To the millions who adored Neil Young`s great work from the `70s, the last decade was a spectacular letdown.
After such transcendent albums as ”Everybody Knows This is Nowhere” in 1969, ”After the Gold Rush” in 1970, ”Tonight`s the Night” in 1975 and
”Rust Never Sleeps” in 1979, Young has spent the last 10 years flitting from style to style like a moth banging on a chain of lightbulbs.
Only now is Young coming to terms with what happened and why. He alludes to those frustrations in a line from his new album, ”Ragged Glory”
(Reprise), his first truly great record since the `70s: ”Why do I keep
(expletive) up?”
In a series of conversations while shooting two videos recently in California, Young supplied some answers. He was tired after spending several days on location-”I feel like a 90-year-old rocker,” he laughed-but exhilarated. He was happy to be reunited with his longtime band, Crazy Horse, and clearly thrilled that with ”Ragged Glory” he had finally nailed a winner after 10 years of records that left even their maker uncertain about his relevance.
”I was about as conscious of what I was doing the last 10 years as that moth,” he says. ”Times change. Things happen.”
A lot of crazy, agonizing things happened to Young in what should have been the happiest time of his life. Just as he was being hailed as the premier rocker of the decade in the Village Voice at the tail end of the `70s, Young and his wife, Pegi, discovered that their newborn child, Ben, had cerebral palsy. Young`s older son by a previous marriage, Zeke, has the same affliction.
It was a heartbreak that turned Young`s life upside down and made his music an afterthought. For 18 months in 1980-81, he and his wife worked with Ben under a rigorous 7-day-a-week rehabilitation program that left them both exhausted.
The first sign that something was askew in Young`s life came in 1982, with the release of ”Trans,” an album made almost entirely of computer music.
Later, Young described it as ”the beginning of my search for communication with a severely handicapped nonoral person”-his son. But to the public, it was the start of Young`s ”weird” period.
”Trans” began a string of albums in which Young crammed himself into one ill-fitting suit after another: the slicked-backed rockabilly throwback in ”Everybody`s Rockin` ” (1983), the country hayseed in ”Old Ways” (1985)
and the veteran blues man in ”This Note`s For You” (1988). His old record company, Geffen, even filed a $3 million lawsuit accusing him of making intentionally noncommercial, ”unrepresentative” music.
The more he was criticized, the more ornery Young became. If Geffen didn`t want him to make a country record because it wouldn`t sell, that was all the reason he needed to add another weepy steel guitar to the mix. ”The more they tried to stop me, the more I did it,” he told Rolling Stone magazine.
Looking back on his six-year stint with Geffen, Young insists that he recorded a ”lot of great things,” but that in general ”it was the worst period of my working life. I felt I was being manipulated, and I began manipulating back. It was all so anti-creative. Making music had become a hassle.
”I was struggling to make the music in my soul. People were fighting me every step of the way, and it was distorting things. I wonder now if I would`ve made this music anyway, or if it was just my angry reaction to what the record company was doing.”
Young pauses. ”But it was all real, it was all a part of my life, and I can`t turn my back on that.”
He switched in 1988 from Geffen back to his old label, Reprise, and recorded the R&B-inspired ”This Note`s For You” with a band of hired guns, dubbed the Blue Notes. The subsequent tour, which played Poplar Creek Music Theatre in August 1988, was uneven, but two songs proved there was life in the grizzled old boy yet: a winding acoustic narrative called ”60 to 0” and a searing ”Tonight`s the Night,” in which Young wailed on his black guitar like a mad man, the only extended guitar solo of the night.
Young next stripped the Blue Notes down to a three-piece band and recorded a blistering set of speed metal in New York, the hardest, loudest, most intense music he had made in years, which he collected on a five-track EP, ”Eldorado.”
Then he put the crowning touch on a decade of perversely anti-commercial moves: Young pressed only 5,000 copies and released the EP in New Zealand, all but assuring that it wouldn`t be heard by the majority of his fans in America. `I didn`t want the thing reviewed, subject to all sorts of analysis about what Neil Young`s new style was and what it meant,” he says. ”I wanted to make something for my audience in a high-quality format (compact disc) that could be easily bootlegged.”
The album he eventually released for the domestic market later in 1989,
”Freedom,” was a hodgepodge of acoustic ballads, anthemic rockers and watered down ”Eldorado” tracks. It was a mess, but with one performance on Sept. 30, 1989, Young nearly redeemed it, and showed the nation he was back on course.
Accompanied by Frank ”Poncho” Sampedro on rhythm guitar, Steve Jordan on drums and Charlie Drayton on bass, he took the tiny stage by storm on
”Saturday Night Live” to play ”Rockin` in the Free World.” The straw-haired Young, clad in a leather jacket, jeans and gym shoes, jumped from the drum riser, flailed his guitar overhead and wheeled in and out of camera range. The music that poured from the amplifiers shook the studio and drowned out his lyrics.
Young relishes the memory.
”That was the most focused I`d been in a long time,” he says. ”There`s no way to be great on TV with all the distractions, so we didn`t involve ourselves with the show in any way: no skits, we didn`t want to wave at the audience, none of that. We just ignored all those people.
”I was on another floor the day of the show, working out with my trainer. By the time we played, I was jacked up; my blood was pumping at about the same level it is when I`m halfway through a show. I was determined not to be part of the entertainment. It was just going to be me, my guitar and my band, and we hit it.”
It was a performance reminiscent of the ”Rust Never Sleeps” tour, the last time Young had rocked with such unadorned abandon.
”Playing rock is a completely draining experience,” he explains.
”That`s why I don`t play with Crazy Horse all the time or make a rock album every year-it would kill me.”
Young had worked with Crazy Horse-Sampedro, drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot-as recently as 1987, on the mediocre ”Life” album. But Young found the trio`s musicianship lacking during the preliminary sessions for ”This Note`s For You” and cut them loose.
It wasn`t until last winter that his interest in working with Crazy Horse was piqued again. Young was weeding through 27 years worth of tapes and films for a retrospective of his career, ”Decade II,” a multi-CD set which may finally be released in late 1991.
Young`s journey into his musical past revealed ”a consistent pattern:
When I played with Crazy Horse I looked and felt and sounded the best. I already knew that, but looking through all those tapes made it real obvious.” As obvious as ”Cinnamon Girl,” ”Cowgirl in the Sand,” ”Tonight`s the Night,” ”Like a Hurricane” and ”Powderfinger,” all of which captured the synergy of Young and Crazy Horse in their `70s prime.
So Young got on the phone and patched things up with his old band mates.
”I told them we hadn`t peaked yet, that we could take the music further,” Young says. More importantly, unlike the Blue Note sessions, he had written material that fit the band`s style: raw, open-ended guitar rock.
The four set up at Young`s ranch in the hills southeast of San Francisco and promptly defied record-industry convention by recording all the tracks live.
”We can`t play very well, we don`t have great chops, but we have great feel and we like playing together,” Young says. ”When I write these songs, I envisioned a lot of jams, not so much guitar solos but excursions that slow down and speed up.”
The 10 tracks on ”Ragged Glory” aren`t tailored to commercial radio specifications. Most end with a long, corrosive note of feedback; two tracks-”Love to Burn” and ”Love and Only Love”-are each more than 10 minutes long.
”No one else is making this kind of music these days,” he says. ”Once music made that turn toward perfection in the `70s, with the multi-track recordings and the polished sound and producers spending three days just getting the drum sound right, people began playing like machines. We wanted to explore the music.”
The cautionary tales of love, yearning and revelation on ”Ragged Glory” resonate even more deeply because of Young`s personal ordeals. His son Ben is communicating more; Zeke remains in the care of his mother, actress Carrie Snodgrass; and he and his wife have started the Bridge School in San Francisco, a learning center for handicapped children such as Ben and Zeke.
”Well I was in a hurry, but that don`t matter now/`cause I had to get off that road of tears somehow,” Young sings in ”Mansion on the Hill.”
”Love and peace may be hippie values, but to me they`re bywords for the
`90s,” he says. ”This record is about me working out my problems, it sounds friendlier to me. When I`m angry and frustrated, it reassures me. When I listen to it, it puts me back on course.”
