What To Do With Neil Young's New Album:
Play it loud and step back

by Bud Scoppa

Neil Young isn't out to win any popularity contests. Just as he reached the top of the heap some three years back with the huge selling Harvest, he immediately shied away from the resulting stardom, reworking his music and image almost from scratch.

For after Harvest came a film, three albums and several concert tours - all of which have revealed an intense and uncompromising side to the man. The mellowness of Harvest went by the board.

And many punters who'd picked up on Harvest, together with such earlier tunes as "Southern Man" and his work with Crosby Stills and Nash, suddenly felt uneasy, as if they hadn't known the man at all. There was a certain public withdrawal from Young and his record sales dropped quite drastically.

But now Neil has a new album Tonight's The Night, that he cares so much about he's willing to join - at least temporarily - the world of media conversations to get the word out about it. Face set with a look of determined congeniality, glass of orange juice in hand, Young has braced himself to meet the press, in manager Eliot Roberts' Sunset Strip office, to talk about Tonight's The Night.

"This record business," Young sighed in response to the forces that caused him to be sitting in this smoky room on a perfectly nice day. "I don't even think I'm in it any more. I really don't. I've never done anything like this before - interviews and everything. But I never had a record you could party to and interview to before."

You feel particularly good about this record?

He affirmed that he did, then talked about the internal forces that caused him to switch direction just after Harvest.

"It's odd," he seemed genuinely perplexed for the moment. "I don't know why. It was a subconscious move. I think Tonight's The Night is the most grand example of that resistance. It was actually recorded in August of '73 at S.I.R. (LA's Studio Instrument Rentals).

"Everybody said that Harvest was a trip. To me, I'd happened to be in the right place at the right time to do a really mellow record, 'cause that's where my life was at the time. But that was only for a couple of months. If I'd stayed there, I don't know where I'd be right now - if I'd just stayed real mellow. I'm just not that way any more. I think Harvest was probably the finest record that I've made, but that's really a restricting adjective for me. It's really fine ... but that's it."

What about his live performances?

"In concert, what I play all depends on how I feel. I can't do songs like 'Southern Man', I'd rather play the Lynyrd Skynyrd song that answered it. That'd be great. The thing is, I go on a different trip and I get a different band together, or I group with some old friends, then they don't know how to play the stuff that I did with some other group and I have to show them. That takes a lot of time and I'd rather be working on new stuff. So a lot of it is just laziness.

"I'm working right now recording. That's what I'm mainly interested in, because I have a lot of new songs that I haven't finished recording."

The conversation swung back to the new album.

The title song, one of the album's most jagged and discomforting, tells the story of Bruce Berry, a friend of Young's who - the lyric states - "died, out on the mainline". Who was he?

"Bruce Berry was a roadie - he used to take care of Steve's (Steve Stills) and my guitars and amps.

"That line about his dying comes out and just hits you," someone noted.

"Yeah ... those mixes are a little unorthodox. Like it's real music. Sometimes I'd be on the mike and sometimes I'd be two feet off it.

"And all the background vocals are live, and the whole thing is, ah...

"I got tired of ... I think what was in my mind when I made that record was I just didn't feel I was a lonely figure with a guitar or whatever it is that people see me as sometimes. I didn't feel that laid-back - I just didn't feel that way. So I thought I'd just forget all that and ... be as aggressive and as abrasive as I could."

Roberts, his manager, pointed out that a number of the songs on Young's recent albums have come directly from actual experience.

What about the chilling "Tired Eyes", with its straight-forward description of a dope dealing vendetta that ends in bloodshed. Has he seen that sort of thing?

"Yeah ... puts the vibe right there ... that's what I was sayin', and these two cats - (Berry and Danny Whitten, the leader of Crazy Horse, who'd worked very closely with Young) - had been a close part of our unit - our force and our energy - both went to junk - both of them OD'd.

"The album was like a tribute to those people, you know? That's why it gets spooky, 'cause we were spooked. If you felt that I'm glad."

Young leans back on the sofa he's sitting on and laughs softly.

"The first horror record, a horror record."

Young's mastery of melody and musical texture is still present on the new album, although not at all in an obvious way. As grisly as "Tired Eyes" seems, as abrasively as it's sung, the melody is there. Done with refinement, this would be a pretty song. Young must go to extremes to keep from making pretty music.

"There's always a chance that nobody will dig it because it's too abrasive. But it's a very happy record if you're loose. If you're not loose, it's not happy."

"I've seen it draw a line everywhere I've played it. People who thought that they'd never dislike anything I ever did, fall on the new side of the line. Other people who couldn't hear me, who said, 'that cat is too sad - he sings funny', those people listen another way now.

"It blew my mind when I saw that was happening.

"I've been listening to this album for about two years and I'm not tired of it, it's a good friend of mine. In some respects I feel like it has more life than anything I've ever done. It's not the kind of life that jumps up and down and makes everybody smile. It's another kind of life - there's a feeling in it that's really strong."

By this time, Young was thoroughly caught up in what he was talking about. His shyness was gone, and the dark reticence I'd heard so much about was nowhere to be found. He was congenial enough to answer even the most stock questions with a concern that approached expansiveness.

For instance, the problem with CSN&Y?

"I thought there wasn't any problem at all. Last time we went out, and every time we've gone out, it's been great."

But haven't you had problems putting an album together?

"We just didn't make an album. And it's not even that it didn't happen - we just didn't do it. If we don't do something, people put together all these trips about, you know, Stills and Young are fighting so they can't do this. That's all a bunch of bullshit.

"The only people who could put it together is the four of us, and we're all in great shape. We're just not doin' it right now."

"But everybody's expecting it," someone pointed out. "and if it doesn't happen, they all figure there must be some problem."

"That's because they can't possibly envision why four guys would not do it and not make all that bread."

"You mean you don't want to be a supergroup?"

"We already are a supergroup, so whether we want to be one or not, it's all after the fact. In the end, it's just another name. And that's cool...."

A minute later, Young commented on the swollen shape of big money rock and roll: "The ticket prices are big and the whole thing is big - I mean, it's bigger than a football game now, it's all different. I started playing for 25 people at a time, and I was getting off. Now it's just so mammoth and you've gotta get by that all over again to get off. Money doesn't ... the biggest thing that affects it is the amount of people. That's where it is, how big the music is. Money's just a side-effect of that. It's really different, though - that part of it's really blown my mind. It's such a high to get really personal with 60,000 people."

"But my next tour," Young continues, "is going to be small halls ... so people can see what it is. And if less of 'em see it that doesn't make any difference.

"I don't know what this next tour will be like. I'll be doing a lot of stuff that I'm recording now. A lot of long instrumental guitar things - progressive progresso supremo? It's about the Incas and the Aztecs. It takes on another personality. It's like being in another civilization. It's a lost sort of form, sort of a soul-form that switches from history scene to history scene trying to find itself, man, in this maze.

"I've got it all written and all the songs are learned. Tomorrow we start cutting them. We're ready to go. We're gonna just do it in the morning. Early in the morning when the sun's out. Sunny days ... just .... play.

"It'll probably take about a week or two, then I'll be done with that. But I've been practicin' for six weeks. I feel great about it. I'm playing all the guitar, and I haven't played guitar in a long time ... so I been practicing. I'm havin' a great time - I can fly all over the place now."