Neil Young & Crazy Horse

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Essential Albums

  • Rust Never Sleeps
    Rust Never Sleeps
    Rust Never Sleeps

    Part of what makes Rust Never Sleeps so extraordinary is hearing all the various Neil Youngs in one place: the acoustic (the first half), the electric (the second); the crass (“Welfare Mothers”) and the cosmic (“Pocahontas”); the gentle (“Sail Away”) and the unhinged (“Sedan Delivery”). He’d never had a consistent persona, per se—just listen to “Heart of Gold” next to “Tonight’s the Night”. But he often used the album format, not to mention different groups of musicians, as a way to segregate his wayward impulses: the polite orchestrations of Harvest, the swampy, paranoid On the Beach and so on. Rust doesn’t reconcile those impulses as much as, to paraphrase the author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of intelligence, prove that he’s capable of holding them all together while still managing to function. But it’s also the first—and arguably clearest—illustration of the radical self-transformations that have defined Young’s career. While his peers from the Woodstock era were taking refuge in fame and the comfort of a cultural battle well-fought, he turned toward punk, not just as the post-apocalyptic sound of the Cold War and early Reagan era (“Sedan Delivery”), but as the inheritor to the rebellion of early rock ’n’ roll (“Hey Hey, My My”). And as much as “Powderfinger” is cloaked in the scenery of early America and the Old West, the essential metaphor of the song is someone so wed to their way of life that they’re willing to die for it. A brave death, but a death nevertheless. The album’s key, then, is “Thrasher”, not just for how unsparingly Young sings about his past bandmates in Crosby, Stills & Nash (“I got bored and left them there/They were just dead weight to me”), but the way he reckons that he, too, will eventually become outmoded, wheat for the thresher, harvested to feed the next generation. According to Mark Mothersbaugh of the punk/New Wave band Devo, who came up with the album’s title, “rust” was their byword for the corruption of innocence and general devolution of humanity. But for Young, it doubles as a note-to-self about the perils of a long creative life: Stop moving, and the rust’ll get you. Roughly 10 years after breaking with Buffalo Springfield and starting his solo career, he celebrated the way visionaries do: by looking forward.

  • Zuma
    Zuma
    Zuma

    After the bleakness of the so-called Ditch Trilogy (Time Fades Away, On the Beach, Tonight’s the Night), Zuma rolls in like a breeze. The songs are simple, the arrangements direct and the mood light even when the music gets heavy (“Danger Bird”, “Cortez the Killer”). None of the cynicism of Tonight’s the Night or price-of-fame angst of On the Beach—just four guys in a beach house, stoned. Guitarist Frank Sampedro, who’d only recently joined Crazy Horse, said he figured Young was making the songs easier because Sampedro had been having trouble playing them. Laugh: It’s funny. But it also affirms the argument in Young’s music that things don’t have to be polished to have feeling—and, if anything, that polish and complexity hide truths that simplicity and spontaneity reveal. So, while the album might’ve been considered hard rock in 1975, its real legacy is in the indie rock of the mid- to late ’90s: Pavement (“Barstool Blues”), Built to Spill (“Cortez the Killer”), Dinosaur Jr., Will Oldham/Palace (“Through My Sails”)—music whose sloppy elegance takes listeners places precision can’t. And it presaged a rough pattern Young followed for decades: some self-conscious, thought-out stuff followed by an unassuming reset where he seemed to flush everything out and start blank (think Hawks & Doves and Ragged Glory, Prairie Wind and Barn). An interviewer later asked if Young ever got pictures in his mind while playing epics like “Danger Bird”. Sometimes, Young said—but mostly it’s just flapping.

  • Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
    Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
    Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

    Decades after Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere had been absorbed into the cultural bloodstream, David Crosby complained he still didn’t get what Neil Young saw in Crazy Horse. Yeah, they were “soulful”, but so was his dog, and he didn’t let his dog play drums, either. Of course, these were men working with different creative metrics: Crosby was guided by craft, Young by the search for a more primitive truth. No matter how familiar the music here is, it still has the haunted quality of something whose looseness and imperfection (such as Crosby might call it) only make it feel realer and more alive. Isn’t the title track a little baggy? Yeah. Could “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Down by the River” be cut in half? Probably. But then you’d lose the murky passages in the middle where the band yawns and the music suddenly comes out—an expressionism that had more in common with jazz and painting than rock ’n’ roll. It wasn’t long before Young insisted on keeping the tape rolling all the time because he realised you could practise as much as you wanted, but you’d never know you got the right take until it disappeared into the mist. In liberating himself from the professionalism of CSNY, Young cut a path not just for himself, but for generations of punk, experimental and indie bands for whom technical correctness and creative spirit were two different vectors that didn’t always intersect. The road diverges: progressive and arena rock tightening things into science over here, Young mucking around in a barn over there. As he later put it, Crazy Horse weren’t very good. But they were great.

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About Neil Young & Crazy Horse

Embodying a significant portion of Neil Young’s storied career, his rowdy and experimental work with the band Crazy Horse encompasses more than a dozen studio and live albums across six decades. ∙ Young’s first LP with Crazy Horse, 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, is ranked among Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. ∙ Three of the group’s most memorable hits—“Cowgirl in the Sand,” “Cinnamon Girl,” and “Down By the River”—were written by Young on a single day while he was suffering from a 103-degree fever. ∙ After a reunion attempt with Crosby, Stills & Nash soured, Young reconvened with Crazy Horse for 1975’s Zuma, featuring the seven-plus-minute distorted-guitar epic “Cortez the Killer.” ∙ They recorded most of their iconic 1979 LP, Rust Never Sleeps, while on tour, devoting one side to Young’s acoustic songs and the other to the blistering full-band set. ∙ Sleeps With Angels—their brooding 1994 album that was partially informed by the death of Kurt Cobain—earned the band their first-ever Grammy Award nomination. ∙ They released two LPs in 2012: a garage rock-flavored collection of folk-revival covers, Americana, and the Grammy-nominated double album Psychedelic Pill. ∙ In 2019, Young and Crazy Horse reunited again to record the heartfelt, reflective songs for Colorado in a mountaintop studio near Telluride.

ORIGIN
Los Angeles, CA, United States
FORMED
1969
GENRE
Rock

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