Neil Young Comes a Cropper

by Paul Rambali

There even comes a time when Neil young has to get up of his raggy backside and release an album. Just as some people spend a lot of time waiting for Joni Mitchell's annual confection, so some of us avidly follow the recording releases and inexplicable wranglings that inevitably herald Neil Young's new out-pouring.

But as a rule of thumb, Young's best albums always arrive out of the blue (On the Beach, Zuma) and this has been due since July. Bad pressings, problems over the proposed title of "Gone With the Wind", and God knows what else, held it up till now.

"Gone With the Wind" hinted at a re-run of Young's pet fascination with American native (Indian) and imported (black) oppression - the Confederate lynch mob scenery of Southern Man rides again.

A glance at the cover dispels the thought. Last years Stars'n'Bars had Young unconscious on some bar-room floor, his head squashed against a spittoon. Comes a Time finds him grinning benevolently at the prospective purchaser. It's by far the most commercially viable album he's made since Harvest, as ordinary as Neil Young is ever likely to get. Which is no great crime. His scheme of things has incurred these moments before and no doubt will again. I suspect they occur whenever Neil Young is especially confused and depressed. Sometimes he couples this to ruthless soul-searching and makes records like On the Beach. Other times he just... well, you guessed it: Neil Young is feeling sorry for himself again.

Roughly half of the ten tracks may be dismissed as the kind of archetype whining love lost Young fodder that has such a terrible effect on 14-year-old boys, and causes much uncomprehending sniggering from 14-year-old girls. Goin' Back (not the Goffin / King tune), Comes a Time (first performed with Californian bar band The Ducks), Lotta Love (previewed two years back), Human Highway (the title of his film, written in '73) and Four Strong Winds (an old Ian Tyson folk ballad) are sugary and ingratiating, maudlin sentiments pleasantly expressed (if you accept that Young's voice is remotely pleasant) and no more.

Recorded in six different locations with the Gone With the Wind Orchestra, featuring stalwarts Ben Kieth and Tim Drummond and amongst others no less than eight acoustic guitarists and an occasional 16-piece string section. It sounds clean, lush and crisp and often unbearably soggy. Only two cuts depart measurably from this overall primness of sound. One Motorcycle Mama, a lascivious tale of biker lust that begs for Ritchie Hayward to pull the right kind of down strokes, spotlight one Nicolette Larson's countrified tones in counterpoint with Young. More strongly than their handful of duets elsewhere, it recalls Ms Emmylou Harris' crowing with the Grievous Angel on the album of the same name. The other Look Out For My Love, is one of two that employs the support of Crazy Horse and benefits immensely from same. The urban nightmare imagery of Ambulance Blues gets resurrected while Young tangles scenes of himself as midnight prowler skulking about his girls neighbourhood evils. Heady stuff, and solitary evidence of fabled debauched fretboard style.

Every once in a while Young gets to grips with subjects most songwriters would pad timidly around. So with Peace of Mind, a song of resigned emotional compromise the kind that allows you to forgive. Already One, wherein the second hand tune of Long May You Run props up a mawkish good bye to ex-wife Carrie Snodgrass. And then every now and again he manages to fame his excesses with a little cheeky perspective. As when he follows Already One with a deliberately tawdry admission of minting his divorce and milking this album because "in the field of opportunity, it's ploughing time again".

But don't let his environment and past associations cause prejudice. The frazzled, gum chewing Orang-utang keeps mostly well away from the somnambulent paths of his contemporaries. Few of them, for instance, even acknowledged the punk blemish. Young meanwhile wrote a song about Rotten.

I make this point of Young's tenacity because its easily obscured by the goods here. Whereas American Stars And Bars was often bad, this is often worse - it's often bland. He'll pull through though. After all, pessimists are often the biggest rascals. And only a rascal could smirk like Neil Young.