Neil Young Checks In With Another Winner

by John Piccarella

Another inscrutable Neil Young album! Never repeating himself, Young continues to toss off records like drawings from a sketch pad - each one faster, less filled in, less fussed over than the last, but each also bearing an unmistakable master's touch and a fresh vision.

Proceeding as he has since Rust Never Sleeps to observe American, Young renders the country in precise media catch phrases and slogans that he then anchors to the most fundamental blues-based forms. He still prefers, as he has from the beginning of his solo career, to uncover a new format each time. Neil Young has always shuffled three basic styles - bandless folkie, sweet country rocker and hard blues rocker - with the unpredictability of a three-card-monte dealer. So it's fitting that the electric Crazy Horse session we expected after Rust Never Sleeps comes now, after the folk-to-country turnaround of Hawks & Doves. We're caught off guard again. And, of course, re-ac-tor is different from anything Young's ever done.

re-ac-tor is the one and only Neil Young LP (sue me if I'm wrong) on which he's backed by Crazy Horse throughout. (Yeah, I know, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, but I dare you to find a rhythm section in "Round & Round." Besides, that disc featured guest musicians and was made a dozen years ago.) Just as Hawks & Doves built on Rust Never Sleeps thematically but was also a throwback, formally, to American Stars 'n Bars, re-ac-tor continues Hawks & Doves' working-class, mid-America sketches as well as its deceptive brevity and flag-detail album-cover design. (re-ac-tor replaces Hawks & Doves red, white and blue lone star and bars with red and black triangles and circles in a kind of nuke-hawks-and-solar-doves motif.) Yet the new work, in its total embrace of the rock & roll mode, is also the flip side of Comes A Time, the only other of Young's last half-dozen or so records that seems an undisturbed stylistic whole. American Stars 'n Bars, Rust Never Sleeps, Live Rust and Hawks & Doves each pitted A side against B side. re-ac-tor, however, is all noisy electric social comment, while Comes A Time was all quiet acoustic personal expression. And though re-ac-tor, with "Shots" as its finale, climaxes as noisily as either of the Rust LPs, the music here is carefully crafted studio raunch, whereas Comes A Time's was carefully crafted studio prettiness.

re-ac-tor's title, apart from its obvious nuclear meaning, seems to characterize both Young's role as keen-eyed but offhand observer and the band's explosive commitment to rock out. But while Crazy Horse follows the gargantuan live-blues attack of the electric Rust sides, the production is tidier and the organizational values somewhat more formalized. This group's unique professional primitivism combines volume and distortion levels worthy of Blue Cheer with the structured tightness of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Neil Young's lyrics and lead guitar come in small spurts and serve a general overriding rhythmic intent. While previous extended guitar pieces, from "Cowgirl In The Sand" to "Like A Hurricane," framed journeying solos with verse and chorus forms, "T-Bone," the longest track on re-ac-tor, simply alternates its single verse with short guitar breaks for more than nine minutes. "Got mashed potatoes / Ain't got no T-Bone" may seem like a silly thing to say over and over, but the phrase locks right into the record's unifying theme like a rocking comic mantra.

Re-ac-tionary Reaganomics divide the LP's images and characters: hawks and doves are now haves and have-nots - the black (profit) and red (loss) of the album cover's colors. This dichotomy takes many forms. In "Opera Star," it's the highbrows or cultural haves against the rocking have-nots. In "Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze," it's winners versus losers, with the leisure class ("We're all going on a pleasure cruise") as spectators, who are neither. The song's Los Angeles decadence and its combination of vague plot with proper-name details recall Steely Dan's cynical insider's view of luxury. Side one's closing cut, "Get Back on It," introduces the rhythms and images of transportation that pervade side two. In "Southern Pacific," mandatory retirement robs a Mr. (Casey?) Jones of his job on the railroad, leaving him both a have (pension) and a have-not (dignity). In "Motor City," a have who owns three cars thinks he's a have-not because one car's breaking down, one's stolen and the third, an army Jeep, doesn't have all the options.

Riddled with machine-gun fire and high-shriek-to-deep-fuzz guitar jumps that recall Jimi Hendrix in his "Machine Gun"/"Star Spangled Banner" style, "Shots" offers a panoramic view of America building up and tearing down. Ripped by the violence of the music, the men, women and kids here are trying to patch up sand-castle securities, while the real forces at work are guns, machines and lust. Each verse ends with the phrase "in the night," lending the whole scary montage the shifting psychological impact of a dream. On these fuzzy borders between supply and demand is where Young means to evoke the Serenity Prayer, printed in Latin on the back of the record: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change what I can, and wisdom to know the difference." It's this important "wisdom to know the difference" that the singer's after as he "keep[s] hearing shots."

These are clear, harsh, lowest-common-denominator visions of the country in trouble. Young's just rocking you, you say? Maybe, but fatalistic resignation appears in the very first tune, in which "Somethings never change." In re-ac-tor' funkiest cut, "Rapid Transit," media phrases like "Mmmmmmmelt-down" and "Ppppppublic Enemy" are struttered into sound. Above all what Young continues to do with vigor and genius is to create powerful moods. These fast-edit intensities, fashioned from limited materials, broken pieces of American language and American music, are totems of contemporary crisis. And if they seem to be just marking time, that's because in Neil Young's apocalyptic nightmares marking time is a profound and terrible activity.