Way back in the mists of time, October 1990 I left my farm in a little hidden away valley in West Wales and headed for the big city.  Amongst all the glam rock cassettes loaded into a specially designated suitcase was a recent purchase picked up on a whim the week before following a good review and the fact it had a track on it called ‘Fuckin Up’*.  This tape very soon got to be a real firm favourite of mine, especially during those times when all the excitement** wore off, as it did occasionally and I’d feel a crushing homesickness for my little green valley, for somewhere I could be alone outside in nature; good therapeutic tears were shed to the sound of it.  Over the years I must have played this LP and its opening track two hundred trigazillion times and it still gets a very regular run out, take a bow Neil Young & Crazy Horse Ragged Glory.

Recorded in a barn on Neil’s ranch, I love every nanosecond of this big beast.  This is an astonishing work of outstanding genius, right from the cover on in, a fish-eyed lens cover shot, which makes Crazy Horse look like the coolest bunch of no-frills gnarly old garage rocking barn burners in existence, especially the back cover pic of an unspooked horse.  Ragged Glory has some great tunes, some on-and-on-til-the-very-crack-of-the-motherfucking-apocalypse-itself guitar soloing, and a great warm immediate sound, but what sets it out from everything else around it, then and now, was an almost frightening sense of total commitment.  Forget all that fucking about Mr Young did for Geffen Records, forget all the good tunes and very good songwriting on the two LPs that formed his creative rehabilitation before Ragged Glory, This Notes For You and Freedom are both (in parts) very good albums, but mere foothills to this raggedly glorious Everest.

Opener ‘Country Home’ is the emotional one for me, I can remember lying in bed late at night listening to this on my Walkman at a volume that made my brain vibrate audibly, over and over again.  It says everything I felt about my geographical situation then and now:

I guess I need that city life
It sure has lots of style
But pretty soon it wears me out
And I have to think to smile.

I’m thankful for my country home
It gives me peace of mind
Somewhere I can walk alone
And leave myself behind.

I struggle to tell you just how uplifted I feel when I drop the needle in the groove and hear that opening totally overdriven salvo of notes, then the band click into place and carry me up and away.  The soloing is damn fine, as you’d expect but everything here serves the tune which is the size of a continent.  I don’t think music gets much better than this.

After the pleasant enough diversion that is ‘White Line’ something very heavy lumbers into view over the horizon, ‘Fuckin’ Up’^.  Again the band take this one to the very edge of sanity, the sound so LOUD and raw it puts you right into that barn hugging the biggest amp you can find.  The evergreen targets of hypocrisy and self-righteousness are firmly in Neil’s crosshairs here and he really lets rip, lyrically and sonically, as you might expect from a man who can sound heavier than most metal bands when playing an acoustic guitar, the results are excoriating:

I can see you on a hill
Comatose but walking still
Curves beneath
your flowing gown
Only I could
bring you down.

Then Ragged Glory gets even better with ‘Over And Over’, which is sometimes my favourite ever Neil Young track.  A sweet balm of overwhelming love and everything again, overdriven and cranked hard into the red, it gets better every time I listen to it, not bad after 27 years.  Neil’s vocals really hover at the edge of his range, the way he delivers the lines ‘Somewhere in the fire of love /
our dreams went up in smoke / We danced beneath silver rain’, just gets me, nothing held back, nothing spared, damn the torpedoes – total commitment; this song matters to him.  When he isn’t singing it he’s playing it, genuinely some of his best playing is right here – Crazy Horse plodding on beneath him all the while in the best possible way.  Romantic regrets, eh?

At 8:28 ‘Over And Over’ is a mere stripling compared to the epic ‘Love To Burn’ which follows.  Sweet, strident, epic it ticks all the right boxes and boasts some astonishingly good guitar extemporizing, sounding like most of the album, simultaneously classic and of the moment.  On this track, more than any of the others, Crazy Horse really give it everything they have, Ralph Molina’s drumming is incredibly good throughout.  This track by itself totally justifies the evolution of ears. True story.

Flip the sides and we get pure garage grunge on the band’s cover of ‘Farmer John’, a Nuggets fave of mine.  The band play it like the most ornery hard-handed bar band of all-time – good luck asking for a request from this lot.  Then we get two gentle shots of bitter sweet nostalgia in ‘Mansion On the Hill’ and ‘Days That Used To be’, both meditations on the doomed hippy dream, the reconciliation of ideals and possessions and the only two songs on Ragged Glory that don’t end snarled in feedback; maybe there is a hard-fought peace to be won in middle age after all.

Saddle up folks we’re off up Epic Gulch again next for the 10 minute ‘Love And Only Love’, which is not a second too long either.  This tale of the triumph of love over everything is kept firmly on the rails by the spritely kicking rhythm of the band and the sweet harmonies of the song.  Sure, Neil fires up his trusty guitar and takes us on a flight over the whole Earth but it never flags for a second, never feels like self-indulgence at all.  The lyrics may not be very subtle but he MEANS it, he really does.

Ragged Glory ends with an absolute corker, of course.  An amp protests with a crackle as a guitar picks out a simple refrain which is slightly redolent of Hendrix torching ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ and then ‘Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)’ emerges as an environmentally conscious folk chorale, backed by the lingering tingling threat of that barely-checked guitar; a little like seeing a Glock totin’ gopher.  I never used to be able to see the point of the track, which was recorded live, I thought it jangled the continuity of the LP, but now it has grown on me until the point where I think it is one of the real highlights here.  Neil doesn’t heed your rules, he just is, like the mountains.

I have written way more than I meant to here, but this is one that means a lot to me.  Forget all my words here, the LP title tells you all you need to know – ragged and glorious.

764 Down.

PS:  These men are definitely old enough to know better:

PPS:  You want a quote to sum up the whole of Ragged Glory? maybe the whole of Neil Young? take us back to our ‘Country Home’:

It’s only someone else’s potatoes
If you’re pickin’ someone else’s patch
And if you go down there anyway
It very seldom lasts.

I found that out once long ago
And it sure got me confused
I still don’t know which way to go
To lose those old spud blues.

*obviously I’m way more mature now.

**Booze! Bands!! New Friends!!! Record Shops!!!!

^written as ‘F*!#in’ Up’ on the cover and label to avoid getting a PMRC sticker, Mr Young was adamant he wouldn’t allow them to slap one on his LP – it’s also the reason why we have a blank black sheet on the inner sleeve, which makes a statement pretty eloquently methinks.

What’s a beach all about then? a holiday, somewhere to shrug aside the daily grind and have fun – not this one; somewhere the sand, the sky and the sea converge reminding you how insignificant you are – yeah, to a point; somewhere the road runs out, an edge that stops you running any further from your problems forcing you to think about them, to chronicle them if you have that creative bent – definitely.  Neil Young On The Beach is all this astringent bleakness and more; ‘Beach with a silent ‘L”, my dad said to me – it took me about a year to get that one*.

Well I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars,
But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.

I love Neil Young when he takes it to the edge and just kicks it on into overdrive from there, zero fucks given.  This he does to great effect on ‘Revolution Blues’, a song I have become completely and utterly consumed by recently.  Sounding heavier than a lot of thrash metal bands Neil mainlines the paranoia and mistrust swilling around the post Manson L.A landscape – guns, marginal folk and frosted nostrils all feed into the empty, murderous mood.

Well, it’s so good to be here, asleep on your lawn.
Remember your guard dog? Well, I’m afraid that he’s gone.
It was such a drag to hear him whining all night long

Just at this point Neil howls a little, this makes the album for me.  Just that.  Bottled dread.

It can beggar belief sometimes that On The Beach was the 1974 follow up studio album to Harvest^, old Neil found the flip side of fame and fortune pretty darn fast.  Either that or he was a strong cynical son-of-a-bitch with a cast iron sense of self that brooked no deviation from his vision and could see the pot holes strewn in his way.  Just slip ‘Ambulance Blues’ on for a near 9-minute mediation on a career in music, it drips with despair and extra harmonica but he pulls off a neat trick keeping it all somehow very listenable and light.

Rarely has an LP cover fitted the music as well as On The Beach too.  From memory Young sorted the cover out himself in a huff because his record company weren’t up to it.  The iconic half-buried fender was from his collection of automotive bits and bobs and the table and chairs somehow just fit the mood perfectly, as a bootless long-haired Young stares into the sea contemplating all sorts of deeply alienated shit.  Something about the washed-out colours just hits right.  My spiffy recent reissue even has the fabric pattern printed inside the sleeve – that’s why I buy records.

It all started so jauntily too with ‘Walk On’, which is such a great little tune, a totally throwaway meditation on outgrowing friends, respectability and reputation.  There is just something great about how bouncy and inconsequential it all is compared to what follows later on, some excellent country rock playing from Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina too.  ‘Some get stoned, some get strange / But sooner or later it all gets real’.  Amen to that Neil.

There are days when I would pick ‘See The Sky About To Rain’ off with sniper fire for being a touch too saccharine, but it is undercut by Young’s voice and I really can’t get enough of his Wurlitzer piano playing either, so it gets to survive, this time.  Plus it is a perfect foil for ‘Revolution Blues’ and adds so much to On The Beach just on that level.  Old Neil is back to his querulous, spare best on the excellent ‘For The Turnstiles’, the banjo and dobro mofo combo is every bit as great as his vocal harmonies with Ben Keith – I’m still not totally sure what it’s about, I’ll plump for a cynical take on the manner in which people behave en masse**.  A lot of days this is my favourite track on the album.

All this and the preceding eco lament of ‘Vampire Blues’ (featuring some great organ playing by the excellent Ben Keith) is just a breezy chuckle compared to the genius title track, a quietly spaced meditation on fame and fortune (the occasional shitness, thereof) that makes ‘Tonight’s The Night’ sound like ‘They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!’.  I have to say I love songs by successful, wealthy artists I admire that tell you how unhappy your adulation and hard-earned is making them; it makes me happier about my ‘decision’ not to be wildly successful and wealthy myself – I clearly dodged a bullet there, clever me.  The melody of ‘On The Beach’ just pierces me somehow, bypassing all my defences and striking unerringly at all the soft mushy emotional bits of myself that I keep hidden away from general view^^

There are whole worlds of experience to sink yourself into here, not many of them very positive but I agree with the review I once read of On The Beach that basically said something along the lines that it was an album crafted in and from despair and disgust but not of those things.  There’s no sense of succumbing to the spiralling existential angst here, which I would chalk up to Mr Young’s legendary cussedness; no matter how strange or stoned it all was, he was ready for when it all got real.

That’s what makes a great album.

865 Down.

PS:  Some pictures from a real life beach on Friday.  Llanfairfechan, since you ask. No filters used on these two pix:

*to save you 365 days, here.

**but don’t take my word on that, you mindless sheep – it may be about boiled eggs for all I know.

^I’m simplifying his discography a bit here, Time Fades Away fans and ignoring the fact that Tonight’s The Night was recorded earlier, but released later than On The Beach too.  What’s the point of facts if you don’t get to bend them like a guitar string occasionally?

^^here I was wallowing along in it a few minutes ago, sinking into mellow reflection and Mrs 1537 said ‘What is this old, whiney shit you’re playing?’ no soul, that one.

We’re doing okay in the seventies, history is coming back, everything’s okay, Spiro says it’s alright …

This is a special one folks. Neil Young Roxy: Tonight’s The Night Live.

Picture the scene, late September 1973 your band gets the chance to open a brand-new music venue on Sunset Strip based in a former strip club and you should be flying high on the astonishing success of your last LP; only, life happens.

A bandmate and a good friend both OD, it hits you hard as you continue to medicate yourself to quite a heroic extent, sleeping all day and recording at night with your band. You cut some tracks, it doesn’t quite work out and then you gird your nostrils and channel it all into writing an astonishingly dark, painfully emotional yet utterly numb set of tracks that your record company would refuse to out out for another 2 years.

The Roxy gig happens as you are finishing off the tracks, you play 2 shows a day there for three days running. You name your band the Santa Monica Flyers as you ‘fly’ on down from there every evening while the ordinary decent folk are sleeping, eating, sporting and being ordinary.

Being the sort of chap who ploughs his own furrow you decide to treat the crowd to an entire set of new tracks, it isn’t about them anyhow. You give it absolutely everything.

You are Neil Young. Congratulations, possibly.

Being a 21st century boy, it absolutely flabbergasts me to think that the crowd were getting served up 10 tracks here they had never heard before, with an intensity and intent that they would never have heard from Mr Young before. In fact Tonight’s The Night would not be released until 1975, although gig closer ‘Walk On’ would be released on On The Beach in 1974; which doesn’t stop Neil introducing it by saying ‘we’re going to do an old tune for you now’, the audience cheers but then doesn’t seem to mind to much.

The crowd love it, of course. Lapping up Neil’s frequent strip club jokey asides and laceratingly heart baring songs with equal relish. Audiences were obviously better then too, try that now and you’d just be heckled by some dumb fuck shouting for the hits.

Okay some housekeeping. Roxy: Tonight’s The Night is a 2018 archival release from old Neil. It’s a beautifully packaged, perfectly recorded and mastered release too, everything here just shrieks quality. Which is as well, because music this good demands it.

The opening version of ‘Tonight’s The Night’ defies my limited vocabulary of super-super superlatives. It isn’t as cold and cutting as the studio version, there’s a warmth here amongst the anger, helplessness and frustration. The harmonies are perfectly imperfect and the performance is absolutely spine-tingling. Simply put this is Neil Young at his very best, almost nobody got anywhere near to being this good, ever.

The memory of Bruce Berry is perfectly honoured here, although it always makes me smirk when Neil sings,

Well, late at night when the people were gone
He used to pick up my guitar
And sing a song in a shaky voice
That was real as the day was long

I mean, Jesus hell! How shaky does your voice have to be for Neil Young to call you out on it? I can only imagine Feargal Sharkey duetting with Larry The Lamb whilst riding a bicycle down a cobbled street, that shakey.

But Roxy: Tonight’s the Night is more than a title track*, monumental though it is. There isn’t a duff moment here, only a single track does not improve on the studio version for me, ‘Roll Another Number (For The Road)’, which is just not as well fleshed-out. So we get gentle songs of camaraderie and peaceful yearnings (Mellow My Mind), the deceptive prettiness of ‘Tired Eyes’**, the desperate sighing fatigue of ‘Albuquerque’ and the wonderful propulsive folksy funkiness of ‘New Mama’. I also have a soft spot for the dignified booze-blues of ‘Speakin Out’.

Danny Whitten’s co-authored and sung, ‘Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown’, his ode to scoring the drugs that eventually killed him when he was sacked from the band for his habit is missing from this LP compared to the studio version, possibly as it was a Crazy Horse backed track, or possibly because Young wasn’t quite numb enough to sing those words yet; ‘sure enough they’ll be selling stuff when the moon begins to rise’.

As always Young’s singular magnetism holds total sway, even then he still sounded heavier than most metal bands just playing an acoustic guitar. He has a hell of a band backing him here though, arguably one of most responsive and flexible of his whole career. Nils Logfren is immaculate as ever, the amazing Ben Keith and the rhythmic drive of Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina make for a great listen, at times questing and at others decisive and joyous. I think Keith’s presence in particular stops these tracks being buried in any excess bombast, his slide and pedal steel colouring everything here.

I like the way that Roxy: Tonight’s The Night gives the lie to the assumption that Young was on the ultimate down trip at this time. His stage raps^ are amusing and there is goofy fun going on here. How else do you explain following the harrowing first version of ‘Tonight’s The Night’ with the band playing an impromptu version of ‘Roll Out The Barrel’? the audience hooting and hollering along with the only track they’d know that evening. Young’s obsession with the strip club past of the Roxy is front and centre, there is much talk of Candy Barr and a prize for the first topless girl up on stage; hey it was ’73! Neil keeps welcoming us to Miami Beach and even threatening to remove his shades at one point^^.

All told Roxy: Tonight’s The Night is a brilliant release and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. Existential dread never sounded so good, or as fun again. Buy it.

1088 Down (and out on the mainline).

*for the sake of brevity let’s skip the second, faster version at the end which is warmer and looser still.

**’Well, he shot four men in a cocaine deal / And he left ’em lyin’ in an open field‘, always makes me think of No Country For Old Men.

^Spotify names them as separate tracks, which I think is a publishing trick to maximise profits.

^^I suspect after his late nights and consumption at the time, this would be a bit like the scene where the Nazis open the Ark Of The Covenant in ROTLA, if he’d actually obliged.

A small series in which I try to sidestep my January blues by any means necessary, Part 5: Neil Young (not Satan, they were probably both in same school year though).

Ah, old Neil. At his best he’s the best thing ever, sounds heavier than most metal bands just playing an acoustic by himself, you know the drill. Problem is for my money he’s been someone best enjoyed retroactively. Recently, he’s been banging out a steady stream of great music almost all of it dating from Gerald Ford’s presidency. Moments and odd tracks aside I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed one of his new albums since Clinton’s second term*.

Too often Mr Young comes across as your friend’s weird unkempt survivalist uncle, shouting mad shit into the wind, building alternate-universe iPods out of genuine US railroad parts and muttering dark truths about climate change whilst occasionally dropping his pants in public.

So, obviously I bought his new LP with Crazy Horse, Barn. I knew hoped it would be different this time.

Recorded in some form of agricultural storage-based structure Barn is such a relief for wannabe believers like me, who had all but given up on him bending his strings with real intent and anger again. It isn’t an immediate unalloyed success but it is a warm, comforting album and a welcome spike of life.

What I will say for a kick off is that Barn is both perfectly sequenced and perfectly produced**, I suspect that’s the sort of thing that you can do when you’re on your 41st go around. Young toys with spontaneity and nostalgia throughout, particularly in respect to whether the latter is a help or a hinderance; nothing could be more relevant to the state of his nation.

The weather-beaten, gnarled edifice that Crazy Horse is/was has actually changed. Nils Logfren slotting in after the retirement of Frank Sampedro, has given the old horse a more flexible, agile, melodic quality, albeit at the expense of some, umm, horsepower^. At times I found myself thinking ‘hmm, too much folksiness’ but overall the songs come through.

Oh yeah, music. There is some of that on Barn.

‘Song For The Seasons’ is a gentle introduction, a slightly wonky afterhours concoction with some (God help me am I really going to type this?!) nice accordion touches. As with a lot of recent Neil you kind of feel what he’s singing about as the lyrics are a bit so-so, but I don’t mind.

I prefer ‘Heading West’ and its’ peculiarly strident nostalgia and personal history all set to a delightfully ramshackle tune, almost but not quite collapsing under its own weight. It is just nice to hear him hit those strings with some real intent again. Although I’m no fan of the slightly pissed sounding ‘Change Ain’t Never Gonna’, too much harmonica man and buff up those words a bit; best thing about it is the This Note’s For You referencing opening line.

Then Neil gives Barn some weight with ‘Canamerican’ his take on his dual national feelings. Personally I think he missed a trick not calling it ‘Ameradian’, but that’s what I get for being Welshlish. Unlike what’s gone before it feels like a finished song and gains real punch for being over and done in 3:17. I am happy to report we get a rare sighting of goofy Neil on ‘Shape Of You’ which goes appealingly falsetto while rhyming ‘for the better’ and ‘sweater’. It’s fun.

The best track on Barn by far is the wonderfully unsettled, sketchy ‘They Might Be Lost’. Mr Young dropping us straight into a story about waiting for the boys with the truck, without any context at all. Could be something as banal as moving house, could be a deal, could be one of them fancy metaphor thangs for the American people. He outdoes himself here to the backing of a slow waltz time, uncertainty filling the inky blackness outside the radius of his porchlight. I can play this one through 5 times in a row, easily.

Crazy Horse come out all guns blazing for the second side opener ‘Human Race’; hey it’s a real barnstormer!^^ I find this one utterly irresistible despite the elementary school level lyrics about climate change. It is utterly thrilling to hear him get angry again and when he hits his solo … paradise. I really love how compact and punchy this track is*^. This is another repeater.

I baulked at ‘Tumblin’ Thru The Years’ when I first heard it, I felt it was trying a touch hard to reach heartfelt. I really dig it now, mostly because the delicate piano flicks and shading, played by a certain Mr N Young.

The only track that quite rivals ‘They Might Be Lost’ is ‘Welcome Back’, where the musical backing is so scaled back at times to be skeletal, in the manner of Dylan’s most recent. There is an air of unaffected affecting beauty to this tune, a masterclass of understated axe-wielding; I never cease to be amazed and moved by just how much emotion he can translate through those strings. At 8:27 ‘Welcome Back’ is the longest track here but it isn’t a second longer than it needs to be.

The kiss off from Barn is ‘Don’t Forget Love’ another grower. This time he preaches tolerance and reconciliation over regret, again more through the tone of that magnificent ruin of a voice than the words. The song teeters at the junction of trite and meaningful but pulls on through and sends the listener home with a fragile optimism.

Barn is not a classic in the Young canon but it is a very substantial album, exceeding what I had hoped he could still make. It just radiates an integrity and purpose, both rare qualities these days, seeded with a very real awareness of mortality. There are some great and lovely moments here, a few that could have graced almost any LP of his and nothing too embarrassing.

Uncle kept his pants on.

1122 Down (on the farm).

PS: This is great beyond all my wildest imaginings. If you are a Neil-head you have to watch this:

PPS: I hope I haven’t written too much and outstayed my welcome.

*yes I know there are folks out there who’d go to bat for Prairie Wind and whatnot, but to me just stick Weld on and the rest is all just shown up as piss on a bush fire.

**by the Volume Dealers – Young and Niko Bolas.

^which is not to diss Mr Sampedro in any way shape or form, I love his playing, this is just different, more brittle.

^^thank you folks, thank you. I’m here ’til Thursday. Please don’t forget to tip your server.

*^you can imagine it dragging on for a full 19 minutes on Psychedelic Pill.