Legendary rocker Neil Young turns 70 on Thursday. While that makes him a ripe old age for an active musician, it still feels, well, young for ol’ Neil. He’s so prolific that it seems like he’s put a 100 years of music out in his 70. He’s released 36 studio albums as himself alone, and then you have to throw his work in Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young on top of that. He’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame two times over, and he’s considered one of the best guitarists of all-time. However, if there is one thing that Young deserves the most credit for it’s the sheer gumption to put out basically whatever the hell he wants.
The quantity of Young’s output is daunting. Being able to be that prolific, with any level of musical acumen, is impressive in its own right. What makes Young particularly notable and impressive, though, is that he’s done all sorts of different things throughout his career. Some of it seemed questionable on the surface. Some of it definitely was questionable. Young still put it all out, though, and then he just moved on to the next thing.
In the beginning, there was the grungy, cocaine addled rock of the Crazy Horse stuff. Songs like “Cinnamon Girl” built around crunching guitar licks. Then, on the flipside, there was the countrified acoustic strumming that Young was just as adept as. This is what you will find on Harvest, the 1972 album that has become, arguably, his most iconic, well-respected work. Harvest, though, also features the song “The Needle and the Damage Done,” which serve, in a way, as the harbinger of what was going to come next.
Young fans will understand when the they see the term “the Ditch trilogy” bandied about, but for those who are less aware, after the release of Harvest came the death of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten from a drug overdose. Young has been quoted as saying, “‘Heart of Gold’ put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch.” Thus, the “Ditch” trilogy was born.
It began with Young’s first live album, Time Fades Away. It’s not just a live album, it’s a live album of previously unreleased material. It’s also aggressive and rocking, and not what people were expecting, or necessarily wanting, after Harvest. Young, for neither the first nor the last time, zigged when everybody wanted him to zag. Time Fades Away was followed by On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night, two miserable albums. Beloved albums, sure, but not exactly material that goes down easily.
Eventually, Young broke from that spiral, and while those albums were a change of course after Harvest, they weren’t completely anathema to work Young had done previously. Then, the ‘80s happened. Reflecting upon the ‘80s, Young said, “The 80s were really good. The 80s were like, artistically, very strong for me, because I knew no boundaries and was experimenting with everything that I could come across, sometimes with great success, sometimes with terrible results, but nonetheless I was able to do this, and I was able to realize that I wasn’t in a box, and I wanted to establish that.” Great success and terrible results, indeed. Young made 10 albums in the ‘80s, and the results were fascinating, and, at times, exceedingly disappointing.
It started with the politically minded album Hawks & Doves, but politics has always been a major part of Young as a musician. Then, he got into electronic music. Re-ac-tor is technically an album with Crazy Horse, but since so electronically focused, it feels weird. In 1982, Young moved over to Geffen Records, and was given total creative control. So he made Trans. He used a Synclavier and a Vocoder. Now, Young has said that the album was influenced by trying to communicate with his son, who had severe cerebral palsy. That’s interesting and noble, and of course sad, but it did not make for a good album. It was totally different and totally weird, but Young had total control and he was going to use it. He then decided the thing to do next was an album of rockabilly songs that is less than 25 minutes long.
At this point, Geffen sued Young, literally for making “not commercial” music. Young countersued for breach of contract, and David Geffen himself ended up apologizing for the lawsuit. Oh, then he made another country album. Toward the end of the decade, now off of Geffen Records, Young released This Note’s For You, which was an attack on the commercialism of rock music that, funnily enough, won an MTV VMA for Video of the Year for its title track. It was not the last time Young would use his music to make a political point.
In fact, that’s pretty much all he’s done in recent years. Not entirely, to be fair. He made Are You Passionate?, which is a ‘60s soul album, and he made a rock opera called Greendale, which also has an accompanying movie that Young himself directed. In 2005, he suffered a brain aneurysm while working on Prairie Wind, which is a very basic, quiet, acoustic album that ended up in a concert film directed by Jonathan Demme.
Again, though, Young has increasingly used his music to express his political points and personal feelings. Living with War featured the song “Let’s Impeach the President.” Fork in the Road is about how Young put a hybrid engine in his 1959 Lincoln Continental. His most recent album is just basically Young bitching about Monsanto. There’s been other political songs strewn about here and there. His 2014 album A Letter Home also needs to be noted, because he recorded it on 1 947 Voice-O-Graph at Jack White’s Third Man records.
There are other projects that have popped up along the way. Young provided the soundtrack for Dead Man, a Jim Jarmusch film starring Johnny Depp as a man who is mistaken for the poet William Blake by a Native American man named Nobody. Iggy Pop wears a dress. There’s also Pono, a music player dedicated to high-quality sound, which was mostly sold on the back of Young complaining about the compression of MP3s. It’s as quixotic as anything else Young has done.
As Young himself said, not everything he has done has been a hit. How could they be, given how many things he’s put out there? Nobody releases this much music if they are afraid of having something fall flat. Nobody makes this variety of music if they are only concerned with success. Young could have been the “Cowgirl in the Sand” guy or the “Old Man” guy forever. He didn’t want to be though, and that’s why almost all his failures are noble failures. Is The Monsanto Years good? No, but the very fact Neil Young, at his advanced age, decided to make it is delightful, and perhaps even admirable, in its own way. Most musicians would think twice before releasing an album about a topic as esoteric as Monsanto, but Young went ahead and did it anyway.
Young has turned tragedy into wonderful music, even when it wasn’t the music people wanted from him, and he made a rockabilly album for the sake of it when he was getting a million bucks an album. It has been clumsy at times, and some of his misses really miss. They don’t miss out of dullness or repetitiveness, though. They miss because they were too ambitious or too idiosyncratic. Neil Young is a great musician with a lot of classic, iconic songs to his credit. It’s the breadth and, occasionally, the bizarreness of his output that really make him such a critical part of music history.
