My favorite Neil Young album is the first.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is why I streamed this.<\/p>\n
I started off with the second, "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere".\u00c2\u00a0 Bought it around the same time as "Deja Vu".\u00c2\u00a0 I needed more.\u00c2\u00a0 I loved "Cinnamon Girl", but the killer was "Down By The River".\u00c2\u00a0 I was hooked.\u00c2\u00a0 I turned everybody on to it.\u00c2\u00a0 And purchased "After The Gold Rush" the day it came out, the first week of my freshman year of college.<\/p>\n
Funny how "Southern Man" has become the most famous track off that album.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe because of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s retort.\u00c2\u00a0 But it was never my favorite.\u00c2\u00a0 I enjoyed it, but my favorites were on the second side.\u00c2\u00a0 To this day, "Don’t Let It Bring You Down" might still be my favorite Neil Young track. It wasn’t made for radio, but for your dorm room, your bedroom upstairs in your parents’ house.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a personal listening experience.\u00c2\u00a0 Light years from today’s bumping ass club world.<\/p>\n
Two tracks later came the other personal favorite…\u00c2\u00a0 "When You Dance I Can Really Love".\u00c2\u00a0 How many times did I dance to this track with my fantasy girlfriend.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what music does.\u00c2\u00a0 It gives you hope.\u00c2\u00a0 That better times are coming.<\/p>\n
Then Neil Young blew up with "Harvest".\u00c2\u00a0 It was hard to believe he could become any bigger, but "Heart Of Gold" was played incessantly on the radio, casual fans liked him so much he had to alienate them, by playing loud, electric rock on his cleanup tour.\u00c2\u00a0 Unrecorded numbers to boot.<\/p>\n
Nobody takes those kinds of chances.\u00c2\u00a0 No one dares his audience to listen.\u00c2\u00a0 Not anyone who’s got an audience.\u00c2\u00a0 And that’s why we still listen to Neil Young.\u00c2\u00a0 He seems to be doing it for himself.<\/p>\n
I read about Neil’s debut.\u00c2\u00a0 How it was recalled and reissued with a slightly different cover with a new mix before most people even knew who he was. But I didn’t truly discover it until the summer of ’72, on the beach with my older sister and her boyfriend.\u00c2\u00a0 He had a tape of favorites playing in the background.\u00c2\u00a0 I loved hearing Zappa’s "Peaches En Regalia", but I didn’t recognize the waltzing country instrumental.\u00c2\u00a0 When he said it was Neil Young, I almost plotzed.<\/p>\n
You see we couldn’t afford all the music we wanted, we couldn’t hear everything in the seventies, the twenty first century is a golden age of listening, with everything available, for free even, to the old purveyors’ chagrin.\u00c2\u00a0 But when I finally started to spin Neil’s debut at people’s houses when I found it in their collections, the track that truly stunned me was the follow-up to the opener, the cut after "The Emperor Of Wyoming", "The Loner".\u00c2\u00a0 It just FEELS right!\u00c2\u00a0 As if your body was a baseball glove, and the song fit right into its pocket.<\/p>\n
Even better is "I’ve Been Waiting For You"…FOR SUCH A LONG TIME!\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, that fuzzy guitar intro…\u00c2\u00a0 Isn’t that just what life is about?\u00c2\u00a0 Waiting?\u00c2\u00a0 You get older and you start to give up hope.\u00c2\u00a0 But then you hear the right song and…<\/p>\n
The closer I knew.\u00c2\u00a0 Heard it in a dorm room one dark Sunday night.\u00c2\u00a0 "The Last Trip To Tulsa".<\/p>\n
The first album is not the best.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m sticking with "After The Gold Rush" as the ultimate, but the first is so intimate.\u00c2\u00a0 You don’t hear the audience at all. It’s like a mad Canadian scientist has concocted it in his basement.\u00c2\u00a0 And you’ve been allowed to descend the rickety wooden steps to hear it.<\/p>\n
The first two archival albums are great, but "Massey Hall" was recorded when Neil had already made it, and upon the recording of "Fillmore East", insiders already knew of his talent.\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas when "Canterbury House" was recorded, Neil Young was a nobody.<\/p>\n
He’d been absent the Buffalo Springfield the two times I’d seen them, but this seemed about intra-band warfare, and hadn’t Stephen sung the hit anyway?<\/p>\n
The band had broken up.\u00c2\u00a0 Faded away.\u00c2\u00a0 "Retrospective" didn’t become a hit until CSN broke through and the audience wanted more.<\/p>\n
So, Neil records an album and goes out on a club tour SOLO!<\/p>\n
That’s one of the marvelous elements of the "Canterbury House" recordings.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s playing all those riffs on his acoustic.\u00c2\u00a0 All the nuances.\u00c2\u00a0 "The Loner" sounds like "The Loner", it doesn’t need a band to flesh it out.<\/p>\n
But as good as the music is, it’s the raps that truly entrance.<\/p>\n
You see I’ve been to this gig.\u00c2\u00a0 Not this specific one.\u00c2\u00a0 But at the Bitter End, clubs all over America.\u00c2\u00a0 You were a fan of an act, you lived for an act, and you schlepped down to hear them along with a hundred other souls.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe two hundred.\u00c2\u00a0 You got there hours early, just to sit up front.\u00c2\u00a0 You hung on every word.\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn’t the same rap in every city.\u00c2\u00a0 This was a one off.\u00c2\u00a0 Made just for you.<\/p>\n
Listening to "Canterbury House" I was jetted back decades.\u00c2\u00a0 There was no Webcast, you had to be there.\u00c2\u00a0 And after the show, you went home and played the album(s) for days.\u00c2\u00a0 Told everybody about your secret, even though they were clueless.<\/p>\n
Neil talks about getting a check and buying a Bentley.\u00c2\u00a0 Today’s Neil Young wouldn’t be so bourgeois.\u00c2\u00a0 But this was before he’d made it.\u00c2\u00a0 When he still wanted to make it.\u00c2\u00a0 When he wasn’t the elder statesman, but he needed the success.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s honest, uncalculated.\u00c2\u00a0 And even a bit boring.\u00c2\u00a0 But we never minded.\u00c2\u00a0 We were interested in everything the act had to say.<\/p>\n
I don’t know if this scene can be replicated.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no money in club shows.\u00c2\u00a0 The act wants to tell everybody about the gig.\u00c2\u00a0 Broadcast it.\u00c2\u00a0 The audience can’t own it.<\/p>\n
But you can only have success when the audience owns you.\u00c2\u00a0 You can’t be owned by the radio station, certainly not television, definitely not the corporation.\u00c2\u00a0 The fan has to be number one.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to make decisions with the fan in mind.\u00c2\u00a0 You can’t break that bond.<\/p>\n
Used to be easy.\u00c2\u00a0 The opportunities to sell out were almost nonexistent.\u00c2\u00a0 But today, the businessmen tell you you’ve got to play the game, that you can’t make it if you don’t.\u00c2\u00a0 So you do.\u00c2\u00a0 And your potential fans play video games, music is seen as sauce, not as the main course, the carb, not the necessary protein.<\/p>\n
Maybe you should fire up a doobie, get behind the wheel and take your car for a spin around midnight.\u00c2\u00a0 You could go alone, but even if you’ve got a buddy, you won’t speak.\u00c2\u00a0 The music will be enough.\u00c2\u00a0 "The Last Trip To Tulsa" will set your mind free.\u00c2\u00a0 You may not understand the lyrics, but your mind will contemplate the absurdity of life.<\/p>\n
Life is absurd.\u00c2\u00a0 The longer you live, the less it makes sense.\u00c2\u00a0 We depend on the artists to point this out.\u00c2\u00a0 No one fifteen whose act was concocted by cynical oldsters can deliver this message.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is why the mainstream is in trouble.\u00c2\u00a0 You see there really is no mainstream.<\/p>\n
Back when this recording was made, labels wouldn’t authorize live product, they didn’t want to confuse the listener, they didn’t want anything substandard, not perfect, in release.\u00c2\u00a0 Now, everything gets out.\u00c2\u00a0 People want the stuff with the warts.\u00c2\u00a0 Because it’s honest, they can relate to it.<\/p>\n
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