuts. There'll be more to say about Jack on future Shakey Sundays. For now, suffice it to say that he was once arrested for chasing his, and Neil's, former lady friend, Carrie Snodgrass, around her home with a handgun. And then, years later, he and Snodgrass got back together.

Nitzsche seems responsible for much of the greatness within the very best song on Neil Young, The Old Laughing Lady. Every version Neil's ever done of the song is wonderful. He hypnotized himself and every one else present with his coffee house version, busked it incognito on an Amsterdam street corner, rewrote it almost entirely for his 76 acoustic tour, complete with train effects, and laid it down in isolated, after hours perfection during the credits of his otherwise dull concert film Heart of Gold. Next up I hope there's a children's choir involved, singing through his vocoder.

Neil Young's studio take of Old Laughing Lady is a masterpiece. Nitzsche's piano lines are subtle and deft; his production corrects the amateur flourishes that undercut the previous year's Broken Arrow: everything is dense and sparse at once, and the backing vocals, led by the incomparable Merry Clayton a year before she laid down some of the best vocals in any rock song ever on Gimme Shelter, are a surging, moaning pulse that's, once again, unlike anything else Neil would ever put on tape.

But arguably the best thing of all on the song is the bass line. Take a listen.

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That's not Jim Messina. It's Carole Kaye, the only female member of Phil Spector's studio band, later known as The Wrecking Crew. Light years ahead of her time, Kaye is responsible for a bunch of the best notes in all the 60's. She's the bass player on Pet Sounds and Smile; her playing there reset the entire way Paul McCartney played bass. She's on La Bamba, I Hear a Symphony and Love's Forever Changes, plus hundreds of other songs we all know from the late 50's and 60's.

So why don't we talk about her all the time? Sexism people, sexism. The poor woman was abused by her music teacher when she was 13 years old and wound up marrying him and having his child at age 16. Somehow she rose above this all and broke just about every barrier you can imagine in the studio. And good for her: she bailed on the whole hideous scene two years after playing on Neil Young. Now the internet is filled with sweet images of her like this one:

But why doesn't she play on all of Neil Young? After all, she was in the sessions a year earlier that produced Expecting to Fly and Slowly Burning.

I'm guessing that a) she was too expensive for Neil (she once claimed, without bravado, that she made more as a session musician than she would if she were President of the United States), and b) Neil was already realizing that he's happiest and most successful when surrounded by lesser musicians. No offense Jim Messina, but you didn't freak Neil out with your mad skills. Carole Kaye did.

Much of the rest of the album is filler, stuff Young wrote to flesh out the record and stuff he largely has not returned to since. But most of that filler is great.

Take I've Been Waiting For You. If you set aside Young's uptight, anodyne vocals and the fact that this song is little more than a chorus and a guitar riff, you'll discover that Neil was well on his way to Prince-like studio skills. He stacks up his own organ, piano and guitars atop drums that don't suck. The whole thing, even the unfunny Ha's! in the intro, swings.

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But we've got to end this first Shakey Sunday by taking note of the most important relationship Young began during the record. Indeed he says it was one of the most important relationships in his entire life. Supposedly, Neil was hitchhiking in Topanga Canyon at some point in 68 when a guy even crazier than him, David Briggs, picked him up. I guess we'll buy into that story and wonder if we would have stopped for Neil in 1968. Before you jump to any conclusions, remember what he looked like at that point.

I don't know about you, but I'd have left his ass on the side of the road.

Briggs had no real qualifications for producing Young or anyone else at the time. But he quickly supplanted both Nitzsche and Ry Cooder in the production booth and helped Neil make more than half of Neil Young. Briggs had exactly what Neil was looking for at the time, and he's still looking for it now: sublime amateurism, both from himself and from his contributors.

Maybe Briggs taught Neil how to run around the car screaming at red lights during their first drive together; maybe not. But either way, he made Neil happy, and he started to get him truly comfortable in front of a microphone for the first time.

Thank God they found one another. Yes, some of what they made on Neil Young is mediocre for Young, and the album's never-ending final track, Last Trip To Tulsa, is one of my least favorite Neil Young songs (except when the Stray Gators are tearing it into wonderful pieces), but most of the best things we'll talk about in these upcoming posts came from the partnership between Young and Briggs.

And so I hope you're out there right now with a similarly sweet partner of any kind, digging your Shakey Sunday.

#Youtube #neil young #shakey sundays #stephen stills still sucks #carole kaye #paul mccartney #the beach boys #david briggs #jack nitzsche

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