neil young

like where does...cortez the killer come from? who sits down and writes that? dylan you can always see his mind at work, neil comes up with this imagery that is very dreamlike

Or those careening narratives on RNS?

XP Neil's claimed it came from eating too many hamburgers one night in high school.

“They came dancing across the water” is straight up bone chilling

"they carried them to the flatlands/but they died along the way"

that song is much more about what people in modern times long for when they think about the past, rather than any serious look into pre-conquistador aztec culture, or the conquering of it. it's a paean for meaning and unity that's been lost, vanquished by the man in the form of the conquistador. a distinctly peaceful version of it, true, but still kinda fascistic imo. i prefer "pocahontas" because it's more fun, more honest and self-conscious about being a fantasy. of course instrumentally cortez is peak neil.

i think "powderfinger" is one of the most powerful depictions of a young life cut short i've ever encountered. the combination of happenstance details of the events, the kid and his little corner of the world, along with the glimpse into his character and his will to live, driving to the flash in the sky, and then the dedication, and all of it being so ragged and raw - like, as an artistically rendered experience of being affected directly by someone's death i can't think of anything i've run across that hits me so hard. but maybe there's an element to it that's also a little sentimental, idk.

“and they built up with their bare hands/what we still can’t do today”

questioned much of what I’ve accomplished in my lifetime just from those lines, tbh.

and "Thrasher" has some of the best lyrics I've heard in a pop song: evocative and mysterious yet scalpel-sharp.

xp yeah I love that line too

“Powderfinger” really gets to me too - the vagueness of the setting, the feeling that there’s not enough time left in his life to tell everything that he needs to explain, the sense that his doing the brave and noble thing is somehow the wrong choice, even though he’s clearly doomed from the moment the song begins.

I think I said this on another thread but it’s hilarious to me how on “Thrasher” the line “how I lost my friends I still don’t understand” is followed by a couple verses absolutely going in on Crosby Stills & Nash.

I think there is something about "Cortez," as written and performed, that can be self-revealing: the killer man, "dancing across the water," bad man, but then I lean in for thee killer guitar---how aware was he of this possible effect---? Maybe it doesn't matter, but, in any case, well-played, sir.

"Cortez" has always felt to me like daydreaming about something and falling fully into the dream, a very visceral recreation of that feeling. i heard randy newman once explain his song "yellow man" as "a pinhead's view of china", and I kind experience "Cortez" as a version of that, like a stoner's fantasy about aztecs, and some of what he imagines is wrong bc hes not an expert, and also as he drifts deeper into the reverie the dream-logic takes over and it starts to become its own weird fantasy.

The slightly inferior sequel is after all titled "Like an Inca."

I like that One Eye Open, also you could say he "wakes up" on the final verse and is once again back to the personal, love lost

i heard randy newman once explain his song "yellow man" as "a pinhead's view of china", and I kind experience "Cortez" as a version of that, like a stoner's fantasy about aztecs Also true of "Sail Away," and imagine Young covering that.

I consider myself a casual fan but even I'm pretty sure Neil has a ton of songs that utilize 12 bar blues form, including several on On the Beach. I mean there are three songs on that record with "blues' in the title

xpost His American grandfather or great-grandfather left Virginia because of Civil War etc. illin', though got mad at blacks boarding streetcar he was on in Canada: something along those lines in Shakey (but I'm sure Neil was more interested in Aztecs, Incas)

His only experiment with 12-bar blues, right? Meh.

From the Bluenotes live album (better than This Note's for You, though this one's very SNL/VH-1):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUdyucphO8I

Blue Note Cafe is much better than the studio album overall, though still has some moves that were dated, ironically or not, even before it was recorded, way before---people were talking about blooze vs. blues even in the 60s.

(Rolling Stone reviewer said the latest Canned Heat album should have been titled Yassuh Boss.)

I consider myself a casual fan but even I'm pretty sure Neil has a ton of songs that utilize 12 bar blues form, including several on On the Beach. I mean there are three songs on that record with "blues' in the title

― Paul Ponzi,

I probably singled out "Vampire Blues" b/c it bores me (it doesn't follow through on the title), but, yeah, "Ambulance Blues" counts.

xxxp The VH-1/SNL vibe actually works great with a satirical track like "This Note's For You" because it completes the fake-beer commercial vibe needed to deliver the joke with accuracy.

This one from This Note's For You always felt like a good blend of the blues concept and his typical songwriting. And this band also led to "Ordinary People" and "Crime in the City", even though they didn't came out on later albums.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNCvIdABUhg

xxp Come to think of it, re SNL, he might have been having a little fun with the Blues Brothers shtick too. Which reminds me of this Hal Willmer quote, via Milton Parker on Hal Willner
(and re beer commerical, Night Music was sponsored by Michelob, who got their name in the title eventually):
...one day Lorne Michaels (Executive Producer Night Music, Saturday Night Live) came to the studio while we were taping Night Music because his buddy Eric Clapton was on the show. When he walked in we were filming Clara Rockmore, the legendary theramin player. So Lorne walks in and looks at the monitor and there’s a 92-year-old woman playing “Kaddish” on the theramin and I can just see stacks of dollars with little wings flying out of his head.

LOL. Michelob, didn't Clapton (by then a recovering alcoholic) make a commercial for them around that time? Ugh, it never ends with that guy.

A reminder that "Powderfinger"/"Cortez" finished 1-2 in the Neil Young poll from 10 years ago--a big surprise to me, I thought "Cortez" would win going away.

A World of Constant Strangers: The Neil Young Results Thread

Freddie Gibbs not a fan, don't think I would have predicted him taking Rogan's side:

https://pitchfork.com/news/freddie-gibbs-says-fuck-neil-young-on-the-joe-rogan-experience/

"birds" and all of after the gold rush really are such a great example of how sharp neil used to be as a lyricist. for such a loud rock kind of guy he was so insightful when it came to love and relationships.

When you see me fly away without you
Shadow on the things you know
Feathers fall around you
And show you the way to go

is one of my favorite images of a breakup. You can't make a home in the shadow of the other person, you have to move away from this space. But they leave you with a gift, a part of themself you can use to enrich your life, a connection to something higher that you didn't have before.

think there's some truth to him being self-centered. at his best though he gestures toward what's mysterious and unknowable about love and life. like, for all of his inability to see past himself, he knows what love is, or at least used to.

Anything in particular you're thinking of?

Freddie has become a full time troll sadly

I wonder if on some level Christgau calling Barn the record of the year is a way of validating his own criticism - if one of his peers can make such a record, surely he has the right to continue to evaluate them and the current music scene.
One factual thing in his article I'm not sure of - I always thought it was Graham Nash, not Neil himself, saying "Last Dance!" at the end of Time Fades Away.

i generally cringe at the whole "i'm just channelling these songs from the cosmos" stuff about songwriting, but there's a quality to neil's best songs that i do wonder if he even knows what they are about

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown),

dylan you can always see his mind at work, neil comes up with this imagery that is very dreamlike

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

I can only guess at what you mean, of course. But he sometimes writes lyrics that suggest many possible meanings, and some of them have led me to construct elaborate interpretations that don't necessarily check out when I follow the trail more closely. His process of deliberation can be ambiguous or obscure in a way that doesn't quite square with the potency of his imagery, and that maybe points to a more of a 'conduit' role.

I would say he shows an interest in the superimposition of folklore and mythogogy onto reality, as well as a respect for the dream state as something that informs and carries over into waking life and from which meaning can be divined. In 'After the Gold Rush' he refers to dreams as prophetic visions pretty explicitly. He also looks for omens and portents in nature, and doesn't always draw clear distinctions between literary symbolism and the interpetation of signs ("I was hoping for replacement when the sun burst through the sky" etc). That could be seen as his authentic connection to ancient or indigenous cultures.

I hear 'Don't Let it Bring You Down' as a response to 'After the Gold Rush' later in the album, the negation of an ominous sign. "It's only castles burning" may be a reassurance to himself that apocalyptic omens are psychological litter to be discarded (correlating to a "white cane lying in the gutter", or a flying newspaper), a way of seeing that appears outmoded or clouded by superstition as it comes into contact with modernity.

Friends and relationships reappear as a grounding influence (the cause of the "down" that forces a withdrawl into hibernation in 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' is identified as... a dream).

Everybody otm re: Neil's best lyrics. The unreliable narrator in song form. Truly a master storyteller.

Daddy's rifle in my hand
felt reassurin'
He told me,
Red means run, son,
numbers add up to nothin'

Always my favorite part in "Powderfinger" and, for me, the most revealing piece of the song's puzzle.

https://twitter.com/olsonpower/status/1502643407369420801?s=20&t=8UPrgQK7e6Xh7MVOHpPy1w

pic.twitter.com/fcGvaLpQkr

— INZANE JOHNNY (@olsonpower) March 12, 2022

Sorry of this was already mentioned: We are pleased to announce the release of the fourth installment in the Official Release Series (ORS).
Available on LP and CD, the box set includes classic ‘80s records Hawks & Doves, Re•ac•tor, and This Note’s for You, as well as the Eldorado EP, previously released only in Japan and Australia.
Both vinyl and CD box sets will be available for pre-order today and out on April 29th.

That was on the 18th, thought of again because I just got one re Official Bootleg Series adding three solo acoustic sets; here's the press release, incl. audio, video: http://view.e.warnerrecords.com/?qs=9efc101a6c823cd183a4a6dfc8f00760337aaea72c7f4e4c707ddb1d7a140b210b5bf611d1d4e79cb4ec8f87606b182131222489e3f15f856a55fa4cb7eac5626547f8f2e1016611

Genuine question. Which one of those is likely the best, most enjoyable set. ‘Cause I ain’t gettin all three.

Great to have a legit release of the '74 Bottom Line show, but lolz at Eldorado getting reissued and boxed with deadweight away from Freedom.

XP Go for the '74 show: it's a genuine, one of a kind concert, and besides there's already a ton of solo Neil '70-'71 shows out there.

Nice set list for that. What makes it one of a kind?

It was an unannounced, one-off surprise solo set (following Leon Redbone, iirc) from a time where he wasn't doing stuff like that, and he previewed a number on On The Beach tracks alongside period unreleased material.

What's going on with the second box in the Official Release Series? It goes for hundreds of dollars now, and I'm not even talking about the vinyl version. Did they just radically underestimate demand and never run off any more CDs?

Probably? The packaging is pretty unique, with the albums in wide cardstock sleeves to accommodate the discs and scale reproductions of the original inserts (the poster from Time Fades Away, the booklet and bag of glitter from Tonight's The Night etc.).

They never reissued the discs in it (and the third box as well) as individual CDs either.

I'm checking out all of those shows because his banter is so great most of the time

Good news about el dorado. Hopefully I can cherry pick its tracks from a digital vendor

Long, loooong overdue, but I'm glad Eldorado is back in-print. It usually catches Neil Young fans off-guard whenever I've play "Heavy Love" and especially "Cocaine Eyes" over the years - like "holy shit, where did this come from?" I believe this will be the first American release it's ever gotten too.

FWIW, I tried restoring the original Times Square album from the Freedom CD, making a few changes to it:

Eldorado
No More
Crime In The City (live from Bluenote Café)
Boxcar (only bootleg source available)
Don't Cry (full-length version from Eldorado)
Heavy Love (from Eldorado)
Wrecking Ball
Cocaine Eyes (from Eldorado)
On Broadway

As a bonus, I also included the SNL performance of Rockin' in the Free World at the very end - ripped from the DVD, it's even better than the studio version.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Fukuoka, Japan – March 8, 1976https://t.co/4cWQLbiqcO

Aside from a few low profile NoCal gigs in 1975, this Japanese jaunt was the debut of the new Crazy Horse with Frank Sampedro in tow, and the beginning of one of Young’s greatest years onstage. pic.twitter.com/5EOsDmm4Bx

— aquarium drunkard (@aquadrunkard) May 9, 2022

I'm checking out all of those shows because his banter is so great most of the time

Which makes it all the more painful that a lot of the iconic banter is cut from the CD release of the Citizen Kane Jr. bootleg.

Oof...no more rappin' about Honey Slides I presume?