Landing On Water

LANDING ON WATER, Neil Young's new album for Geffen records, could well be called the most unexpected and purely innovative LP of the season. Could be, except for two irrefutable facts. First, Neil Young has always, obsessively and explicitly, dealt in the unexpected. Secondly, if it wasn't innovative, it wouldn't belong to Neil Young.

Having laid those ground rules, it's still safe to state that the ten original cuts that comprise LANDING ON WATER are a distinct revelation. That an artist of Neil Young's longevity could so effortlessly leap over every pop music convention to create a new set of rock and roll fundamentals: that one album could, at the same time, recall the sweeping passions and authoritative advances of EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE, AMERICAN STARS 'N BARS or any of a number of quintessential Young LP's, while at the same time casting so far into the future that it takes on its own visionary sheen: that an effort so distilled from rock's best impulses could follow an album of pure country music (1985's OLD WAYS) -- all this is evidence that while we may have gotten used to surprises from Neil Young, LANDING ON WATER is still something utterly different: compelling, revealing, riveting in a dozen different ways.

Over the course of twenty years and as many albums, Neil Young has created some of the most eclectic, intensely personal and stylistically prophetic pop music of all time. The son of a well-known Toronto sports writer, whose gift to his boy for Christmas 1958 was a ukulele, Young quickly became adept both banjo and guitar and lists among his earliest influences Hank Marvin of the legendary Shadows. By 1964 he was a veteran of two local bands, the Jades and the Squires, writing and arranging for the latter.

As a folk singer on the Greenwich Village circuit he met a trio of fledgling musicians -- Stephen Stills, Richie Furay and Bruce Palmer -- with whom he migrated to Los Angeles to form Buffalo Springfield, a band that stood squarely at the crossroads of psychedelia, pop and the infant sounds of country/rock. Much of the group's most enduring work was from Young's pen, including 'Broken Arrow,' 'Mr. Soul,' 'Expecting To Fly,' 'I Am A Child,' 'Out Of My Mind' and many others, already revealing a extraordinary writing and performing talent both ahead of his time and, as it turned out, timeless. In 1969, Young recorded his first solo album and a year later released the above mentioned EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE, featuring his incendiary backing band Crazy Horse. The album, containing the classic 'Cinnamon Girl', as aptly summed up the aspirations, delusions and dangerous pleasures of the decade as anything ever would.

A stint with Crosby, Stills & Nash briefly interrupted his solo recording career, but by the early seventies he was back with a pair of albums that again spoke for a generation, even then beginning to feel the effects of the sixties staggering dislocations. AFTER THE GOLDRUSH and HARVEST represented an apex in the craft of the singer/songwriter even as they totally transcended the genre to reach for something at once more private and more universal. 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart,' 'Heart Of Gold,' 'Old Man' were not so much pop songs as testifying truths set to haunted melodies.

What followed was a string of records unparalleled in American music, a body of work full of sweeping stylistic shifts, dense thematic meditations and a ceaseless recasting of rock's potential. JOURNEY THROUGH THE PAST, a soundtrack to the Young-produced film of the same name, ZUMA, a thundering return to basics, the anthemic AMERICAN STARS 'N BARS, the self-compiled retrospective DECADE mark a furious creative output.

A second powerful surge brought Young and his music into the eighties beginning with the introspective COMES A TIME and continuing through the electrifying experimental music of RUST NEVER SLEEPS (also the title of the second Young film), HAWKS AND DOVES, RE-AC-TOR, TRANS and others. Rockabilly, folkish tints, white noise rock and roll, synthetic orchestrations -- all this and something else, staked out only by this artist, was sharpened, blended and illuminated across the span of these albums.

In 1985 Neil Young took a sharp turn toward the traditional with OLD WAYS, a collection of country music originals that featured top flight Nashville session musicians and an unforgettable rendering of 'The Wayward Wind.'

It's an impressive, unequaled musical career, yet it's still not quite enough preparation for the stunning advance of LANDING ON WATER. An album that takes the technical advances of the past several years and harnesses them to a sound that seems almost completely spontaneous, the lingering effect of LANDING ON WATER is like nothing so much as transplanting the Sun Records studio to the surface of the room. Stripped down to its barest essentials, the mix is comprised simply of Young's lead guitar, vocal and sythesizer work, co-producer Danny Kortchmar, also on guitar, synth and voice, and the drawf-star density of Steve Jordan's drumming (Jordan, for the record, also plays synth and sings).

Amazingly the result is nothing short of majestic: music that invites you to dance and transcend at the same time. Thematically, LANDING ON WATER finds Young exposing and examining subjects that range from the painfully personal ('I've Got A Problem') to the existential ('People On The Street') to the harrowingly historical ('Hippie Dream'). Throughout, the emotional timbre is keyed to a fever pitch (check 'Violent Side' or 'Hard Luck Stories') and, on more than one occasion, it breaks through into what only could be described as a universal cry for human warmth ('Drifter' or the album's debut single 'Touch The Night', featuring the San Francisco Boys Choir in an etheral doo-wop refrain).

A masterpiece? It's a too-tired term to have much impact, but if LANDING ON WATER isn't one, it's something awfully close. On it Neil Young has proven that expectations are simply there to be shattered. It's a lesson his fans are certain to be re-learning for years to come...