"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" (pre viewed 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 un bearably 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. By Paul Rambali.
AS I picture it, he's scarce risen with the rooster, taken his morning dump and settled down to chow back some beans and read the funnies than the muse is round there, just a knock-knock-knockin' at old Neil's brain plate ready to spill out a whole slew of lyrical profundity all duded up in spangled melodies an' sort of thing into that bottomless well of an imagination of his.
I mean, who can forget such songs as "Sweet Joni", "Pushed it Over the Edge", "Deep Forbidden Lake", "Human Highway", "Traces","Campaigner", "Wondering", "Hawaiian Sunset", "Winterlong"... to name but a few ? Who's even heard them? I have--most of them anyway--th'o I bet you haven't 'cos this list is just a small part of the great Young legacy of unreleased tracks he's holding back either until the muse stops knocking or he croaks off or else to give to his buddies to cover occasionally. Verily, this Canuck's cup runneth over.
So here's a new Neil Young album anyway and boy, I'm glad since it's a time since I've heard Neil's lonesome moan. One thing about thatvoice that lean timber sure brings out the hunger in a man. My digestive organs start to howl in tune and...well, talk about the Starvation artist! Just count your blessings that Neil's never actually sung about food or there'd have been wide scale breakouts of hippies looting supermarkets, for sure. Fact of the matter is I had to sell all my Young albums one day for groceries ; I just get so hungry listening to them. So it's good to have him back again even though I'm getting kind of peckish right now listening to his latest masterpiece. Particularly the second side which is what you'd call yer more vintage Neil fare chronologically.
Side one is all new songs, recorded scarcely two months ago and all of 'em spot lighting a whole new slant to Neil's talents, this time as the drinking man's companion. This is made obvious by the cover art, one half of which is a clever shot of Neil passed out on a bar-room floor, his face scrunched up like a bruised plum next to a golden spitoon and under a crotch-shot of some bar queen similarly incapacitated. The comatose belle's brandishing a bottle of Canadian whiskey to make the point truly clear - in case you'd thought Neil had OD'd or something (bad publicity and anyway "Tonight's the Night" was the master's Thinking Doper's Companion). Nope this is definitely Neil on the sauce, either feisty and soused or else maudlin with tear stains in the whisky macs.
The first track sets the picture clearly. "The Old Country Waltz" is maudlin as hell, a virtual rewrite of "The Old Tennessee Waltz" - Neil stuck in the bar when he gets the news that his true love's severed the knot and he's weeping into his tequila sunrise. It's got that stately waltz time beat with back-up unit The Bullets (a hickory brick union of Crazy Horse plus Ben Kieth's pedal steel plus Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larsen crooning or Carole Mayedo sawing away on fiddle) holding up the poor boy from actually falling off his stool in a stupor and turning a slight, stupid song into something actually offensive to the ears.
The Bullets are pretty good, sounding like Young's very consciously copying one Bob Dylan with his Rolling Thunder backdrop of lachrymose violin and chick singers, but picking up points by incorporating Crazy Horse to hold down the bottom. So if you can imagine the Rolling Thunder bunch discarding that puny rhythm section they had and pulling in Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson instead, you'll get a rough parallel of the ground plan here.
Things get more spry with "Saddle up the Palomino", a drunkards dream of stolen love - all bleary eyes, a headfull of bricks and on the trail to tie down the neighbour's wife, or maybe Carmelita the bankers daughter. I don't know - neither will you - but then nor does Neil so it makes no odds anyway. I like this one as it's sloppy without being messy - and I'm not even much of a drinker myself. "Hey Babe" is pure dewy-eyed hokum - John Denver could do this - but its very lack of poetry, its brusque schmaltzy attractiveness is enough to hold down its slight (again), airy charm. "Hold Back the Tears" is Neil's own answer to all those poor bar-fly sots who awaken from their drunken stupor every now and then to holler out "play "Melancholy Baby"" to nobody in particular and a pitiful testimonial to the fact that booze can fuse the muse when taken to excess. God, its horrible. But fortunately all is not lost as Neil exits the bar on a fine high-flying note, playing crashing electric rhythm guitar for the first time on the whole danged side on the boisterous "Bite the Bullet". Again, no profundities, but more boozy lust abounds like corks popping as Young and Crazy Horse skip about keeping this drunken brawl of a song just together enough to work effectively.
Overall verdict - Neil's drunken binge makes for a 50-50 success-failure rate which is okay as I can't stand drunks myself. Anyway he's either a maudlin fool or a mean drunk, so take your pick. Meanwhile, predating all this recent liver torture comes side two, a mixed bag of four tracks, two of which which were actually placed on Young's postponed "Decade" the great missing triple set of late last year which is greatby the way, though God and Young alone know when it'll ever appear. "Star of Bethlehem" is a dour '74 affair, recorded for yet another cancelled Young album, "Home grown" nixed in preference for "Tonight's the Night". It's an almost classic Young lonesome paean which you'll either find deathly self-indulgant and depressing or else yearningly beautiful. I incline to the latter opinion myself and it isn't just Emmylou Harris presence on shared vocals that puts me in mind of Gram Parsons greatest sad song performances. I've loved it anyway ever since it first came to my notice on "Decade" and it's good to see that Young's questionable taste in choosing his own best songs hasn't ignored its greatness yet again.
Alas, if only the same could be said for "Will to Love" a dire affair dating from May 1976 which may well be the worst song Young's ever written. A horribly trite acoustic minor-chord affair which America wouldn't even dare to put on one of their albums, it gabbles on insanely about being fishes and swimming about in the endless oceans of pure love. "Never Loose the Will to Love" indeed! Actually, this abortion - lasting an amazing seven minuets plus sounds like something straight off the grisly Charles Manson album ESP Records put out after Chucko hit the front page for his gore-letting. What's even more criminal is that its time could've been used to allow both the immaculate "Traces" and "Human Highway" (two gorgeous cuts discarded from the last aborted CSN&Y album sessions) to find their rightful place on record. Alas and alack. "Like a Hurricane" is the other "Decade" extract, a highlight of last year's Young concerts (whence none of the six or seven other new songs have found their way onto "Bars" whither "Country Home" or "Too Far Gone"?)and considered a masterpiece by most Young devotees. Personally I find the chord progression unbearably predictable, the words-"I am just a dreamer and you are just a dream" ad nauseam thoroughly rubbishy, the King Crimson mellotron just about bearable and the extended guitar solo a most inadequate display of what Young a great electric guitarist - is capable. You may well differ, most I know certainly have. Lastly, "Home grown" recorded at the same time as "Hurricane" is a complete jive hoedown throwaway of a song but it at least features that great amped-up,jangling electric guitar crackling and spitting for two and a half minutes or so.
Final conclusion: this is an incredibly lazy album but that's hardly the problem. Young could have stayed out of the studio for over a year and still thrown a great album together from unreleased gems already in the can. The fact that he hasn't and that the overall effect of "Bars" is uneven and unsatisfactory just isn't good enough and displays a weakness in the good taste department. One wonders if he really knows just how good and great he can be. Bad judgement, bad management (Elliot Roberts, credited with "Direction") or a bad liver?
Still face up, he's a great man even if these turkeys can't even cluck in time. Figure it this way. Anyone who's a "true rock enigma" who wasn't offered a "good kicking" by Sid Vicious in last week's Melody Maker and who has yet to be dragged into doing an interview with Barbara Charone is truly a master of his own destiny.
Chew on it, anyway . Me I'm going to eat. Nick Kent.
Neil Young then; the oldest of the old blokes, the 51 year old so called godfather of grunge, a man who sometim around 756BC drove around in a black hearse, a man who as a nipper, survived diabatas, polio, epilepsy and the divorce of parents, who once wrote a song called -oh yes- "Expecting to fly", a man whos seen chums die from drug overdoses, who's two children suffer from sever brain damage (a statistical "impossibility"), sometime member of bluesmeister combos to get the old fellas with grey ponytails in a rhapsodic lather about, Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills Nash and Young. Neil Young and Crazy Horse and all variations thereof, bhla de bhla, you know "Down By The River"; "like a Hurricane"; "The Needle And The Damage Done"...
Who in "our world" of 1992 created a masterpiece called "Harvest Moon" and everyone went, "crikey we can dig it, granddad" and swooned away in oblivious rapture to the quavering beauty therein. Then he missed his old pals Crazy Horse and thier relentless blues-buster geetar squeedles and made the sparodically alright "Sleeps With Angles". Then the cop-free "Mirrorball" with Brendan O'Brien in 1995 and we fancied the old fellow had lost it. Untill now he's lost it offically.
"Broken Arrow" (named after one of his own tunes from 245BC necrophilla fans) contains eight songs, approximately 4,897 squeedieous geetar solos, each the accumulated beard-length sighted at a Fairport Convention, er convention, and the sound of what must surely be "Young" hobbling gaily into premature senility with the lyrical elan af your avarage 11-year old on a bottle of advocat egg-nog.
Some of its, well, plesant enough; the spirited dream-rock opener "Big Time" (poetic couplings ending thus; "car/far"; "you and me/eternity"; "suntan lotion/ocean"), despite the most miserable drum plod in the history of unconcious drummers with thier hair trapped forever in the high hat; the echoey doodle-trance of "Slip Away"; the jolly country springer "Changing Highways" featuring Johnny Cash's "Boy Named Sue" two-note comedy bass winner - bum! bum! bum! bum! and the rest is, frankly, four old blokes having a "work out" down the barn in Pitlochry in 1975 with thier pantaloons made entierly of patches with spliff leaves on. Especially the, like heavy man, "Loose Change" which contains, mercy, a geetar solo which is five minuets long. FIVE WHOLE GREAT BIG BRUNG-DRUNGE-DIDDLE-YOI-EEEE-OI-EEE-SCREE-SQUEEDLE- TIDDLE-DIDDLE-DRRRRRUNG!! of precious life long. Suddenly, for the very first time Bis makes sense.
Then theres the meandersome Scattered (lets think about livin') and things realy get "going": "Im a little bit high / Im a little bit low / Im a little bit here / Im a little bit there / Im a little bit up / Im a little bit Down / hear your name all over town". And we laughed at the Gallagher lasagne "experience".
Plus! the chugging My First Bert Weedon Songbook Of Marvy Fret Wieldin' Scale-Practicen' Lumpathons "This Town" featuring the old whailers stunning reprise "Im not asleep when Im lying down / Im asleep while Im walking around this town." Help.
And just when the "guess what's comming next, ho ho worra lark" caper finally loses its magic at 4am because your heads a plateful of spaghettie in the microwave, we have the acoustic reverie of "Music Arcade": "Have you ever been lost?" quakes the old buzzard. "have you ever been found?/ theres a colour in the sky tonight / makes me feel like Im alright" Well fancy - and furthermore - that. All this and the allegedly "rousing" cover of the old Jimmy Reed "classic" "Baby what you want me to do", the booze-blues cavalcade which goes You gat me running? / You gat me hidin' / gat me runnin' hidin' up down anywhereahoodeehuurgh" etc,etc, limping in last at just under eight minuets long, featuring sundry chums whoopin an' a hollerin down the bayou in Louisiana with thier bottles of rum up a gumtree and you know that the words "originality" and "Neil Young" can never again appear in the same sentance.
Musicianly, mastership, then we have in abundance.
Apparently. Tunes spirit solace for the soul and a great big rollickin'
sing-song to fan the fading embers of the heart we have somewhere in the back
catalogue from the Neolithic age of Neil Young, as perpetrators of Noelrock
already know. Maybe theres more dignity in a sometime-genius-old-bloke's trout
farm collective in Sunderland after all.
SYLVIA PATTERSON.