Comes A Time - A Neil Young Page

"Hey hey, my my - Rock and roll can never die..." Neil Young's "My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)" is the song that Kurt Cobain quoted in his suicide letter:.........

"It's better to burn out, than to fade away".

The song is included in Rust Never Sleeps, one of Young's masterpieces (from 1979). Rust Never Sleeps begins with acoustic versions of ballads like "Pocahontas" and then passes over to aggressive, angry rockers. One side is acoustic, with guitar, piano and mouth organ, and the other side contains electric, raw music: the typical sound of Young's longtime backing band Crazy Horse. Young's voice raise over the pounding distorted guitars to give us a deep, spooky feeling.

Young launched the "Rust" mammoth world tour in the fall of 1978. The following summer he released his fourteenth career album Rust Never Sleeps, recorded live with the audience track subsequently removed. A terrific movie shows the legendary appearance of Young & Co. in San Francisco Cow Pallace, spotlighting both old and new, acoustic and electric music, and all performed amid oversize microphone and amp props. Film director: Bernard Shakey (alias Neil Young!). Here are some of the scores in the Rust film: "Into the Black (Hey Hey, My My)", "Goldrush", "Like a Hurrican", "Cinnamon Girl", "Sugar Mountain", "Lotta Love", "A Day In The Life" (Beatles' song), "Star Spangled Banner", "Hail Hail Rock'n'Roll" inter alia.

"There was a band playing in my ears..." Many Neil Young's songs manage to be both hard and catchy, and his music provides surprising contrasts. Rock'n'rollers are supposed to die before they get old. Neil knows it well. Maybe that's why he has affirmed many times that he refuses this kind of music. ("Rock'n'roll is like a drug. I don't take very much but when I do rock'n'roll, I fuckin' do it. But I don't want to do it all the time 'cause it'll kill me.") He changes style very often. Horse-drummer Ralph Molina says: "Neil is a genius, he has to travel down what avenue he needs to."

However, Neil Young always remains a herald of the rock. There's a feverish, mystical atmosphere in his best songs. Doesn't matter how harsh the guitar playback: his lyrics are vividly coherent and poetic. Or they sound poetic because of his voice, which is deep and nasal at the same time, anyway pleasant.
THE LONER

Neil Young was born in Toronto, Canada, on November 12, 1945. He grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba with his mother following her divorce from his father, the well-known sports journalist Scott Young. In the mid-Fifties, Neil discovered rock 'n' roll music and played it with his first semi-professional band, The Squires. "Neil Young and The Squires": the first band of a long list. All of Neil Young's bands are gone, but not forgotten: The Blue Notes, The Stills/Young Band, The Shocking Pinks, The International Harvesters, 10 Men Working, The Trans Band, Gone With The Wind Orchestra, The Lost Dogs, The Ducks, The Santa Monica Flyers, Young And Restless... In the beginning of the Sixties, Neil got interested in folk music, gaining influence from Bob Dylan. He couldn't get any gigs in Toronto, so in 1964 he decided to form the Mynah Birds, a rock band inspired by rhythm and blues. Two years later he left these disciples and drove a battered funeral car two thousand miles from Canada to Los Angeles in the hope of getting more fortune in the music business. In L.A. he met Stephen Stills. They founded a group which name was taken from some steamrollers doing roadwork in the streets. The nameplates of these steamrollers had two words - Buffalo Springfield.

Buffalo Springfield was dominated by Stephen Stills' songwriting, but Young contributed several classic originals to the band's repertoire, such as "I Am A Child" and "Mr. Soul". He already showed that his songs could not be described as fitting only one style. In the years 1966-1968, Buffalo Springfield made three records and were considered one of America's best '60s bands. Among a bunch of fine songs recorded by the group, there are also Neil Young's "Expecting To Fly" and ."Broken Arrow". Young still performs "Mr. Soul" and "Broken Arrow" in his live concerts.

Around 1968 the singer-songwriter started questioning his rock-star life with groupies and a lot of drugs. Later we will hear him whine about the hippies:

"They were lost in rock formations
or became park bench mutations"

(in "Thrasher", arguably his best song, included in Rust Never Sleeps). And in "Ambulance Blues" (album On The Beach) he sings: "You're all just pissin' in the wind."

Everything went too fast then and therefore, Neil decided to go solo in 1969. Most people would at this point avoid trying new musical ways, but not Neil Young, whose career has been shaped mostly by his utter capriciousness. His self-titled solo debut, which sees a very young Ry Cooder as co-producer and an overdubbing Jack Nitzsche in studio, included country and classical instruments ("The Loner"). Young's next move was hard to predict... He was at this time checking out a local band known as The Rockets. He liked the "un-technical" way drummer Ralph Molina, bassist Billy Talbot and guitarist Danny Whitten played. It was the spontaneous, instinctual, sloppy guitar-driven approach that made him include them in a new band - Crazy Horse. In 1969, their first record - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere - was released. With Danny Whitten, Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot. Art Direction: Ed Thrasher.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is definitely NOT an ordinary, well-produced, mainstream kind of album. "Cowgirl In The Sand" and "Down By The River" have a powerful, "rough" backing, with extended guitar epics. (This kind of guitar playing has inspired many musicians.) The album also includes "Cinnamon Girl", another classic of Young's oeuvre. At that time Neil traded his old guitar for a black 1956 Les Paul. This is the legendary instrument he still uses today and that gives him his special spiky, gritty sound, something of abysmal. Of course he has given the guitar a name: Ol' black.

In 1970, Neil Young joined Crosby, Stills and Nash as additional instrumentalist and dark horse. Steve Stills, Young's old collegue/adversary from Buffalo Springfield, was the motor of the band, David Crosby and Graham Nash were the wheels. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young debuted at the Woodstock festival, and Young wrote the lovely ballad "Helpless" for CSNY's Deja Vu album in 1970. The songs gain power thanks to Young's voice, which gives a lovely and painful feeling at the same time. Very impressive is "Ohio", a ballad about the Kent State University shootings (in which four students lost their life). But the alliance between Young and CSN lasts only one year. Young is positively against drugs, and he mislikes David Crosby's cocain habit. So he returns to his solo career. With spectacular results.

"I am just a dreamer, but you're just a dream."
(Like A Hurricane)

After The Goldrush from 1970 was a Top Ten album with melancholic folk and country ballads. His creaky ensemble, including pianist Jack Nitzsche and rotating members of Crazy Horse, transforms ramshackle folkish songs into soulful hippie hymns (like the haunting guitar epic "Southern Man"). Among the musicians: 17-years old Nils Lofgren.

"I was lying in a burned out basement
With the fool moon in my eyes..."

The first arena tour was darkened by a drama: songwriter and guitarist Danny Whitten died. Whitten, a close friend of Young's who'd given him early encouragement in his career, had been due to go out on tour with the band, but was too heavily dependent on heroin to cope.Young sent him home and the same night Whitten died of an overdose. "I loved Danny. I felt responsible," said Young. He wanted to record with Crazy Horse again, but Whitten 's death didn't make this plan come true. Instead, he teamed up with The Stray Gators, an outfit of Nashville musicians, and recorded his best selling album of all time - Harvest (1971).

In Harvest are included the well-known ballads "Heart of Gold" (Young's first No. 1 single) and "The Needle and the Damage Done", but also "Words" and "Alabama", which sounded very much like the low-down songs of Crazy Horse.

"I come to you and see all this ruin,
what are you doing Alabama?
You got the rest of the union to help you along,
what's going wrong?"

These lyrics made the band Lynyrd Skynyrd write "Sweet Home Alabama" in protest.

After Harvest had clocked up sales running into millions, Young's fans were horrified first by the release of the double album Journey Through The Past, a pastiche served as the soundtrack to a Young-conceived film. After Journey... came out, the film company refused to release the movie, to Young's continuing disgust.

The live recording Time Fades Away (1973 - with The Stray Gators) finds him singing in a tremulous voice pure soft-rock melodies. He refused to make an expected follow-up of Harvest and lost a lot of aficionados because his changing of style. Feeling boxed in by commercial success, Young had steered away from it. The chart performance of "Heart Of Gold" had brought him a lot of things he found he didn't want. "I was still only 23 or 24, and I realized I had a long way to go and this wasn't going to be the most satisfying thing, just sittin' around basking in the glory of having a hit record. It's really a very shallow experience, it's actually a very empty experience." Next came the tragedy of Bruce Berry's death. Berry, a CSNY's roadie, died of a drug overdose, just like Danny Whitten. In came the aching Tonight's The Night (1975, but already 1973 produced by Dave Briggs), recorded with Crazy Horse reconstituted after the lost of Whitten. Molina (vocals and drums), Talbot (vocals and bass), guitarist Nils Lofgren and steel-guitar player Ben Keith got stoned for the recording, as well as Young. Many people consider Tonight's The Night Young's best album ever. It's an apocalyptic work, filled with personal pain, dedicated to Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry. Neil Young once explained: "The whole thing is about life, dope and death". In the same year he also recorded the proto-grunge Zuma, named after Zuma Beach in L.A., where Young owned a house. Zuma features a new Crazy Horse line-up with Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot and guitarist Frank Sampredo as Whitten's substitute.

GO TO PART TWO