Neil Young Takes A Close Look At America: Another Casual Masterpiece

by John Piccarella

Back in the first few days of the Eighties, a friend and I were arguing about whether or not the Clash had already made the album of the year, London Calling. I said: "Maybe Neil young will surprise us again and get even better." My friend said: "Yeah, he could. But he'd have to make a political record, and I don't know if that's possible in this country right now." Hawks & Doves may not be the LP of the year (it's only thirty minutes long!), but it is an American political album. And like most Neil Young discs, it's not what you expected - or rather, as usual, not what he was doing last year.

Though there are several Sixties superstars who sailed through the Seventies intact, who else in the history of rock & roll has so improved with age? Who else has remained vital without ever really becoming slick? The astonishing thing about Young's recent strength is his added reach. In 1978, he made his first perfect record. Elegant and carefully crafted (for once), Comes A Time also signaled maturity. Few American artists survive youthful fame to outdo themselves, but like a great author with many masterpieces behind him, Neil Young settled into the confidence of his craft and did it better. He'd had five or six careers by then: the Buffalo Springfield; the early superstar solo years; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; the dark period culminating with Tonight's The Night; the mid-Seventies triumphs as a revitalized rocker. But apart from an occasional sociopolitical narrative ("Southern Man," "Cortez The Killer"), Young's songwriting, even at its best, was claustrophobic - and I mean phobic! With Comes A Time, he achieved distance and an ease of expression. And in 1979, his best year ever, he took bold strides toward his audience, summing up his career with a brilliantly organized concert movie (Rust Never Sleeps) and two closely related albums (Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust).

"My My, Hey Hey (out of the Blue)" - or "Hey Hey, My My (into the Black)" - was probably his first anthem. And Rust Never Sleeps was the first Neil Young record that was more about the world than about the artist. "Powderfinger" and "Pocahontas" fused personal visions of fear and desire to the sense of American history that's always come, and gone throughout Young's work. But more important, the imagistic wealth of "Thrasher" and the wisecracking, working-class rocker pose of "Welfare Mothers" and "Sedan Delivery" unutilized his narrative gifts to define the sociology of his generation.

Though it's something of a musical throwback (Young has once again abandoned Crazy Horse for his stable of country musicians), Hawks & Doves is the sequel to the broadened vision of Rust Never Sleeps. Yet stylistically, as its title and cover art clearly indicate, it's the sequel to American Stars 'n Bars, too. Like that LP, Hawks & Doves has a strange mixed bag of a first side and a tight set of electric country-rock on the second. But it also preserves the acoustic-electric division of Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust.

Every track on Hawks & Doves sounds like an instant classic built on the barest materials: one good hook or simply a mood. The disc's title provides a concept that almost covers the contents. Initially, this theme seems to divide the album's main characters. "Little Wing," a gorgeous fragment of an opener, is unquestionably a dove: "She comes to town when the children sing / And leaves them feathers if they fall." "Captain Kennedy," who closes side one, is an obvious hawk: "And when I get to shore / I hope that I can kill good." Yet musically speaking, the hawks might be the electric numbers and the doves the acoustic - just to mix things up. In another extension of the title imagery, the songs on the first side borrow, at least in atmosphere, from "Birds" on After the Gold Rush to Zuma's "Danger Bird." But in Hawks & Doves' two longest and strangest compositions, "Homestead" and "Lost in Space," the metaphoric consistency collapses. And it's within this enigmatic chaos of images that the record begins, paradoxically, to come together.

The long-awaited sequel to "The Last Trip to Tulsa," "Homestead" is an eerie, elliptical and surreal narrative in which the moon, a man's shadow and a flock of prehistoric birds accompany a naked rider on a seven-minute journey through his head in search of some cosmic telephone connection. These images hang over him like omens of a fate that never arrives. The LP's major song, "Homestead" casts a peculiar light on the apparently freewheeling hoe-downs of side two. "Lost in Space" starts as if it's the album's one personal tune: "Live with me," Neil Young sings. It ends similarly with "Look at these blues / The deep sea blues." But between the lines is a dream scene that suggests the nature of the unnamed fate in "Homestead." The quiet acoustic mood of "Lost in Space" turns weird when a waterlogged chorus of children asks: "What could be stranger than the unknown danger / That lies on the ocean floor?"

Each short song on side two is centered on a hook that offers a snippet of proverbial working-class fortitude. Linked by guitar and fiddle riffs that jump from cut to cut, these compositions form a suite about contemporary middle-American attitudes. The side opens with "Staying Power" ("We got stayin' power you and I / Stayin' power through thick and thin"), which is followed by "Coastline" ("We don't back down from no trouble / We do get up in the morning"). In the rollicking "Union Man," Young, in mock seriousness, allies himself with the American worker. Pretending to chair a union meeting, he calls for a vote on an important item of new business: "LIVE MUSIC IS BETTER! bumper-stickers should be issued!" As far removed from proletarian reality as the No Nukes movement, this reminds me of Ronald Reagan's ironic bid for blue-collar support when he declared he led the first strike of his union back in Hollywood.

Rufus Thibodeaux' fiddle begins "Comin' Apart at Every Nail" with the same riff that closes down "Union Man" as the recession hits home:

It's awful hard to find a job
On one side the government, the other the mob
Hey, hey, ain't that right
The workin' man's in for a helluva fight
Oh this country sure looks good to me
But these fences are comin' apart at every nail.

In "Comin' Apart at Every Nail," the dread of the first side becomes an explicit threat of war, and the record ends with the title track collecting all the ambiguities of being part of the problem. Built on an irresistible "YEW-ESS-AAY" hook, "Hawks & Doves" sounds celebratory and mournful at the same time: "Ain't gettin' old / Ain't gettin' younger though / Just gettin' used to the lay of the land." Through a series of casual ironies, Young subtly hammers home the feeling that in this election year, faced with the most dismal political choices of our lives, we make up the midsection of the electorate: "Got rock & roll / Got country music playin' / If you hate us / You just don't know what you're sayin'." And the chorus - "Ready to go / Willin' to stay and pay / U.S.A! U.S.A!" - only underlines the complacency.

In the offhand, half-informed rhetoric of the average citizen (that includes you, me and him), Neil Young has articulated the tone of the body politic. But if Hawks & Doves is a major statement, it's also an understatement. Another throwaway masterpiece, dashed off like most of his LPs - like a letter, letting you know what he's thinking, for the moment. So this year, after the apocalyptic dread of side one, the present-day, shit-kicking urban cowboy of side two looks like an endangered species. And if you think that Young's portrayal of life-before-wartime America misses the supposed vitality of the New Wave, then you've got it backward. He mourned the death of Johnny Rotten last year.