Just think of me as one you'd never figure.
Neil Young and I have some superficial things in common. We were both born in Toronto but we spent our adolescence and teenage years in Winnipeg, and it was there that we took up playing the guitar and writing songs. And I suppose my late teenage look, such as it was, owed quite a bit to Neil's, such as it was - work boots, patched jeans, flannel shirts, long black hair. His songs were part of my own early songbook. But I think all similarities end there (and surely, that's enough!) We became very different artists, with very different approaches to music. I could never be so careless, so reckless, so fearless, so senseless, so ruthless, so downright weird. I'm not ashamed. No one else could either.
After apprenticing in local bands in Winnipeg, and working the folkie circuit between Toronto and Winnipeg, Young's professional career truly begins in the spring of 1966 when Buffalo Springfield suddenly came together in Los Angeles. The concept for the band was brilliant - Young and Stephen Stills would write the songs and play lead guitar, Richie Furay would sing them, and Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin were a dynamic rhythm section. It held together for about six months, time enough to establish a reputation as an incendiary live act and time enough to make their brilliant debut album, though Stills and Young both swear to this day that the recording process was botched, and the tracks were then poorly mixed. Ahmet Ertegun said the album couldn't touch the demos that had prompted him to sign the band in the first place.
It was too good to last. Stills and Young both wanted to sing their own songs. Stills fought so hard for the steering wheel that he pushed his bandmates away. And Bruce Palmer kept getting busted and deported back to Canada. It also turned out that Young had epilepsy, and his first seizures began during this period. He began a pattern of quitting the band, and then returning to the fold. The Springfield unexpectedly scored a big hit with a one-off single of Stills' "For What It's Worth" (it was hastily added to the next pressings of their debut album), but the band's involvement in their second album was intermittent, to say the least. Two of Young's three songs don't feature any of the other band members at all. Furay and Stills were also working on their own songs independent of the others. The group finally broke up in early 1968; Furay and Jim Messina assembled a third album to fulfil remaining contractual obligations. Buffalo Springfield made some of the greatest music of their era, but they left so much more on the table, unfulfilled and unrealized. What could have been.
Young has been a solo artist ever since. He's hooked up with Crosby, Stills, and Nash on occasion and he's had a number of regular backup bands. He's given them a series of tremendous names - Crazy Horse, the Shocking Pinks, the Santa Monica Flyers, the Stray Gators, the International Harvesters. While there have been many other musicians, from Ben Keith to Nils Lofgren, who turn up at regular intervals on Young's record, drifting in and out of his orbit, he has always been most famous for his work with Crazy Horse: Billy Talbot on bass, Ralph Molina on drums, and originally Danny Whitten on guitar. Young's enduring attachment to them has always mystified many of his more conventionally musical friends and colleagues. David Crosby was positively eloquent on the subject ("They should’ve never been allowed to be musicians at all. They should’ve been shot at birth. They can’t play. I’ve heard the bass player muff a change in a song seventeen times in a row. "Cinnamon Girl’— he still doesn’t know it!") But this decidedly ordinary California bar band somehow takes Young where he needs to go, where no one else can take him. And that's why he rides that Crazy Horse.
It’s not that they fuck up that makes them great. That’s a by-product of the abandon that they play with. They’re not organized. No matter how fuckin’ much we practice the song, Billy can get so into the groove he’ll forget to do the change, y’know? And Ralph may turn the beat around. It happens. Or I can start playin’ the guitar, and Ralph can pick it up on the wrong beat and play it backwards—that happens all the time. Never happens with real professional groups. With our band this shit happens all the time.
There have long been two main threads to Young's career. On the one hand, there's the singer-songwriter type material, based on his acoustic guitar or piano. And on the other, there's loud hard rock that often serves mainly as a framework for his twisted, unique guitar playing. Young has zig-zagged between these two directions from the very beginning. His first solo album followed one of those trails, his second switched sharply to the other. He had made some random, often quite surprising, detours along the way. And he has an endearing habit, every time he wanders down some strange new path, of announcing with great excitement that this is it. He's finally found his true calling - whether it's traditional country music or mechanical synthesizer music or horn-based r&b - and that this is the music he expects to play from now on, for the rest of his career. And without fail, six months later, he's hauling that black Les Paul off the shelf and saddling up the Horse.
Young's a very odd singer-songwriter, of course. What other kind would he be? His most effective lyrics are almost always maddeningly obscure. It probably means something to him but the rest of us are usually in the dark. It's rather as if he doesn't really have anything to actually say. Which is just as well - he's not a particularly thoughtful, well-informed kind of person. There is very little that is coherent or logical about his thinking and on an intellectual level, he and his art can often seem shallow and simplistic, downright crude at times. It's precisely when Young gets straight to the point, and states clearly what he's thinking, that his music loses its way. But on an emotional level, Young is nuanced, subtle, sympathetic and gifted at making a connection. He may only have some kind of vague impression or feeling to work with, but he is extremely good at being able to share that somehow. It's a very odd gift indeed, but one that plays to his strengths and avoids his weaknesses. His greatest gift has always been his way with a memorable melody that says as much or more as whatever words are spilling out.
Well, that and his crazed, inspired, reckless, inimitable electric guitar playing. He doesn't sound remotely like anyone else. Some of it's simply the enormous sound he gets out that legendary 1953 Gibson Les Paul, nicknamed "Old Black," and played at ear-destroying volume. It's been the signature of his electric sound for more than fifty years now. But he plays differently as well. Most rock lead players took their initial inspiration from the great blues guitarists, and most of those players played lead lines vaguely influenced by the way a horn moves between notes. A guitar is a very different kind of instrument, and its natural tendency is not to flow between notes - each note is a discrete thing, like on a piano. Guitar players can get around this - the space between the tones can be elided, rounded off, by bends and slides, by hammering on and off. The sustain of the notes which electricity provides makes this much easier to accomplish.
But that's generally not how Young likes to do it. For one thing - as he doesn't mind admitting - he doesn't quite have the chops, although they've improved considerably over the years. But he's made a virtue, and an audio signature, out of his shortcomings. His playing accentuates the fact that a guitar - like a piano - produces a note by a percussive act. If the tempo gets slow enough, Young can get a little more conventional and let notes slide and bend. Certainly, the immense noise he gets out of Old Black and his rig of vintage Fender amps and a multitude of foot pedals gives him sustain to spare, which sometimes helps his playing seem to flow. A little. But for the most part, he generally looks to play the most jagged, aggressive guitar lines imaginable. If the tempo is fast, he hardly seems to be playing at all - it's more like he's just thrashing away up high on the neck, as if he were trying to throttle the instrument. But he absolutely makes it work, as something like "Rockin' in the Free World" clearly shows.
Young's discography is an enormous, sprawling thing. He has been an extremely prolific songwriter - Bruce Springsteen could probably match his output, but Springsteen has been extremely picky about what he decides to release to the public. Bob Dylan has had periods when the songs poured out of him as well, but Dylan has had even longer stretches - years and years worth - thwarted by what seems to have been a crippling writer's block. Young has seldom even slowed down. The songs just keep coming, and he just keeps putting them out there. But he's notoriously someone who simply doesn't care much about the job of making records. Even Dylan takes more care with his records than Young, and the bar doesn't get much lower than that. Young writes songs and plays them, preferably to an audience. He goes into the studio, he bashes them out as quickly as possible, and he moves on - to the next thing, whatever it is. He is changeable and impulsive, and utterly ruthless in following his wayward muse. He's always swinging for the fences, and he misses it completely over and over. But when he makes contact, he knocks it right out of the park.
Young is a collector - of guitars, of amplifiers, of old automobiles, of model trains - and it shouldn't surprise anyone that he's done his best to collect every recorded note he's ever played. So he has spent much of the last two decades tending to his enormous Archives. Through them he has now issued entire albums that he made and scrapped along the way, almost two dozen concert recordings, and all sorts of stray songs and out-takes along with his official releases. There are two official volumes of the Archives so far, containing eighteen discs all told, and they only take us to 1976. The project already has a real chance to become the rock and roll equivalent of Tristram Shandy.
But wait - there's more. The Archives additionally include the Performance Series, which so far runs to fifteen live recordings from 1968 to 2003, six of which are also included as part of the main Archives package. And there's still more - he's since added the Special Release Series, for albums he recorded but chose not to release in the moment - there are four entries so far, one of which (Homegrown) was also part of his official Archives. And finally, he now has the Official Bootleg Series, the purpose of which is to provide well made versions of shows that had long been the basis of popular bootlegs. Young's attitude on the subject was changeable as always, but as a rule he didn't object all that much to being bootlegged. No sane record company could possibly allow him to issue as many records as he would have liked, and he was always far more dedicated to live performance than making records anyway.
The very distinction between live and studio is often meaningless in Young's case. For most of his career, he has always recorded live anyway, even when working in the studio. So the only truly meaningful distinction I'm making here is between records that introduced a new collection of songs (some of which were recorded live in concert, but also several collections that weren't issued until decades after they had been recorded) and albums that were explicitly presented as concert recordings of songs already issued in "studio" versions. There are 47 albums that require our consideration, as well as an EP that was only issued in Japan and Australia. I can't even fathom the notion of living without all of the top fifteen albums from this list. I couldn't even think of myself as a serious person without them. I'd still be pretty grumpy about missing the many great songs scattered elsewhere in his catalogue. There are some absolutely essential live recordings, of course - the monumental Live Rust, the 1970 Fillmore concert with Crazy Horse, the Massey Hall performance from his solo acoustic tour. I'd also recommend his 1976 retrospective Decade, a terrific career overview that includes his best contributions to CSNY and Buffalo Springfield, a handful of gems released nowhere else, and Young's own helpfully informative and extremely droll annotations.
But we're going to begin at the bottom, as we always do, and there's almost nothing to recommend about the first nine or ten albums. He's hit a lot of home runs, but he's fallen flat on his face quite a few times as well. It's just how he rolls.
48. Peace Trail (December 2016)
Young's disdain for the process of record-making is well known - we've learned to deal with it - but here it's simply insufferable. The songs sound like they were all written that morning and his players sound like they'd never heard them before recording them that afternoon. That's probably not fair - they did spend three whole days on it.
cause I like to work
When nothing else is going on
47. Are You Passionate? (April 2002)
He had a great band to work with - Booker T. and the MGs provide support on this. Booker T. Jones has done excellent work for half a century, with an enormous range of artists ranging from Otis Redding to Willie Nelson to (most recently) the National's Matt Berninger. But he couldn't salvage Neil Young, who just didn't have any good songs for the occasion. He scrapped Toast for this?
Let's say it's hard to break,
Let's say we got to do something,
Before it's just too late.
46. Old Ways (August 1985)
Young had been so erratic in the years preceding this that everyone had basically stopped paying attention to him. No one missed anything here. Young had been dipping his foot in country-inflected music all along, but here he jumps in at the deep end, recording with Nashville session pros and everything. But this is tame, countrypolitan music. It opens with his inexplicable cover of Gigi Grant's "The Wayward Wind," and then provides nine Young originals. Although it's rather well played and sung, it doesn't go anywhere, mostly because these are almost all pretty bad songs.
Got lucky with a rock 'n' roll band
Struck gold in Hollywood
45. Everybody's Rockin' (August 1983)
David Geffen had been taken aback by Trans, Young's first album for Geffen Records. He then rejected an early version of Old Ways and insisted that Young make a rock'n'roll record. Neil Young does not respond well to people telling him what to do, one reason he's never been able to tolerate Stephen Stills for longer than a few months. This album is basically Young shoving a rock'n'roll record up David Geffen's ass. There are just ten songs, four of them covers, and it runs a mere 25 minutes. And working in the traditional rock'n'roll genres simply doesn't suit Young's skillset. Rockabilly requires a lighter touch than Young's electric music usually provides, and when he attempts it, as he does here, it simply doesn't sound natural. He can play the notes, but it sounds forced and awkward. He's wearing clothes that don't fit. And yet... it's so downright goofy that it's almost likeable, in its thoroughly weird way. Almost.
Cause Wanda always want to
44. Storytone (November 2014)
Young's life was changing drastically at this time. He had just divorced his wife of 36 years. He'd given her the ranch in northern California that had been his home since 1971 and was in the process of moving to Colorado. Many of the songs here celebrate his new romance with Daryl Hannah, and there's actually an appealing sweetness to some of them. But for reasons no one will ever understand, Young decided to record them live on a Hollywood soundstage, usually with a 92 piece orchestra (a few others feature a classic big band instead.) What the hell? Perhaps such a thing had always been on his bucket list, and he needed to check it off. It's not like these songs are exactly crying out for such treatment (Young simultaneously released a stripped-down version of these same songs, also done live in the studio.) Who knows what he was thinking.
What it's like to be like me
But I'm not different from anyone else
43. Living With War (May 2006)
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Young's politics have never been remotely coherent - the man is neither well informed nor particularly well read - but he disliked George Bush, both father and son, and he was vehemently opposed to the Iraq war. But Young is never particularly persuasive when he comes right out and tells you what he's thinking. And when he's all fired up with something he wants to talk about, the part of his work that is supposed to be... you know, art - that all gets shoved off to the side. Where craft had already been banished. So the songs degenerate into crude, simplistic things with mere chants rather than anything resembling a melody, and empty slogans for lyrics.
We came to liberate them all
42. Fork in the Road (April 2009)
Not exactly a concept record, but certainly one with a theme. Young normally doesn't even notice when he contradicts himself, but the combination of his passionate concern for the environment along with his lifelong love for enormous old gas-guzzling vehicles was so obvious even he couldn't ignore it. His solution? Dropping an electric motor into a vintage Lincoln Continental and seeing if he could make it work. (Not very well.) And then writing a whole bunch of crude and sloppy songs upon that general theme, and bashing out a crude and sloppy record of the same. So yes, this record has all the same problems that Living With War has. As the cover photo suggests, he's taking this whole cranky old coot thing just a little too seriously.
Stored for you in a giant battery
She don't use much though,
that's smart for a car
41. Re-ac-tor (November 1981)
This is simply a bad record on its own merits. Until this album, Young and Crazy Horse had never put a hoof wrong. But he'd never before counted on the Horse to salvage such a dull group of songs. It was beyond them. There were pressing personal reasons for Young not to have his mind on his work (and for his work to be so crude and repetitive), but no one was aware of that at the time. And knowing the circumstances doesn't make the record any better.
Got mashed potatoes
Got mashed potatoes
Ain't got no T-bone
40. A Letter Home (April 2014)
First things first - it sounds just awful. It sounds like utter crap. This was recorded on Jack White's Voice-o-Graph vinyl recording booth, which was a handy way for amateurs to record themselves in the 1940s. Young went into White's antique recording booth and bashed out a bunch of songs from his old folkie songbook. This was certainly a strange move for a man in the midst of a very public campaign that saw him railing away about the lousy quality of modern recording. Do not expect coherence from Neil Young, people. These are really good songs, and Young does a decent job with them. It still sounds like crap.
Why do I let myself worry
Wondering
What in the world did I do
39. Long May You Run (September 1976)
This is by the "Stills-Young Band" - it started out as Stills and Young trying to renew their old connection, from the Springfield and CSNY. It began to evolve into the long-awaited CSNY reunion album when Graham Nash and David Crosby joined the sessions, but when Crosby and Nash departed to finish their duo album (they did have a deadline), Stills and Young rather churlishly erased all their contributions and went back to making their own duo project. Which is a lemon. The whole point of the Stills-Young team is the electric guitar interaction between the two of them. It's led to absolutely spectacular fireworks in the past, in both Springfield and CSNY. Unfortunately, we get none of that here. Just a collection of songs that are either dull or dumb, or dull and dumb. They planned a tour to support it, but Young bailed on it after a few weeks. Stills had always been a handful, abrasive and aggressive from the beginning, but after he discovered cocaine, he was quite unbearable. At least Young's title track, a droll ode to the old hearse he used to drive around in, is a winner.
some things together
38. The Monsanto Years (June 2015)
Young hooked up with Lukas Nelson's Promise of the Real to make a record denouncing Monsanto and various other large corporations he was unhappy with. The songs are way too much like blog posts set to music. To the extent the record is redeemed, it's mostly by the band - Willie's kid leads a unit that plays a slightly sloppy and energetic country-rock, and their energy and spirit rubs off on the old hippie bitching about the evil corporations.
That's why they're like people, just harder to control
They don't want to fall,
Too big to fail, too rich for jail
37. World Record (November 2022)
Young's latest has a photo of his father on the cover, author and journalist Scott Young, whom I actually remember seeing on Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts when I was a little kid, before John Bassett got him fired back in the early 1960s. It's the third record with Nils Lofgren filling out the Crazy Horse lineup, and the more Young takes advantage of Lofgren's abilities, the less it works. The Sampedro version of the Horse imposed some real restrictions on what Young and the band could do, and it seems clear to me that Young always benefits from anything that narrows his scope and gives him some kind of focus. Even if it's the limitations of his band, the fact that these guys can only handle these three chords, and this one tempo. But Lofgren is both prodigiously skilled and not driven by his own ego. He doesn't fight with his bandleader - he does his best to realize his bandleader's vision. His skills and his nature allow Young to wander down all kinds of dead ends that were closed off to him in previous incarnations of the band. Here Young has nine reasonably short songs of no particular distinction. There are a couple of noisy rock tunes, but Young is playing keyboards half the time (Lofgren is playing accordion on several cuts.) The project is mostly redeemed by the tenth song, the lengthy, noisy "Chevrolet" when the loud guitars finally get cracking.
The wonder won't wait for you
36. Landing on Water (July 1986)
This is a failure, and yet another very strange record for Young to make. It's a synth-heavy studio concoction, played by Young and Danny Kortchmar, with Steve Jordan on drums. Kortchmar is a veteran studio wizard, probably best known for his work on Don Henley's meticulously crafted records, but from all accounts it was Young rather than Kortchmar who was responsible for the weird turn this record took. For some reason, Young had become obsessed with getting an enormous drum sound. Jordan is a fabulous drummer, of course, a rock'n'roll powerhouse - Keith Richards' drummer of choice when he can't have Charlie Watts - and three years later Jordan would be behind the kit for Young's legendary performance on Saturday Night Live. But since his debut Young had made a point of not working this way in the studio. It all sounds wrong, the big drums are a distraction, and the songs aren't particularly interesting. The most noteworthy one here is "Hippie Dream," practically a diss track aimed at his old bandmate David Crosby.
Are a hippie dream
Capsized in excess
35. Silver and Gold (April 2000)
Young had spent the 1990s practically attached to his Les Paul, blowing the roof off concert halls across the world. He went into the studio to make three loud and noisy records with Crazy Horse and one with Pearl Jam, and issued a couple of live albums with the Horse as well. Perhaps all this had blown out his ears, perhaps Old Black needed to go into the shop for some repairs - at any rate, there was no electric guitar anywhere on his first record of the new century. All these songs are based on his acoustic playing except for the one where he plays piano. It's well crafted for a Neil Young album, but the songs are extremely uneven. Only a couple are worth the bother, but those ones - "Razor Love," "Horseshoe Man" are worth the time and trouble.
And shakes 'em up like he doesn't care
He says there will always be heart break
34. The Visitor (December 2017)
Recording again with Promise of the Real, and the youngsters in the band give the grizzled old-timer in front a bit of a kick in the ass, which he can use from time to time. Young has some fairly promising songs, although as always with his latter-day work, the more clearly you can hear what he's singing about the less effective it tends to be. He's also off on some pretty weird excursions - "Fly By Night Deal" is more of a rant than a song, and he seems to be trying to invoke a carny barker on "Carnival." It also sounds like they may have actually rehearsed these songs once or twice - the band sounds much tighter than they did on The Monsanto Years. They may simply have grown more accustomed to playing with Young, or they may simply be getting better (this is a very young band.)
That's how I plan to say goodbye
33. Psychedelic Pill (October 2012)
We all love the sound of Crazy Horse jamming. Really, we do. But sometimes it's just a bit too much. This record opens with a meandering jam over two chords that gets extended for 27 minutes. Really. There are two more songs running a little over 16 minutes apiece. It's actually a lot more fun than it sounds - you'll probably just have to trust me on this - and Neil plays some very cool guitar. But you have to really feel like hanging out with the Horse for this one.
It's what I do and what I can
This old world has been good to me
32. Life (June 1987)
The war with David Geffen continues - those are prison bars on the cover, and the number of albums he owes Geffen are being checked off on the wall behind. This is a Crazy Horse album, but Young isn't quite over his very 1980s obsession with big drum sounds, which is a bit of a distraction, and certainly sounds very strange with this band. After all, it's Ralph Molina on the kit - you're glad he's there thumping away, but it's not the sort of thing you want to emphasize. The first three songs address politics, which is generally never a good idea for this particular artist. And Young is still messing around with synthesizers. A lot of problems here. But he sounds fully engaged and full of life. Like someone starting to recover his bearings. And "Prisoners of Rock and Roll" lays out the whole Neil and Crazy Horse ethos.
They try to change us and ruin our band
That's why we don't wanna be good
31. This Note's For You (April 1988)
After floundering through most of the 1980s, Young's denunciations of the commercialization of the music industry - with artists cutting ads for products and corporations sponsoring tours - earned him both credibility and notoriety (MTV famously declined at first to play the video to the title track, which savagely mocked Michael Jackson and Calvin Klein.) But it's another of his genre exercises - in this case, soul and r&b based music, complete with horn section - and as always, Young is far too idiosyncratic and downright weird to make much sense in any genre other than Neil Young Noise. But the songs are starting to get better, and the guitar playing is just fine. Still, there's something almost sour in the sound of the horns, as if they're wondering what the hell they're doing on a Neil Young record. (Well, for one thing they're playing Neil Young songs and Young generally writes in guitar keys - A, G, D - rather than the keys that actually suit horns.)
Ain't singing for Coke
I don't sing for nobody
Makes me look like a joke
30. Prairie Wind (September 2005)
This is mostly a sweet, humble record. Young always sounds comparatively normal, suitable to be presented in civilized company, when he's strumming his acoustic as he does here. There are a couple of misfires ("When God Made Me,") and we don't need another song about Elvis, but they're outnumbered by some of the most appealing melodies Young had come up with in years. But even the best songs tend to run too long - they average five and half minutes even though there's not a single guitar break in earshot.
29. Colorado (October 2019)
The third iteration of Crazy Horse has Nils Lofgren occupying the second guitar chair previously filled by Danny Whitten and Frank Sampredro. Lofgren is as great a guitar player as anyone who has ever played, even if he has spent much of his professional career as the second guitarist to Bruce Springsteen and Young. His presence changed the sound of Crazy Horse considerably. Molina and Talbot are still doing the same old crude stomp they've been playing since they were kids, but where Sampedro generally joined in with big blocky rhythm chords, Lofgren's approach is a little more like Whitten's, an actual complement to Young's playing rather than part of the foundation. One of the weaknesses of Young's latter day records is that his melodies are not as distinctive, not as defined, as they were earlier in his career. This is probably because it's become his current habit to write some words and sing them and record them right away, before he's even developed a real melody. It's also made his singing much less assertive - he often sounds downright tentative these days. But he's not going to change his ways now.
I found my friends along the way
Some are here with me right now
Some have disappeared somehow
28. Le Noise (September 2010)
Neil Young and Daniel Lanois is an interesting concept. Young had guested on Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball, produced by Lanois - the title track is one of Young's songs - which is probably where Young got his first look at Lanois' methods. Not that he used many of them here. Lanois is famous for assembling large groups of players in a small room, often with old and exotic instruments, and having them try lots of different things. The process can take some time. But this record is just Neil Young, his guitar, and eight new songs. Except on six of those songs the guitar is that old Les Paul, cranked up to the max, with some of Lanois' special effects. It's very strange to hear what sounds like Crazy Horse music without Crazy Horse thumping along - and it turns out, one really misses them. They ground Young's music somehow - they provide a firm foundation for the noise and the wildness.
27. Broken Arrow (July 1996)
The Horse sounds just great and so does Neil, but he runs out of interesting songs pretty quick. Almost right away, to be honest. Just when you're beginning to get excited about the whole thing. Oh well. It opens with three long ones that are mainly settings for guitar excursions; these are followed by three shorter, generally nondescript tunes -"Changing Highways" finds the Horse tackling a vaguely country-inflected song that sounds like it had been abandoned by Buffalo Springfield. After the solo acoustic "Music Arcade," it all concludes with a live take of Jimmy Reed's "Baby What You Want Me To Do" recorded on an audience microphone. As if Neil was making his own bootleg.
For me it's not over
26. Barn (December 2021)
Young sticks with Crazy Horse for another record, and the second record with the Nils Lofgren version of the Horse is the best of the three. Neil doesn't have much singing voice left now that he's in his mid-70s, but it doesn't matter nearly as much on the up-tempo numbers. Some of them are pretty dumb, but they get salvaged by the guitar playing. An old trick. It still works. The best track, "Welcome Back," is the longest - it's the best precisely because it's got the most (and best) guitar. And the closing "Don't Forget Love" is as sweet as Crazy Horse has ever managed to get.
One that you heard before
Might be a window to your soul I can open slowly
I've been singing this way for so long
25. Mirror Ball (August 1995)
Young had been adopted by the Seattle grunge bands of the early 1990s as a kind of role model, and Pearl Jam had been delighted to have him join them on stage. They're not really the right kind of band for him - they're just a little too polished (I know - Pearl Jam, polished?) But Pearl Jam does play really hard, with plenty of enthusiasm, and the combination of them and Young fits rather well. It's not really a great bunch of songs, but they all catch a groove and ride it. They sound pretty good while they're doing it.
They don't do the things I do
They go somewhere
While I run away with you
24. Chrome Dreams II (October 2007)
Young had planned an album called Chrome Dreams in the mid 1970s. As usual, he changed his mind and did something else instead. As usual, most of the songs that had been planned for the album showed up on one of his next few albums anyway. And there's no apparent relation, none whatsoever, between the scrapped album and this Chrome Dreams II. So one suspects that Young simply thought it was a good name for an album and didn't want to waste it. While some of the songs here had been waiting a very long time to be recorded, the entire album (with one notable exception) was recorded in mid-2007 with the core band of Young, Ben Keith, Ralph Molina from Crazy Horse and Rick Rosas and it's a pretty varied set. The first few songs lead one to assume that Young is in fairly laid-back mode, but then the stomping rockers kick in with "Spirit Road" and "Dirty Old Man." It closes with "The Way" in which Young is accompanied by a children's choir - it sounds vaguely reminiscent of his very first album, for some reason. Along with these fairly normal songs are two lengthy epics. "No Hidden Path" is a 14 minute electric guitar stomp, and that's always fun. But "Ordinary People" (not something Young knows much about) takes us all the way back to the 1980s, when it was recorded with the Bluenotes band. It's 18 minutes of mostly fierce guitar leads trading licks with the horn section. All told, the record is actually pretty good, even if it is utterly incoherent.
That used to lead home
But now they seem used up and gone
23. Americana (June 2012)
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It had been almost ten years since Young had hooked up with Crazy Horse, and they celebrated their reunion by running absolute roughshod over a collection of chestnuts from the Great American Folk Songbook. These songs may never recover from the brutal thrashing they receive here, and there's something rather glorious about it. Because why not? These are just songs, they're not sacred texts. Just for fun, they toss in the Silhouettes "Get a Job" (Crazy Horse did start out as a doo-wop vocal group before they ever picked up instruments.) After an outstanding - and surprisingly restrained - version of "Wayfaring Stranger," Neil closes with "God Save the Queen," like any good Canadian boy. Except Neil sings all the verses.
22. Harvest Moon (November 1992)
It had been twenty years since the original Harvest had placed Young in the middle of the road ("travelling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.") This was marketed as his long-overdue return to that type of music, as if he'd recorded neither the excellent Comes a Time or the not-so-excellent Old Ways in the meantime. But this one actually had a song called "Harvest Moon," which received a suitably nostalgic video of old boomers acting romantic. What was really happening is that Young had blown out his ears touring with Crazy Horse in support of Ragged Glory., He would saddle them up again just as soon as he recovered. But this was a nice placeholder - with a couple of exceptions ("From Hank to Hendrix"), this is a bunch of pretty fetching songs. The title track, a modest hit, is actually one of the album's weakest numbers.
I don't have to understand
21. Hitchhiker (September 2017)
This was recorded in a single session one night in August 1976, stopping only for more "weed, beer, or coke." Reprise thought it was a collection of demos rather than a real record and didn't want to release it. Remarkably for him, Young seems to have regarded this as not unreasonable of the company at all. He would eventually redo most, but not all, of the songs found here. The title track would have to wait more than thirty years before turning up electrified on Le Noise, but seven others, mostly in fairly similar versions, would turn up as deep cuts on other albums before the decade was over. ("Powderfinger" would benefit from the mighty power and glory of Crazy Horse.) This is a very impressive group of songs and they make for a fine album in themselves.
It's only reality the way it seems.
20. Trans (January 1983)
Nobody - especially not his brand new record company - saw this coming. It begins innocently enough, with a minor little trifle called "Little Thing Called Love," originally recorded in Hawaii for an album to be called Island in the Sun that David Geffen wasn't keen on releasing. So Young kept three of the Hawaii tracks and veered off in a very different direction. The synthesizers take over on the second track, and the mechanically generated beats, and Young's famously distinctive voice rendered almost unrecognizable, processed through a vocoder. It's weird that it works as well as it does (and so much better than work that seems closer to his normal comfort zone - thinking of you, Old Ways.) But it's a pretty good batch of songs - those melodies of his insist on making themselves heard. Strangely enough the two Hawaii songs inserted in amongst the electronics don't sound quite as out of place as they should. The lengthy closer, "Like an Inca," also doesn't belong here - but it's a pretty cool track, and one of the few times Young is content to play rhythm while Nils Lofgren handles the lead playing.
To the city just in time
To bring another system down
19. Toast (July 2022)
This was recorded with Crazy Horse in late 2000 and early 2001 but was set aside in its moment. Young found the project depressing and instead went on to make the very mediocre Are You Passionate with Booker T. and the MGs, where he remade several of the songs found here. This was unfortunate. The album he scrapped is a perfectly fine Crazy Horse album. It's not as great as Ragged Glory but it's definitely better than Broken Arrow. Be forewarned though - the opening track "Quit" is awful, a bad song, and a type of song that doesn't suit the Crazy Horse skillset. (Which didn't stop Young from re-recording it for his next album, but Booker T. and company couldn't save it either.)
As easy as a song
I'd wake up someday
And the pain would all be gone
18. Eldorado (April 1989)
A five song EP issued only in Australia and Japan, and kind of a trailer for his next album where remixed versions of three of the songs would appear. But "Cocaine Eyes" and "Heavy Love" can only be found here, and they're more than worth the price of admission - furious, stomping rockers. The EP still has that stupid 80s drum sound, but the guitar playing is generally loud and twisted enough to overcome it. Old Black rules, as usual.
Nothin' I say is written in stone
17. Hawks and Doves (October 1980)
This seems like a deliberately minor record - it only runs 29 minutes - and it's another mixed bag. The second side is the new material, five bits of somewhat edgy country music mostly addressing the plight of the working man. Young generally gets away with it, too. But it's the other side that's really interesting - four songs from the trunk intended for albums that didn't come out or were left off the ones that did. These are remarkable songs, especially the lovely "Little Wing" and the rather frightening "Captain Kennedy." The highlight is the long and winding head trip of "The Old Homestead," a surreal narrative about a lone rider in some weird landscape.
16. Greendale (August 2003)
A rock opera? From Neil Young? Sort of. As an opera, it doesn't work at all - the story is so dense, so convoluted as to be quite incomprehensible. But as a record, it works remarkably well - it's the most focused Young had sounded in at least ten years. Doubtless, it was the requirements of his "plot" that forced this unusual level of self-discipline, but that's something that's often helped Young produce his best work. It even rubs off on the band. This is Neil Young - self-discipline doesn't necessarily mean tight, concise songwriting. Six tracks exceed seven minutes in length, and who knows what he's on about half the time. But that's not unusual for him. It all sounds good, and the wild finale "Be the Rain" is his best song in ages. The Horse finds a groove, there's a great melody, sometimes the backup singers take it over so that Neil can yell a weird commentary along with it, and every now and then he decides to see what he can say with his guitar instead. Irresistible.
Be the magic in the Northern lights.
Be the river as it rolls along.
Be the rain you remember fallin'.
15. Homegrown (June 2020)
This was recorded between June 1974 and January 1975, and was supposed to be the album after On The Beach, which had been released in May 1974. As is well known, at a listening session for the album with some friends the tape continued with Tonight's the Night and Young was persuaded to issue that dark masterpiece instead. Some of these songs appeared over the next few years, but "White Line" would have to wait more than ten years before Crazy Horse dug into it, and most would never be issued anywhere at all until this installment of the Archives appeared. Young has since said that Homegrown may have been too dark for him to put out anyway. Too dark? Seriously? You put out Tonight's the Night instead. How much darker does it get? In fact, Homegrown gets downright goofy in the middle - the title track is a celebration of exactly what you think it is, "Kansas" is a bizarre spoken word track, and "We Don't Smoke It No More" is everybody messing around on a blues vamp. But the unreleased album was written and recorded in the midst of a difficult breakup, there was a child involved, it was all very fresh... But still.
Are you my enemy?
14. American Stars 'n Bars (May 1977)
One side of the vinyl has five newly recorded songs with Crazy Horse, all short country inflected stomps. They're not bad, though he could have left them on the shelf without anyone missing them. But they're paired with four remarkable recordings from his trunk. The two short bookends had been slated for Homegrown, the album he shelved when he issued Tonight's the Night instead, and "Star of Bethlehem" is especially fetching. In between are two long, memorable pieces. "Will to Love," recorded on a two track cassette in front of a crackling fireplace (which can be heard from time to time) takes on the persona of a salmon swimming desperately upstream to spawn. It's one of the strangest, and most divisive, songs he has ever written. I personally find it hypnotic and fascinating - but your mileage may vary. Opinions differ, to say the least. But everyone has long agreed that "Like a Hurricane" is one of Young's all-time classics, a great song, an awesome guitar workout, and fully worth the price of admission.
But you are just a dream
13. Harvest (February 1972)
By far the biggest commercial success of his career - it even gave him a #1 hit, his only one. I feel I've never liked it quite as much as the rest of the world seems to. It features two excursions with the London Symphony, one of which ("There's a World) is a complete disaster. "Alabama" would be better if it wasn't such an obvious rewrite of "Southern Man," which was a much better song and "Words" doesn't go anywhere. The other songs are generally quite good, but he'd been performing many of them on his solo performances in 1971, and I think I always found those live versions, preserved on countless bootlegs (which is where I first heard them, before this album was released), to be much more compelling. Still, they're certainly fine enough on this record and the title track is simply wonderful. This was a strange period for Young. He was having serious back problems, which would eventually require surgery. He found it impossible to bear the weight of his Les Paul (they are ridiculously heavy guitars), so he had gone back to his Gretsch when he wasn't sitting in a chair playing acoustic. He'd bought a ranch south of San Francisco with his CSNY money, and would live there for the next 40 years. And he'd watched heroin take over the life of his guitar player, and wrote an absolutely chilling song about it.
12. Freedom (October 1989)
Hailed at the time as a return to form, the record is something of a hodge-podge. There are a couple songs left over from the Bluenotes sessions and three songs from the Eldorado EP along with the new ones. It's held together by the rhythm section (Chad Cromwell and Rick Rosas on all the tracks), Young himself, and the unexpectedly high quality of the songs - "Crime in the City," "Someday," and "Wrecking Ball" are all about as good as Neil gets. Even so, everything was overshadowed by "Rockin' in the Free World," two versions of which bookend the album (the third time he'd pulled off that particular manoeuvre.) It's one of his two truly great political songs, and just like the other ("Ohio") it's mostly a collection of images and impressions rather than any kind of statement. It doesn't really say anything - but it expresses something very powerfully indeed (in this case, fury - in the case of "Ohio," it was dread.) The song was supported by an outstanding video that MTV just loved to play - and especially by a stunning, unforgettable performance on Saturday Night Live. (It can be hard to find - SNL's lawyers have done their best to get all clips from the show removed from the internet.) Even when SNL was dull, which it often was in the 1980s, one was willing to check out the musical guest. In the decade of video, it was a place where one could see someone actually playing live on television. (There was also Letterman, but his musical guest generally came on at 1:20 in the morning, and some of us had to go to work the next day.) And by far the most memorable musical performances SNL provided during the decade that music forgot were by the Replacements in 1986 and Neil Young in 1989. It was for much the same reason on both occasions. Both performances were wild, unhinged rock music that practically exploded out of the television and into your living room. But the Replacements were a bunch of snotty kids, rock and roll delinquents, who also happened to be roaring drunk after spending the hours since rehearsal getting shitfaced with show host Harry Dean Stanton. They couldn't help themselves. This is who they were. And maybe it's what I had been myself once upon a time, years before, but not any more. Those days were past. I will always be older than Paul Westerberg. But Neil Young was 43 years old that Saturday night. He and his bandmates - Steve Jordan, Charlie Drayton, Poncho Sampedro - were comparatively sober and clear-headed. They had made a decision that this is what they wanted to do. This is what they were aiming at, this is what they wanted to be. It was fucking inspiring. And I will always be younger than Neil Young.
Never get to fall in love
Never get to be cool
11. Neil Young (January 1969)
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Young's solo debut picks up where some of his later Buffalo Springfield work had left off. These are produced songs, like "Expecting to Fly" and "Broken Arrow" from the second Springfield album, which were also made with the assistance of Jack Nitzschke. These are really good songs, although the record has very little fire. He had yet to find himself as a singer - he had always wanted to sing, but he'd just been in a band with Richie Furay and Stephen Stills who both had far more obvious vocal skills. These vocals were overdubbed, as is common practise on almost all records, but it seemed to make Young almost timid at the microphone. Young would soon discover that he sang with far more assurance and authority when he cut his vocals live on the floor, with everyone playing. He would conclude that the type of record production used for this album was not for him, that he didn't approve of this way of working. He would try to never do anything like it again, and he had a new record ready just five months later. But... these are still really good songs.
10. Time Fades Away (October 1973)
Young followed the record that had made him a superstar with this sloppily recorded and even more sloppily played collection of bleak new songs. Heading for the ditch, indeed. This was recorded on the tour in support of Harvest, but in the aftermath of Danny Whitten's death. Whitten was just 29 years old, a genuine talent, the author of the utterly gorgeous "I Don't Want to Talk About It" which would be turned into a hit by other people more than once. But he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, and opiates eased his pain, before they took over his life. Young had hoped that Whitten would be able to join his touring band but he was simply too far gone. Young had to dismiss him - he just wasn't capable of playing anymore. And Whitten went back to Los Angeles and died from an overdose that very evening, which would haunt Young for years afterward. On the record, Young sounds either like a man in complete despair about whatever he's lost, or one shaking with rage at whatever brought this situation down upon him. There's no in between. It's definitely not what the masses who had just bought Harvest were expecting to hear when they bought their tickets. Not that Neil was ever one to to worry too much about that sort of thing.
9. Sleeps With Angels (August 1994)
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Kurt Cobain had famously quoted Young in his suicide note. This album arrived just four months later with many curious as to how Young would respond. As it happens, all but the title track (which seems somewhat unrelated) had been recorded before Cobain killed himself, but Young met the moment anyway. It's mostly coincidental, but the songs are largely obsessed with decay, death, and disappointment. Young sounds - not angry, not despairing, but very intense. And miracle of miracles, Crazy Horse sounds tighter and more polished than one would have thought possible. They keep their limitations out of the way and provide the sturdy support Young's material needed. This was the last album Young made with his longtime crony David Briggs, who died of lung cancer the following year. Briggs had produced or co-produced the top nine albums in this summation, and many of the others as well. Young has been a spotty, inconsistent recording artist all along but without Briggs he has been even spottier, even more inconsistent. Young doesn't really listen to anyone, but Briggs could always get his attention. He also understood exactly how to function in the studio with this willful and unpredictable artist.
8. Comes a Time (October 1978)
This sounded like a return to the singer-songwriter styling of Harvest. Which it is, but it's a better batch of songs. It's a really impressive batch of songs, in fact. It's almost as if Young looked around at all the other singer-songwriters who had emerged in recent years and said "hold on fellas - this is how it's done." No wonder he's practically smirking on the album cover.
7. Ragged Glory (September 1990)
Crazy Horse. They are what they are, they do what they do. People will always wonder why Young keeps going back to them - after all, they can barely play and they never seem to get any better. That's practically the point, though. If they were any better, they'd just get in Neil's way.
6. Zuma (November 1975)
What a great, insane album cover. Young had made a couple of suggestions to his friend Mazzeo, who dashed off four quick sketches ("in less than ten minutes") to see which idea Young wanted him to develop. Young didn't want him to develop any of them - he wanted to use one of the crude sketches. And he did. Crazy Horse had ceased to be an option for Young after the death of Danny Whitten. Talbot and Molina were there, with Nils Lofgren filling the guitar seat, for Tonight's the Night - but Ben Keith was also part of that band. It felt like something very different, so Young decided that band was really the Santa Monica Flyers. Crazy Horse didn't ride again until Talbot discovered Frank Sampedro in late 1974. Sampedro wasn't nearly as talented as Whitten (which made him a much better fit with Talbot and Molina) but his presence established a new and vital band chemistry and this wonderful album practically celebrates it. There are a pair of acoustic numbers (one with Crosby, Stills, and Nash) which manage the neat trick of being ragged and pretty at the same time. There are two long, brooding guitar epics, both of which are simply outstanding. But most of the record is Neil and the Horse sounding like the greatest bar band that ever walked the earth. Which was probably always their first, best destiny.
Like a shadow on the sky
5. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (May 1969)
The final five albums can go in any order you like. Each is an immortal, all-time classic and my own preferences can change from day to day. So screw it - I'm proceeding in chronological order. That means we begin with the first Crazy Horse record and the only studio album to feature Danny Whitten. His participation is the main reason this record doesn't sound much like Young's other records with Crazy Horse. Whitten was a far more adept guitarist than Frank Sampedro, and he also helped carry the vocal load. (He's practically the lead singer on "Cinnamon Girl.") Whitten plays with Young, exchanging riffs and phrases in an electric guitar duet. Sampedro plays beneath Young, laying down a thick and simple wall of guitar sound for Young to play over. But ultimately all this is insider trivia. This is a great record because it's packed full of great songs, and Young and his band play the hell out of them. And that moment (at 0:31) at the beginning of "Cowgirl in the Sand" when the little guitar intro peters out and the full band suddenly jumps in.... mercy. These guys are not messing around. They've come to blow your house down. The Whitten era was brief, and not much of it was recorded, but I have to mention the live recording of their electric set from the Fillmore East in March 1970. Young finally issued it in 2006 as his Archives project began to take shape. Words fail me. It is incredible, stunning, stupendous rock music. As great as Live Rust is - and it's merely one of the greatest live albums ever made - this was even better.
I run in the night
4. After the Goldrush (September 1970)
Young began working on his third album in the fall of 1969 with the same band that had just made his second, but Danny Whitten was descending into the heroin addiction that would kill him soon enough. Young broke off the sessions to join another band instead. Crosby, Stills and Nash recruited Young when they needed to take their debut album on the road. (Young held out for full bandmember status, and then marched to his own drummer as always.) The album they made together, Deja Vu, had come out in March 1970 and been a huge success, supported by their first US tour. Young's "Helpless" was easily the best song on the album, and his "Ohio" was easily the most noteworthy single of the summer. Then they all made solo records. Young already had the Crazy Horse tracks from the previous year ("Oh Lonesome Me" and "I Believe in You" would appear on the album.) He recorded a collection of new songs in the basement of his Topanga Canyon home with Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina and CSNY bassist Greg Reeves. Young has often found the players from Crazy Horse don't seem to play well with more accomplished musicians, and he normally avoids it as much as possible ("don't spook the Horse," he says) - but Molina and Reeves worked brilliantly together. Reeves' playing on "Don't Let It Bring You Down" is breathtaking and suggests just how he learned from his idol, the Motown genius James Jamerson. A teenage guitar whiz from back east named Nils Lofgren was staying in Young's home - he joined the sessions, and Young tasked Lofgren to play piano. Lofgren didn't actually play the piano, but he could handle an accordion and the white keys and the black keys work the same way. This grouping recorded the bulk of the album, but the original lineup of the Horse was assembled one last time for "When You Dance I Can Really Love." And Danny Whitten, for what would be the last time, sounds just fabulous. Neil Young moves in mysterious ways, but when he's got the songs, nothing else matters. And this is as perfect a collection of songs as anything he's put his name on. Just one after another after another. Every last one's a winner.
of games that I was playing
Trying to make the best of my time
3. On the Beach (July 1974)
Everyone who was involved in the making of this record refers to it as the honey slides album. It seems to be the only thing anyone remembers about it. Apparently, to make honey slides you fry up some marijuana in a skillet. When it starts to smoke, you add some honey. Then you eat it. And in about twenty minutes, you start forgetting where you are. Ben Keith said it looks like cow shit, and Elliott Roberts described it as worse than heroin. Certainly on the three long songs that make up the second half of the vinyl album, everyone involved sounds positively catatonic. The fact that the record is so great - especially that second side - is a disturbing argument in favour of cow shit that's worse than heroin.
You don't know it
But you are
2. Tonight's the Night (June 1975)
The story is that Young never intended to release this - it was more of an exorcism than a recording, a bunch of guys getting drunk and playing music as they worked through their grief over the overdose deaths of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry. He did take the songs on the road, for a stand at the Roxy and brief tours of Canada and the UK, shows that were intense, abrasive, and generally insane. Imagine the confusion of his audience, as this band of drunken lunatics played songs no one had heard, while Young spewed demented rants about a guy who shot somebody's guitar up his arm. (That's why Bruce Berry was fired - it's simply not cool for a roadie to steal one of the guitars and sell it for dope.) The moment passed, and almost two years later, Young was playing some friends what he expected would be his next album. It was going to be called Homegrown and it would indeed be issued as part of Young's Archives forty years later. This is what happened to follow it on the tape. And everyone present, led by Rick Danko, told Young to put it out instead. They had to have been very high indeed to come to that conclusion. But they were right. This is not easy listening - often, it's not even pleasant listening as tempos wander and vocals stray badly off key. It's as disturbing, as frightening, as absolutely harrowing as anything the Velvet Underground might have imagined in their darkest dreams. But they did what they set out to do. They made damn sure no one would ever forget that there'd once been a man named Bruce Berry.
1. Rust Never Sleeps (June 1979)
This is mostly a live record, although it was never presented as such (as far as possible, the crowd was removed from the recording.) It's bookended by Young's typically cryptic meditation about the state of rock'n'roll - this was shortly after the death of Elvis Presley and the spectacular rise and fall of the Sex Pistols, both of whom are referenced in the song, in Young's usual oblique way. This weird old hippie was still standing tall, with another batch of memorable songs. "Thrasher" is one of those meandering Young streams-of-consciousness that casually dismisses his old bandmates in CSNY as useless has-beens ("they were just dead weight to me") about halfway through. And while surely no one, its author included, can contrive a sensible, or even coherent, explanation of what "Pocahontas" is about, no matter - what a great song it is. On the second side of the vinyl, Young saddles up the Horse and they simply ride off to glory, highlighted by the astonishing "Powderfinger." The album title is the warning heard in the song that opens and closes the record in two slightly different versions of the song and two extremely different recordings - one acoustic and one abrasively electric. Young's disturbing assertion that it's better to burn out than to fade away reverberated for years afterward, if not to this very day. It irritated some, it haunted others, some people were frightened by it, some were offended - but Young had already moved on. To whatever he was doing next...
