Neil Young's Blues Revival

by David Browne

You could hear the groans all the way back east. Last fall, Neil Young began a string of unannounced gigs in California clubs, fronting, of all things, a large, horn-heavy band called the Bluenotes. It seemed like the final insult, the depressing cap to the decade in which one of the foremost singer-songwriters reduced his career to one attention-getting gimmick after another: synth rocker one minute, rockabilly cat or right-wing honky-tonk balladeer the next. Shying from the bitter and often scathing dissections of stardom and the music business that characterized his best Seventies work, Neil Young of the Eighties instead opted to become his generation's consummate weirdo, trivializing his monolithic accomplishments and putting his future in question.

This Note's For You, the album that is the result of this spurt of activity, seems on first listen another false step, another byway Young can use to duck the nagging issue of artistic commitment. Opening with a walking bass line and a swaggering blast of horns that wouldn't sound out of place on The Tonight Show, "Ten Men Workin'" introduces both the band and the record's motif: "We are men at work we got a job to do," sings Young. "We gotta keep you rockin' to keep your soul from the blues." In comparison, the semistoned mumbling that began Tonight's The Night and the sweeping strings on "The Wayward Wind", the opening cut of Old Ways, seem downright orthodox.

At this point, loyal Young fans who still remember Everybody's Rockin', his 1983 neo-rockabilly toss-off, may be tempted to leave the room. They do so, however, at their own risk. This Note's For You is not merely the most spirited work Young has done in some time. A recasting of his considerable strengths in the unlikeliest of settings, it is also his first conceptually successful record of the Eighties. (It may be a coincidence, but the album also marks Young's return to the reactivated Reprise label, where he enjoyed his greatest artistic and commercial successes.) Most important, from his recharged guitar chops to the juke-joint stomp of the Bluenotes - a nine-piece band that includes a six-man horn section and two longtime Young band mates, Ben Keith on alto saxophone and Crazy Horse's Frank Sampedro on keyboards - This Note's For You is a rediscovery of the joys of spontaneity and unbridled human emotion and, especially, the benefits of being Neil Young.

With This Note's For You, one can simply revel in the album's raunchy, robust big-band swing and the blues-band gestures - off-key call-and-response vocals from the band, solid shuffle rhythms and the corniest of saxophone solos. The songs, all Young originals, rework the standard cliches: "Well I lost my job thinkin' about you / Now there's another man workin' in my place"; "Well my money's gone / And so are you." But Young's gloriously atonal guitar playing shows that this is no Ry Cooder-type archival study. Spitting off spare leads in "Ten Men Workin'" and "Married Man," Young proves himself a more than capable blues guitarist; the barrelhouse rocker "Hey Hey" employs a relentlessly sloppy slide guitar that takes on the whole horn section and wins.

Young is clearly having fun with the blues concept, as when he rebuffs a barroom temptress in "Married Man" and, on "Hey Hey," good-naturally sings, "Get off that couch / Turn off that MTV." The downright bouncy and unexpectedly sentimental "Sunny Inside" features a swell of horns that would have made Blood, Sweat and Tears blush. At the very least, the album reveals that Young has regained his off-beat sense of humor. In "This Note's For You," a swipe at corporate sponsorship that's also the album's most urgent rocker, he spits out, "Ain't singin' for Pepsi / Ain't singin' for Coke / I don't sing for nobody / Makes me look like a joke." With twisted glee in his voice, in the next verse he adds, "I won't sing for politicians / Ain't singin' for Spuds."

But the album truly shines when Young slows down the pace and turns inward. Both "Coupe de Ville" and "Can't Believe Your Lyin'" forsake huffing and puffing in favor of an intimate after-hours setting, with brushed drums, muted trumpet and Young's own light picking. "Coupe de Ville," which recalls the moroseness of such Young angst chronicles as "On the Beach," is a lilting, melancholy ballad in which he quietly pleads to his departed lover: "I got a right in this crazy world / To live my life like anyone else." "Twilight," a dreamy tale of heading home that features menacingly ticking drums and an understated vocal, is even better.

Moments like those make it easy to forgive the album's failings. With his quivering tenor, Young - surely one of our whitest rock & rollers - is only slightly more effective as a blues singer than he was as a synth popper on Trans or as a honky-tonker on Old Ways. And anybody worried about his right-wing tendencies won't be comforted by "Life in the City," an alarmingly paranoid view of society's problems ("People sleepin' on the sidewalks on a rainy day / Families livin' under freeways, it's the American way").

Like every one of Neil Young's abrupt shifts in musical direction, this one leaves nagging doubts. Is it all a shuck? maybe. With a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunion in the works, will the Bluenotes go the way of the Ducks, the Shocking Pinks, the International Harvesters and other ad hoc Young bands of the past? Probably. Yet the renewed energy and purpose heard in This Note's For You provide hope for the future. Whether the album signals the beginning of another golden era for such a frustratingly erratic musician is open to question. But for the first time in a long while, the question has finally been raised.