Bully for you, Lonely for me:
Neil Young looks back,
Steve Clarke looks on

by Steve Clarke

It's not just any major rock star who could get away with releasing a triple album which traces a ten year long career.

Moreover, one might immediately distrust the motives behind such an extravagant scheme as a retrospective triple album - it smacks of a record company more interested in swelling their coffers than furthering the artistic standing of the hapless artist.

Neil Young's different, though.

First and most important, he has the necessary talent to have sustained him through ten years of, for want of a better phrase, professional music making. Secondly, anyone familiar with Young's work will know how complete his artistic integrity is - complete to the point of exasperating his record company.

The saga around the release of these three albums is a perfect illustration of Young's, ahem, "complete control" - not that Young, a media recluse, has ever made a meal of his unwillingness to play what can best be referred to as 'product games'. Who else would follow up a couple of best sellers like After The Goldrush and Harvest with four albums as overtly 'unviable' (a word Young probably detests) as Journey Through The Past, Time Fades Away, On The Beach and Tonight's The Night? It says quite a lot for Reprise that they ever released Tonight's The Night, or, come to that, On The Beach (Isn't that what they're there for? - Ed).

Unlike say, the Peter Framptons of this world, Young (and Dylan and Mitchell must fit in here somewhere too) sees success for what it is and it's this kind of awareness that gives Young the necessary objectivity to come out with a statement like the sleeve note accompanying "Heart Of Gold," one of his few hit singles: "This song put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there."

Originally scheduled for release last November 19, Decade hits the stores this November 18th. For Young aficionados it's essential listening, seeing as how, apart from including cuts from every Neil Young album save for the live Time Fades Away, there's five hitherto unreleased songs and, equally important, what are arguably the best sleeve notes ever, written by Young himself.

Taking the form of a note for each cut, Young tells you as much about himself as any halfway decent interview. Some are anecdotal. F'rinstance, writing about his first studio experience as a vocalist (Buffalo Springfield's "Burned", late 1966), he says, "The boys gave me some uppers to stay up all night. Maybe you can hear that." Young's other scrawlings reveal that David Crosby cried after CSN&Y recorded Young's enraged condemnation of 1970's Kent State Massacre "Ohio", where Nixon's soldiers mowed down four students, that Young wrote "Down By The River" and "Cowgirl In The Sand" while in bed with a fever, that "Southern Man" wasn't penned after watching "Gone With The Wind" but (he thinks) knocked out in the dressing room of the Filmore East, etc etc.

Obviously Decade isn't some record company scam aimed at merely re-cycling old material; Young has taken time and trouble with the album, along with producers David Briggs and Tim Mulligan, selecting the material himself.

And what a selection it is. No Neil Young fan could justifiably argue with what's included. Providing you've got the bread (5.99 Pounds) Decade is the record for anyone who's not familiar with Young but who'd like to be.

Clearly the prototype hippy - lank hair, ill kempt beard, obsessed with the drug culture (and as "Tonight's The Night" and "The Needle And The Damage Done" have illustrated, Young's drug songs take some beating in that they at once evoke images of squalid addiction without wagging a heavy moral finger), anti-Christian, anti-rightwing, pro-humanity, and living the proverbial alternative lifestyle on some gorgeous ranch - Young's credentials remain intact ten years on.

That he seems unwilling to release commercial rock records, despite having a plethora of material ripe for such treatment - as the previously unreleased "Winterlong" and "Deep Forbidden Lake" here show - is on the one hand infuriating (for surely if he'd gone on travelling in the middle of the road more people would have known his name), but ultimately admirable.

Rock artists as honest as Neil Young are hard to come by.

More than anything else, listening to Decade hammers home the scope of Young's artistic vision. As side one shows - five Springfield cuts and that old ubiquitous Young B side, his wonderfully inane live strumalong "Sugar Mountain" - Young, like so many other mid-Sixties American (Canadian by birth but American by adoption) pop artists, was heavily influenced by The Beatles.

The vocal arrangements and Young's lyrics to "Burned" are very "Beatles For Sale". Young was quick to mature and, doubtless reeling under psychedelic influences, went on to write and record, aided by producer / arranger Jack Nietzche, cryptic epics like "Broken Arrow" and "Expecting To Fly", the former giving vent to Young's obsession with the luckless Red Indian (Young's subsequent band Crazy Horse [formerly The Rockets] was, of course, named after a Cochise Indian chief).

Young was never to come up with the likes of such compositions again; in fact his career to date has been unusual in that rather than writing more complex songs as time's gone on, he's simplified his material so that on American Stars and Bars, his last studio album, itself something of a hotpotch, Young is writing simple country tunes.

The hitherto unreleased Springfield cut "Down To The Wire", intended for their cancelled Stampede album, is nothing to write home about; it's a fairly routine love song, only hinting at the masterpieces Young would later record with the band. It does, though, boast Young's early influences and isn't a bad place to start a retrospective of this kind.

Young's never made a habit of staying in one place too long and his subsequent solo album Neil Young, with Nietzche once again arranging, was, as the two cuts here show - "The Loner" and "The Old Laughing Lady" - far removed from the acid pop rock the Springfield turned out from their Los Angeles home.

Even on a strident rocker like "The Loner" there's latent lyrical delicacy that's more to the fore in "The Old Laughing Lady" where Young is relentlessly unsentimental about a woman for whom the present is the thing. To date, he's never made music which sounds anything like this first album, and as a basis for shaping his future the following Everybody Knows This I Nowhere was much more important.

Recorded with the original Crazy Horse, the greatest bar-room rock 'n' roll band in the world, the album introduced Young as a full-blooded rock 'n' roller. Young's rock and roll is out there on its own, owing little to traditional sources. While not as joyful as, say, a Chuck Berry derived band like The Rolling Stones, or even The Sex Pistols, Young's brew is just as potent, tinged as it is with a dark melancholy as his highly expressive guitar style shoots it out against a back-cloth of doomy minor chords.

Young is one of the great rock and roll guitarists, as "Down By The River" and "Cowgirl In The Sand" bear out; Young was later to resurrect the Crazy Horse sense of dynamics for his 1975 album Zuma. Included here is that album's most important cut "Cortez The Killer", his romantic paen to a Spanish conquistador.

After appealing to a cult audience, Young made his reputation public with After The Gold Rush. The melodies were sublime, the arrangements crisp as a pine tree autumn morning. Adult love songs were the order of the day though Young still found time to vent his disgust at the hypocrisy of The South in "Southern Man", where Young communicates his venom through one whiplash of a guitar solo. The song's fundamental simplicity (it's another minor chord opus) gave no end of room for Young and his former Buffalo Springfield colleague Steven Stills to "stretch out" on guitars when he rejoined him in CSN&Y.

Young gave CS&N muscle and what could well be their finest hour in "Ohio" which opens side four. Recorded live in the studio with Young and Stills' guitars interlocking in a humdinger of a riff, "Ohio" captures the four's fury at the events which went down at Kent State. No piece of new wave social comment approaches this; "Ohio" is entirely devoid of sloganeering or posing.

Six years later Young wrote a song called "Campaigner" while touring with Stills. Decade features the song for the first time and is positive proof that while Young's direction isn't as clear as it has been in the past, he can still come up with a song as stirring as anything written by Bob Dylan.

In the song Young is not apparently without sympathy for Nixon, singing "Even Richard Nixon has got soul". Like Young's best songs, the number is thick with imagery, and in it he perhaps acknowledges his own impotency when it comes to actually changing American society's set of values.

It's a great song, fittingly the penultimate cut on Decade, harrowing and yet touched with compassion. As for the album's other new material, "Winterlong", a song of unrequited love with an elegant guitar motif and a middle eight, and "Deep Forbidden Lake", written in 1969 and 1974 respectively, they're nigh on peerless songs too.

Young writes that "Deep Forbidden Lake", a narrative, hopefully signified the end of the post-Harvest "dark period" and while Young sounds decidedly resigned in the song it doesn't chill the listener in quite the same way as cuts from On The Beach and Tonight's The Night.

"Love Is A Rose", a good natured song about the pitfalls of love with a chord sequence and rhythm identical to "Dance Dance Dance", the song Young wrote for Crazy Horse, and given a country arrangement, is the remaining 'new song'.

Decade is rock's first entirely satisfactory triple album and one which confirms how important if exasperating Young is in that there are still several great Neil Young songs - "Traces" and "Human Highway" - unreleased.

It's easy to put down others when you're at the bottom for playing the music biz its own way. When you've already played it and won, and then gone and turned your back on it, that's a good deal more commendable. Neil Young, never one to lose his roots, is currently touring tiny bars with an obscure Californian band called The Ducks and not playing a week long season at the Empire Pool.