Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Psychedelic Pill/Americana

I admit it - my first reaction to hearing about Neil Young & Crazy Horse putting out a collection of songs that I learned in grade school was “WTF?”  After that, I wondered “why?”  But being a longtime NY fan, my curiosity got the better of me and I bought a copy of Americana at the same time I bought Psychedelic Pill.  What the hell, why not?  It’s NY & Crazy Horse – what could go wrong?  Then I remembered these were the same guys who made Life and Re*ac*tor, neither of which are works for which they’d want to be remembered.

So I put the CD on in the car, and I heard the music to Oh Susannah and thought to myself “I’ve heard this before…”  Then it occurred to me – they “borrowed” the tune from Venus [think the Shocking Blues, or even Bananarama] and sang Oh Susannah over it.  Odd as that may sound it worked out pretty well.  NY and Frank Sampedro sliced and diced with their guitars, while bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina were locked in like the nine years they spent apart hadn’t happened.  Clementine and Jesus’ Chariot have the same kind of Indian beat as F*#kin’ Up [from Ragged Glory] and Goin’ Home [from Are You Passionate?].  Tom Dula is the same song as Tom Dooley, though the Crazy Horse arrangement isn’t quite what the Kingston Trio had in mind in the 1950s.  Gallows Pole does not resemble what Led Zeppelin did in any way.  Until I bought Americana, I never heard High Flyin’ Bird, so I have nothing to compare it to.  Now that I have, I’m reminded of another cover done by NY & Crazy Horse – Farmer John.  These songs are ok, but they just strike me as…odd.  After having my mind completely blown by these songs, NY and company go acoustic with Wayfaring Stranger.  They did an excellent job with this one.

The Silhouettes’ Get a Job is a very odd choice for the Horse treatment.  Crazy Horse was a doo wop group long before they ever picked up any instruments, but never in my weirdest dreams did I think NY would give a doo wop song [or any of these other songs] the garage band.   Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land does not fare well here, nor does God Save the Queen.  I was a bit disappointed when I heard God Save the Queen and it wasn’t the Sex Pistols’ song.  I thought it would be cool for NY to sing a Johnny Rotten song thirty-five years after singing about Johnny Rotten, but it was not to be.

Why Neil Young opted to release Americana I haven’t a clue, but I’ve long since given up trying to figure out what motivates him.  He’s notorious for scrapping entire albums at the last minute [Chrome Dreams anyone?], and releasing some off-the-wall stuff [Everybody’s Rocking, Trans, etc]. If the purpose of Americana was for NY & Crazy Horse to get re-acquainted, that’s ok – I get that, but did the public have to be clued in?  This could have stayed in Neil’s private collection and nobody would miss it.  Americana did serve a purpose – it got the band warmed up to produce something good - I just didn’t have to hear it.

Best cuts – Oh Susannah, Wayfaring Stranger.  The rest – meh... File Americana with Life – for completists only.

Forty-two years ago Neil Young appeared on an album called Déjà Vu with Crosby, Stills & Nash.  Here it is in 2012, NY and Crazy Horse released Psychedelic Pill. There is definitely a feeling that the music contained therein is something I’ve heard before.  I know that will read like a slam on NY, but Psychedelic Pill is the album some of us have been waiting for over twenty years for him to make.  It’s a hell of a lot better than his last effort with Crazy Horse [the 2003 concept album Greendale].  To borrow a phrase from Martha Stewart, this is a good thing. On Psychedelic Pill there are two kinds of songs – short, pleasant songs that might get played on the radio, and monster epic jams, of which there are three.  As with all NY & Crazy Horse albums, the less NY sings and the more the band plays, the better the album.

Driftin’ Back – Musically this is a neat song – it lasts for almost 28 minutes (!).  It starts with NY on acoustic guitar, but then as he’s “driftin’ back” into time, Crazy Horse comes out of the haze and lays down the groove NY will play over.  The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse come roaring out of the fog – goody!  While the Horse is laying down the groove, NY gets to improvise quite a bit.  Lyrically he’s still the cranky “old man.”  On 2009’s Fork in the Road he complained how downloaded music “sounds like shit.”  On Driftin’ Back he’s still complaining [while plugging his memoir Waging Heavy Peace] about how crappy music sounds today – Dreamin’ ‘bout the way things sound now/Write about them in my book/Worry that you can’t hear me now…When you hear my song now/ You only get five percent/ You used to get it all…He also bitches about the corporatization of art - I used to dig Picasso/ Then the big tech giant came along and turned him into wallpaper…He repeats I’m driftin’ back so much I thought it was like a mantra the first time I heard it – and guess what, it is!  He even says as much. 

Psychedelic Pill - I’ve heard the song Psychedelic Pill twice before – Sign of Love from 2010’s Le Noise, and Dirty Old Man from 2007’s Chrome Dreams II.  All three songs have the same riff.  On the new album it’s presented twice – with and without phasing so you can pick and choose which version you like.  If he was John Fogerty instead of Neil Young, he would be sued by Saul Zaentz for sounding like himself.  But if you can’t copy yourself, who can you copy?  I like it anyway.  For the record, I go for the phased version.

Ramada Inn – The second of three epic jams on Psychedelic Pill, this one looks at an old married couple who’ve been through it all [raising kids, alcoholism, the normal ups and downs of married life, etc]. 

Born in Ontario – Helpless gets an electrified sequel.  Here he admits to writing songs "to make sense of my inner rage."  He likes to write happy songs but sometimes things piss him off [Ohio, Living With War, etc].

Twisted Road – NY pays homage to three of his musical heroes – Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead.  After each time NY sings the chorus Walkin’ with devil on a twisted road/listen to the Dead on the radio/That old time music used to soothe my soul/If I ever get home I’m gonna let the good times roll…you hear the riff from the Dead’s Friend of the Devil.  He dreams of singing in a place where he “first saw Roy,” and he remembers what a joy it was to hear Dylan sing “how does it feel” for the first time.  Here’s a man who definitely yearns for radio the way things used to be, when DJs played what they wanted to play and not what their corporate masters want them to play.

She’s Always Dancing – At over eight minutes this would normally be considered a “long” song, but with NY everything is relative.  Since three songs on Psychedelic Pill clock in over 16 minutes, this one is a short song in comparison.  I’m not sure if NY is playing the same song as the rest of the band, but somehow it works.  It has an interesting a capella beginning, then suddenly the band fades in with all guns blazing.

For the Love of Man – NY’s ode to his son Ben.  Crazy Horse slows it down, turns down the volume and the whole thing still works.  This is probably the most poignant song I’ve heard from NY in awhile.

Walk Like a Giant – Eureka!  This takes me back to the time of Rust Never Sleeps/Live Rust.  This has Cortez the Killer, Like a Hurricane, Hey Hey, My My [Into the Black], and Tonight’s The Night all rolled into one.  Barrages of feedback and distortion abound like they did on those recordings from that previous era.  NY comments on his status in the rock world many years ago and compares that to what he feels it is today - I used to walk like a giant on the land/Now I feel like a leaf on the stream...He comments on the idealism from his youth and how the real world crushed that idealism - Me and some of my friends/We were gonna to save the world/We were trying to make it better/We were ready save the world/But the weather changed and white got stained and it fell apart/And it broke my heart...This echoes the same sentiment he expressed on Just Singing a Song from 2009’s Fork in the Road [Just singin’ a song won’t change the world...].  This from the same guy who dedicated an entire album to raging against the Iraq War – that’s quite a revelation to make.  At the end, Ralph Molina pounds his drums as if to sound like a walking giant.  After awhile the rest of the band joins in the “walking giant” noise.

Psychedelic Pill is NY & Crazy Horse’s best album since 1994’s Sleeps With Angels, and very good album in its own right.  It is an album of the type I thought he would never make again.  Even though there are lyrical themes and music passages that give one a sense of déjà vu, Psychedelic Pill is still worth every penny you spend.  It belongs with other greats like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Zuma, Ragged Glory, the aforementioned Sleeps With Angels, and Rust Never Sleeps/Live Rust – a must for any Neil Young collection.

Neil Young - Sleeps With Angels

I have almost everything Neil Young has recorded [and released] with Crazy Horse.  I’ve seen him perform live with Crazy Horse twice, so I think I know what to expect when I see the two names linked together.  I expect long guitar jams, extremely high volume, ear-splitting feedback and mind-altering distortion.  So that was what I thought I'd get when NY & Crazy Horse released Sleeps With Angels in 1994.  However, these guys decided to throw me and their fans a filthy breaking ball, and I mean that in a good way.  Sleeps With Angels is one of the most subdued performances from them.

Kurt Cobain killed himself in April 1994.  In his suicide note, he quoted Neil Young’s song Hey Hey, My My [Into the Black] – “it’s better to burn out than to fade away…”  Neil just published his memoirs, titled Waging Heavy Peace.  About Cobain’s suicide note, NY had this to say - “When he died and left that note, it struck a deep chord inside of me. It fucked with me.”  That isn’t all he had to say on the subject - he recorded Sleeps With Angels.  Apparently when Cobain’s suicide happened, NY and the Horse were already in the studio. This tragic event steered NY in the direction to make this album a song cycle about death, along the lines of Tonight’s The Night. 

My Heart – With NY on tack piano, Frank Sampedro on bass marimba and Billy Talbot on vibes, this is a very unusual beginning to an album with Crazy Horse.  It would be right at home on After the Gold Rush.  There’s the pastoral image of a shepherd who sees his flock and a shooting star, the first metaphor of death on an album filled with them – “A star is falling down from someone's hand…” 

Prime of Life – With another unusual choice of musical instruments, NY plays a Tibetan flute to color this song.  I have no idea who’s life he’s singing about, but he keeps asking the question - Are you feeling all right /Not feeling too bad myself /Are you feeling all right,my friend?

Driveby – Suddenly after NY asks “are you feeling all right” in Prime of Life, you get Driveby, where someone is struck down at random, someone who is in the “prime of life.”  This is a story of someone NY knew who was killed in a driveby shooting and the randomness of how somebody can be here today and suddenly gone tomorrow [“like a shooting star…”].  For a song with Crazy Horse, the instrumentation is very different.  The Billy Talbot/Ralph Molina rhythm section assume their normal bass/drums roles, but NY plays the acoustic guitar while second guitarist Frank Sampedro plays the piano.

Sleeps With Angels – This is the one song that is specifically about Kurt Cobain and his wife Courtney Love.  This is a quick and dirty meditation on Kurt Cobain’s suicide that has the thunder one normally expects from Crazy Horse.

Western Hero – Like Driveby, NY plays acoustic guitar while Frank Sampedro takes the piano.  Western Hero shares the same melody as Train of Love.  Here NY talks of a man who “fought for you” and “fought for me” on the beaches of Normandy, but now is “just a memory.”  To me, this is a song about another dead guy.  It continues the “songs of death” cycle.

Change Your Mind – This is the centerpiece of Sleeps With Angels.  Clocking in at 14:40, it has the look and sound of Down by the River and Cowgirl in the Sand from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.  This one stresses the importance of having love in someone’s life, as if that is the way to get through life and enables on to “fade away” gracefully rather than take Cobain’s method of “burn out.”  Even the music seems to enforce that message – when NY sings about being confused and the world is getting you down, it’s all in minor chords.  But when the message of hope [the “change your mind” bit] are all in major chords.  It’s like alternating between sad and happy. 

Blue Eden – Rarely does one see a song on a Neil Young album credited to anyone besides Neil Young.  This one credits all four guys with songwriting, which tells me this is a made-in-the-studio jam.  The somewhat anarchic character of the music was my second clue.  It’s anarchic, and it’s bleak.  The words are a mash – it’s like an overview of the album.  The words came from three other songs from Sleeps With Angels [my third clue]:

Embracing, distorting, supporting, comforting

Convincing you, consoling you

Controlling you, destroying you

All over you

[from Change Your Mind]

I know someday we'll meet again

We come and go that way my friend

It's part of me, it's part of you

[from Train of Love]

You feel invincible, it's just a part of life

You feel invincible, it's just a part of life

[from Driveby]

Safeway Cart – This one has a sinister vibe.  The music is bleak.  Mostly it alternates between E Minor and G, but every so often B Minor and C sneak in there.  Frank Sampedro plays the Oberheim and Wurlitzer piano in the background to set the mood while NY quietly strums his guitar.  NY blows a heavily distorted harmonica that sounds like an air raid siren.  Wherever this “safeway cart” rolls down the street, “it’s a ghetto dawn.”  It sounds like someplace I don’t want to be.

Train of Love – After the dust settles from Change Your Mind, Blue Eden and Safeway Cart, here’s another pastoral piece where the singer tries to make sense of what just happened.  Train of Love recycles the melody and arrangement from Western Hero.

Trans Am – Lyrically, I’ve got nothing here – the meaning escapes me.  Sometimes that happens with NY’s songs.  Sometimes only he “gets it.”  But the music is ok… 

Piece of Crap – This song is a gratuitous piece of comic relief bemoaning the lack of quality in manufactured goods, especially what one would buy from QVC. 

A Dream That Can Last – Sleeps With Angels ends here on a note of guarded optimism.  Like My Heart, NY plays an upright tack piano while he sings about heaven and hope.

Sleeps With Angels would end up being the last album NY would make with producer David Briggs, who died of lung cancer the following year.  From what I’ve read about David Briggs, he was the only guy who could tell NY when the emperor had no clothes.  Between playing the grand piano, the Wurlitzer, Oberheim, bass marimba and guitar, Frank Sampedro is this album’s MVP who finally put to rest any comparisons with the long-lost Danny Whitten.  Sleeps With Angels is one of the most musically diverse albums Neil Young has recorded with Crazy Horse.  This album is a lost nugget in the huge Neil Young discography.

Neil Young - Rust Never Sleeps

Awhile ago I wrote on one of my favorite Neil Young albums, On the Beach. I thought I’d step back into the time machine and look at another Neil Young gem. Rust Never Sleeps is one of those few albums that one gets to see two sides of Neil Young. One side is the acoustic folk hippie first encountered on Harvest. The other side is the future “Godfather of Grunge” with a little bit of punk thrown in for good measure. This album came out in June 1979, when vinyl was still king and there were two sides to an album. On Rust Never Sleeps, the two sides of Neil are neatly divided. Side 1 has all the acoustic songs, one of which was recorded circa 1975 [Pocahontas] and the other recorded with Nicolette Larson [RIP] during the Comes a Time period [Sail Away]. This is the second time where Neil uses the device of using the same song to begin and end the album [Tonight’s the Night being the first]. He’s use this device again with 1989’s Freedom [Rockin’ in the Free World]. The album begins with the acoustic My My, Hey Hey [Out of the Blue], and the electric version Hey Hey, My My [Into the Black]. Except for the aforementioned Pocahontas and Sail Away, the rest of Rust Never Sleeps was recorded live at various venues in 1978. The audiences were for the most part mixed out, but from time to time you can hear them.

In My My, Hey Hey [Out of the Blue] Neil has two rock icons on his mind – Elvis Presley and Johnny Rotten. Elvis died only a year before these tracks were recorded [the King is gone but he’s not forgotten…], but with the advent of punk the torch had been passed to another generation [this is the story of Johnny Rotten…]. He laments its better to burn out like the punks than to fade away like Elvis. I’m not sure about Thrasher, but there does seem to be commentary on Crosby, Stills & Nash [they had the best selection, they were poisoned with protection, there was nothing that they needed, nothing left to find…so I got bored and left them there, they were just dead weight to me, better down the road without that load…]. Ride My Llama is just plain strange, with Neil playing guitars with aliens and then deciding to ride his llama from Peru to Texarkana. Pocahontas, one of Neil Young’s most enduring songs [and one of my favorites of his] is a track from the lost album Chrome Dreams. It is Neil’s lament on the condition of the American Indian, with references to American pop culture thrown in [Marlon Brando, the Astrodome, televisions, etc]. These days he plays the song with an electric arrangement. I like the acoustic treatment here much better. As he tells the Indians’ tale of woe he sings the song from the first-person point of view as if he was an Indian himself. Did he ever get to sleep with Pocahontas to see how she felt? He wonders if he and Pocahontas get to talk with Marlon Brando [he who sent an Indian actress to refuse his Oscar™ for The Godfather] around a campfire about TV and other stuff. I like Neil’s surrealism. J His use of the surreal is one of his enduring qualities. Its like he channels Salvador Dali at times. Sail Away is a lovely duet with Nicolette Larson. It would have fit in right along the songs from Comes a Time. That’s good enough for me.

Powderfinger kicks off Side 2. Neil’s lyrics immediately take us back to a distant time, perhaps right after the Civil War [look out Mama there’s a white boat comin’ up the river with a big red beacon and a flag and a man on the rail, I think you’d better call John cause it don’t look like he’s here to deliver the mail…and it’s less than a mile away, I hope they didn’t come to stay, it’s got numbers on the side and a gun and it’s makin’ big waves]. Whose white boat was it – the Feds? Again told from the first-person point of view [Daddy’s gone, my brothers out huntin’ in the mountain], the protagonist is the 22-year old guy left alone to do the thinking, only to find himself killed by the guys “when the first shot hit the dock.” Were Neil and his family moonshiners? The song doesn’t really say. This is another NY favorite of mine [two in one album!]. Welfare Mothers is very repetitious – the riff, the background vocals [Welfare Mothers make better lovers…]. What else are you going to do with a song about getting it on with divorced moms on welfare? It’s a bit of harmless fun. Sedan Delivery is more in the punk aesthetic. But it’s all stream of consciousness, meeting Caesar and Cleo in the Milky Way, getting away from it all, meeting a woman with varicose veins, etc. His sedan delivery job was really hard to find, as he tells us over and over again. It’s more harmless fun. The Ramones would be proud. The finale is Hey Hey, My My [Into the Black], the counterpoint to My My, Hey Hey [Out of the Blue]. End the album as begun, only with high volume, much distortion, phenobarbital riffs.

Back when Rolling Stone magazine was a music magazine and its editors’ opinions meant something to some people, they named Rust Never Sleeps their Album of the Year for 1979. After this and the live album Live Rust that came out four months later, Neil’s artistic output became both erratic and extremely frustrating to his fans. To wit, NY wouldn’t return to this standard of excellence until 1989’s Freedom. Regardless of what came later, Rust Never Sleeps is a testament to Neil Young’s validity in the face of the onslaught that was punk. A must have!