What I Learned By Listening to All of Neil Young's Albums in Order
On my personal blog I sometimes embark on projects where I listen to all of a legacy artist’s albums in order, writing up a post for each period. In the past I’ve done Dyland and Springsteen; this spring I decided to tackle Neil Young partly because his music was back on Spotify after he dropped his objections. I am one of the weirdos who subscribes to his Archives streaming service, so it was less that I had been deprived of his music, and more that the news reminded me of what an important artist he has been for me for so long.
Listening to all of his music was quite an undertaking, more daunting than for other legacy artists due to the sheer volume of material he has put out through his Archives project. Only Bob Dylan’s bootleg series rivals it in scope. In Young’s case, there were six live recordings from the same two-month period in the winter of 1970-1971! There was everything from a recording of him playing bars with a band called The Ducks in 1977 to several “lost” albums.
You can read the entire series if you want, but if you’re not the world’s biggest Neil-head I can give you the takeaways here.
Feel Trumps Virtuosity in Rock and Roll
Young has played with several groups in his career, from Promise of the Real more recently to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Pearl Jam, and Buffalo Springfield in the past. He has played most often with Crazy Horse, and those records are his best playing with a group. The thing is, as I say in my series, “to say they are not great musicians would be like saying Joan Crawford wasn't much of a mother.” The rhythm section of Ralph Molina on drums and Billy Talbot on bass can sound like a shopping cart with a busted wheel. Danny Whitten (RIP) and Frank “Poncho” Sampedro on guitar are hardly Clapton, but they know how to chop wood. Nils Lofgren handles the axe now, but he intentionally plays below his exceptional skill level because he understands what’s needed in this context.
Whatever Crazy Horse’s technical limitations, they have an amazing feel that Young vibes well with. What struck me when listening to all of Neil Young’s records was that whenever he went back to Crazy Horse after time away, Young would be revitalized. The best evidence comes from one of the great gems of the Archives project: Way Down in the Rust Bucket. It’s a 1990 recording of Young and the Horse at a bar in Santa Cruz prepping for the Weld tour. They play the recently released songs from Ragged Glory with even more immediacy than on the record, and rip through some old favorites, too. Young spent the 80s flailing and engaging in dead-end genre experiments, but his return to Crazy Horse had him making some of the best music of his career.
Live Performance Matters
Speaking of his best music, delving into the Archives revealed Neil Young’s abilities as a live performer. There were eras in his career where I did not care for his studio albums, but his live performances could give the material more punch and immediacy. For example, his 1980s country album Old Ways is kind of turgid, with too many Nashville Sound production touches. The live versions on A Gift, however, were really enjoyable. It even sounded like the musicians were having fun. I felt the same way about Young’s time with Promise of the Real in the 2010s. His songs were getting really cringe and didactic, which you would expect on an album called The Monsanto Years. While the lyrics still sounded like a sung blog post when performed live, there was an immediacy that came from delivering the message to a live audience. Young’s most recent release, Fu##in’ Up is a recent live recording where he sounds as energetic and vibrant as ever.
At its heart, music is meant to be played to another person, not captured in the grooves of records or the bytes of computer files. I heard this most powerfully on the solo acoustic live albums from the early 70s. Young wrote some of his best songs in this era, but they sound even better live. You can tell the ways that he feeds on the energy of the crowd as well. When the crowd is especially good, like on the Roxy live show from 1973, the results are stunning. So many legacy artists are kinda lame live. Not Neil.
Don’t Be Afraid To Try New Things And Fail
Young famously diverged so much from his old styles in the 1980s that his record label sued him for not producing “representative” music. He did a rockabilly record (Everbody’s Rockin’), a country album (Old Ways), a blues record (This Note’s For You), and an 80s corporate rock sound synthesizer record (Landing On Water.) None of these are good, but out of this experimentation, Young also produced Trans, an electro-rock record that sounded like Kraftwerk by way of Malibu. He was attacked for it at the time, but today it sounds refreshing. A follower online suggested that Neil Young in the 1980s constituted the most epic midlife crisis in music history. There’s something to this, considering that Young’s son Ben was dealing with severe cerebral palsy and Young himself made caring for him his focus rather than his music. Middle age is typically a time when carefree youth ends and the daily realities of increased responsibilities can be suffocating.
Instead of just falling back on what had worked for him, Young used this crisis moment to get weird. Apart from Trans, the results are mid at best. Part of the issue was that Young’s distinctive voice doesn’t really work with country, blues, or rockabilly, which require a certain style of singing. His songwriting style also did not mesh well with these genres because he is a folkie and rocker at heart. Nevertheless, I think these failed experiments are why he made such great music in the 90s, music as good as any made in his supposed glory days. Sometimes you have to leave home to understand why you love it in the first place. Young’s time in the wilderness helped him rediscover what made him good.
Rust Never Sleeps
After listening to all of Young’s albums my favorite is still Rust Never Sleeps. Young has managed to neither burn out nor fade away and has remembered that rust, indeed, never sleeps. He still puts out a new album every year, just like he did back in the 70s. Almost nobody does this nowadays, legacy artist or not. When listening to some of his more recent albums I wished that he had taken his time and made one really great record instead of five pretty good ones. This is the approach Bob Dylan took with Rough and Rowdy Ways, which is polished rather than shambolic. After thinking about it for awhile, I realized that the rough nature of Young’s records is the whole point. Their spontaneity and rough edges reflect the chaos of creativity, something Young is dedicated to maintaining.
Sometimes, the results are less than optional, but that’s worth it for the more thrilling moments that emerge. The song “Human Race” from his recent album Barn was evidently conceived while Young was walking from his house to the barn where he records. The recording practically bursts from the speakers, reflecting the fevered moment it was conceived in and the anger about the state of the world it emerged from. Considering that Young pulled this off in his seventies it’s a kind of miracle.
On this last point, I found Neil Young’s career to be particularly inspiring. He has been putting out records for almost 60 years, and some of what he has produced as a septuagenarian stands right with what he could do in his twenties. We should all be so fortunate. Long may he run.