Hey Hey, My My....

I've been down the road and I've come back/lonesome whistle on the railroad track/ain't got nothin' on those feelings that I've had

Those lyrics are from Neil Young's 1975 song "Mellow My Mind", among my favorites in the Neil Young catalog. It's a song I've been thinking while reading Young's autobiography, "Waging Heavy Peace." 

The book is less a traditional chronological telling of a life story than a collection of Young's musings on his life, career, and the things that he's passionate about. If you're looking for the definitive story of Neil Young, this isn't it. If you're looking for a deep dive into his creative process and the story behind some of his best albums, you won't find too much of that here. And if you're looking for a really well-written book by a notable musician, move on. Let's just say Neil has trouble with structure and linear thinking. Chapters that seem to begin one topic (say, his early days as a musician in Canada) end up somewhere else completely, as do paragraphs. Hell, some sentences end up on a different topic from where they begin. Knowing what a control freak Young has been throught his career, I'd be willing to bet that part of the deal with the publisher was that no substantive editing could be done to the manuscript. It shows. 

 

Here's one of the highlights, in which Neil discusses the LA scene in the late '60s:

"It was not long afterward that suddenly I realized I had the clap. There were a lot of hippie girls, and we saw them at the Whisky all the time. After the show it was time to go to the International House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard. I remember those German pancakes. They were delicious. How much sugar can one person eat? After that we paired off and went back to our shacks for some fun. Anyway, I had the clap and I had to go to the clinic"

You get the idea. Throughout the book, Neil's train of thought is often derailed (sorry) by a random memory (delicious pancakes!), and he's never really able to get back to the original point. 

 

But if an autobiography can be viewed as a window into how an artist thinks about his art, "Waging Heavy Piece" does provide some explanation for Young's enigmatic, meandering, and inconsistent career. And I make that statement as a longtime Neil Young fan who was hooked after first hearing the plaintive voice on "Sugar Mountain" (which struck me as the saddest song I'd ever heard). After the Goldrush and Harvest are among the best rock albums of the '70s, and are merely two highlights of an incredibly prolific decade for Young. But when you put out as much material as Neil Young has over his 50 year career, there are bound to be duds. And there have been several of them since the '70s. Hell, his own record company sued him for making albums "uncharacteristic of Neil Young."

But that's the beauty of Neil Young. Just as he shows no ability to edit himself in his autobiography, it doesn't seem there's been much music in Young's career that's gotten left on the cutting room floor. And that's either an indication of his ego as an artist or of how much the recording industry has changed. It's rare in today's music business to see established bands put out a stinker of an album, a real shit sandwich of misconceived and poorly produced songs. Which, in a way, is too bad. It's kind of nice to have a record (again, sorry) of the dross and not just the gold. What music fan hasn't flipped through a stack of old vinyl and thought "how did this album ever get released?" Musicians today seem to be so careful, and so carefully managed, that their subpar material rarely sees the light of day. Or maybe they just have a better sense of what the audience deserves.

The '70s were a different time for the music business. Record labels nurtured young artists and stuck with them. And after Young made Harvest, he could pretty much do anything he wanted. He was a star, and he got to make the music he wanted to make. Not all of it was good (and, according to Neil, some of it was intentionally bad, simply to piss off his record label after they sued him).

But for whatever critical filters Neil Young lacks in his music and his writing, he certainly makes up for it with his passion, whether it's for model trains, electric cars, high quality digital recordings, or the music itself. And it's clear that Young's belief in the power of music has been the driving force in his life. 

Which brings me back to the song "Mellow My Mind," which appeared on the 1975 album Tonight's the Night, an album recorded in an alcohol-induced fog after the drug-related deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young roadie Bruce Berry. The album was controversial both for it's dark content and the raw quality of the recordings (Young calls it "audio verite"), and it sat for two years because the record executives were nervous and Neil was unhappy with the remixes. But he fought to have it released, and his artistic instincts were right on this one. 

 

Tonight's the Night is my favorite Neil Young album because of its rawness and emotion, best exemplified when Young sings the lines I cited in the beginning of this post. With the song building to a ramshackle crescendo, he strains to hit the high notes as he sings "ain't got nothin' on those feelings that I had," his voice cracking with weariness. It's pure and aching and beautiful, and no amount of added production or remixing could make it any more poignant. It's as pure a Neil Young moment as anything he's ever recorded.

So go on Neil, keep following your muse. Sometimes it leads you to beautiful places.