Neil Young

The two-year span of '69-'70 holds something magical for Neil Young, who in the space of a few months assembled the key pieces of his legend: by that point he could already boast a stint in a seminal band like Buffalo Springfield, two solo albums (one of which, "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere", is a stunner), and the not-inconsiderable honor of being the "Y" in CSN&Y, the outfit behind the epochal "Deja Vu" (followed by a tour of incredible success). What else could our man do but release what, in a merciless poll among fans, would seriously risk being voted the best album of his career?

"After The Gold Rush" came out in August 1970, and it's a collection of extraordinary songs, a genuine poetic manifesto, the best possible blend of country and rock, a combination that is by turns harmonious and sparkling, capable of furious rage, extreme tenderness, promised-land epic and the languid carcasses of utopias.

The opening is entrusted to the skittering "Tell Me Why", which could easily have been just a folk watercolor, guitar and voice backed by an ineffable five-part choir (among others Stephen Stills and Nils Lofgren), yet turns out to be one of Young's most stealthily uneasy tracks, as underlined by the inflection of his singing, halfway between falsetto and lament, like a probe into the soft underbelly of unease, like regret coupled with the chilling awareness of the inevitability of things. Then there's no forgetting the first listens to the following "After the Gold Rush", that disarming sense of delicacy and despair, the last thing you'd expect to find on a rock record: a piano teetering on the fragility of that wounded voice, the dreamlike presence of the horns, the imaginative, quixotic flight of an old illusion, caught between defeated time and lost prospects, solidified in the image/archetype of the spaceship/silver seed launched into space, in the wishful hope of new inseminations and future developments (a bit like in Kantner's "Blows Against The Empire").

"Only Love Can Break Your Heart" could rightly be called a limping, lopsided waltz-western, a divertissement vaguely in the vein of The Band, infected by a cynical bitterness that lends it chilling shadows, as if it were negating in embryo the very possibility it holds out. "Southern Man", on the other hand, is pure raging expectoration, a scathing invective against the Southern mindset, against the obtuseness of a racism encysted down to the root of the soul, with that low-flying guitar unleashed in an abrasive phrasing, the driving piano and Young's voice doubled and buoyed by a supportive chorus: a legendary track, destined for years of scorching live apotheoses (the version on "4 Way Street" is extraordinary). A brief bucolic counterpoint comes with the little march of "Till the Morning Comes", a semi-orchestral inlay that reveals Jack Nitzsche's hand in the control room, strategically placed to ease the tension, before the arrival of "Oh, Lonesome Me", the only track not written by Young (it's a Don Gibson song), with the most exposed country vein in a ballad of a very sour, scarcely sweet flavor, in which one always delights in rediscovering those guitar tears and the saving presence of the piano, with Young's forlorn harmonica fluttering like tongues of solitary flame, and poor Ralph Molina's drumming caught in flagrant naked pulses: one of those songs that make the difference between a great record and a poor one, because it's on poor records that "minor" tracks are usually mere filler, sloppy offspring of the left hand.

The concept of the ballad is a slippery proposition, and Young loves to slide along the inclined planes of the indefinable: "Don't Let It Bring You Down" backs us into a corner, building a restrained yet irrepressible rhythm, a compressed energy that rubs against Billy Talbot's bass and Nils Lofgren's assertive piano, before exploding and dissolving into the magic of a chorus that lends a touch of warmth to the chilling visions of the verse. To my mind, one of the Canadian's finest songs in absolute terms, bold in form (with the third chorus marking a clean break as well as the song's very topos), beautifully played and sung, sinuously melodic and carrying a reckless unease, along with the subtle mystery typical of every legend.

"Birds" represents the other face of our loner: just piano and voice, in one of his most heart-rending melodies, with that opposition of "tomorrow" and "today" laid against the opening line as if to season the unbearableness of parting, of every parting, leaving open — as always — a sliver of soul.

But Neil Young is also a rocker, let's not forget: indeed "When You Dance You Can Really Love" carves out a groove of frayed guitars and a voice pushed to the limit of its range, a full-bodied bass and rhythmic outbursts of piano, while Molina's drums do what they can and must. Needless to say, it's another live "must". The following "I Believe In You" is a sweetly melancholic, heart-on-sleeve ballad which — far from being a syrupy declaration of love — digs into the friction point of a couple's relationship, tracing boundaries of misunderstanding and affection, of resentment and trust, with the chorus collapsing into a full striptease of feelings while a backing chorus, in a mood for understatement, quite fittingly raises the stakes of irony.

The closing track is entrusted to the ramshackle country-folk of "Cripple Creek Ferry", bass and piano at the forefront sustaining the wavering evolution of a melody that is memorable in its own way, disguised as a harmless homage to tradition, with the menace of a message that starts to become apparent on the closing fade, with the threatening image of the "looming trees" against the hull of the Cripple Creek, an emblem (?) of everything that the great Neil then (and now) sees as the root of so many of the world's sorrows.

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14/11/2006