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TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT, released in July, 1975, though recorded two years earlier, announced Neil Young's emergence from confused agonising—about rock 'n' roll, America, Life and so on—into a creative spate which makes even Prince look a slacker. Over the next four years he produced seven new albums (AMERICAN STARS AND BARS misses this re-issue slew for reasons unspecified) and masterminded the triple-vinyl retrospective, DECADE. The biographical consensus is that it was all down to grief and horror at the deaths of original Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry from heroin overdoses. In fact, "Tonight's The Night," the megalithic title track, mourning and warning about the fate of these men "who lived and died for rock 'n' roll", casts a shadow over the rest of the album. It came from the first sessions on which Young had used the "live in the studio" approach and there's a ramshackle air to it the charm of which time has worn thin. After that, at least partial, exorcism—although a median line through his switchback manoeuvres might show a growing emphasis on raw electric noise—he always maintained extreme contrasts through tracks cutting back to acoustic guitar or piano and his most tremulously fragile vocal style. This was true even of ZUMA, often touted as his first hard rock album. While the durable epic, "Cortez The Killer," is carpeted with distortion, forgotten delights are the plain country lament "Pardon My Heart" and and the sombre subtleties of "Dangerbird." LONG MAY YOU RUN is not one to go down in rock history, being mainly Stephen Stills and Young taking turns to lead affable variants on contemporary laid-back. COMES A TIME, from 1978, has a run of soft acoustic pieces prettified by Nicolette Larson's plaintive harmonising, but broken by a convincing one-off soul song, "Lotta Love," and the roughhouse "Motorcycle Mama." Finally, with RUST NEVER SLEEPS he made a little more sense of his contradictory instincts when he split the album clearly into acoustic and electric sides, bracketed by, respectively, quiet and rackety versions of "My My, Hey Hey." It flows, it's got a couple of his strongest issue songs in "Pocahontas" and "Powderfinger," and it's even rather good-humoured (Young exchanging surreal courtesies with a Martian in "Ride My Llama" and praising "Welfare Mothers" who "make better lovers"). Play these studio albums end to end and the late '70s Young story is that, pouring it all out, he spread his intensity a thinly so that no one album is the great statement. The same applies to the 35-track compilation DECADE. Reaching back to Buffalo Springfield days, it has many of his finest—"Mr Soul," "I Am A Child," "Heart Of Gold," "The Needle And The Damage Done"—and nothing that wastes space. But it's more key text for the earnest student than a joy to all. LIVE RUST is the one that really captures the essence of Neil Young, from aching fragility to the overwhelming power he can unleash in love or rage. There's no better place to hear "Tonight's The Night," "Cinnamon Girl" or "Like A Hurricane"—unless it's his 1992 live album, WELD. Manassas
Thousand Roads After that, it's a recorded story of Stills's degenerating voice (by 1988, and AMERICAN DREAM, it's truly buggered), Nash's grimmer and grimmer tunesmithery ("Song For Susan" on 1982's Los Angeles formica-pop disaster area, DAYLIGHT AGAIN, is the marzipan nadir) and Crosby's increasing disinclination to put pen to stave. Of the Stills offshootage, the eponymous 1970 debut is a lost gem of stoned gospel rock 'n' roll (with full-blooded hyperjamming courtesy Clapton and Hendrix), while MANASSAS (also the name of his band) is a sprawling rug of affecting country warp (cheers, then, ex-Byrd Chris Hillman) and keen folk-rock weft. Crosby's post gun-bust THOUSAND ROADS
(1993) is Phil Collins-abetted and depressingly anaemic, though his
"Compass," from AMERICAN DREAM'S enjoyable Crosby, Stills,
Nash & Young reunion is outstanding. End to end, a beautiful
calamity.
American Dream The results of the renewed studio collaboration are wildly varied as the four members pursue their individual musical predilections without regard to a cohesive whole (it has also been suggested that the atmosphere in the studio was, ahem, "heated"). Graham Nash, ever the quaint and dainty hippie, contributes four songs which range from the embarrassing to the even more embarrassing: "Don't Say Goodbye" is a toenail-curling piano weepie, "Soldiers Of Peace" sees the Mancunian with his "social conscience" hat on, and his "Clear Blue Skies" is the kind of dippy "aren't-trees-nice" song that makes James Taylor so annoying. Stephen Stills, meanwhile, is just coasting: his two songs, "Got It Made" and "That Girl," are set firmly in American AOR territory—pedestrian and forgettable—while a pair of Stills collaborations with Young, "Night Song" and "Drivin' Thunder" (a piece of J. Geils Band-styled, slide guitar-driven R&B bluster) are hardly more thrilling. It is the songs of Neil Young and, more surprisingly, the old reprobate David Crosby that work best by far. Crosby's "Night Time For The Generals" is a typical "almost-cut-my-hair"-fashioned paranoiac's rant about the CIA eating all our babies or something, but its caustic rock and the singer's cross growling are really rather bracing; "Compass" finds Crosby in self-pitying frame, warbling over trippy acoustic guitars and phased harmonicas about how he has "wasted ten years in a blindfold"—quite moving actually, God bless him. And then comes Young singing of love ("Seal Your Love"—jaded and weary and beautiful), of unemployment ("The Old House"—a tongue-in-cheek blue collar country sing-along) and of love again ("Name Of Love"—cranked-up guitars, rough and archetypal Young). AMERICAN DREAM, then, is just the
hotchpotch we expected. Oh, but those harmonies are thoroughly
evocative; the codgers' bodies may have run to fat, their faces may have
seen lovelier days, but the voices haven't packed in quite yet. Crosby, Stills & Nash (1st album) All three came from successful groups they had left under bad terms: Crosby quit The Byrds when they wouldn't record "Triad," a song about a menage a trois; Stills ended Buffalo Springfield after feuding with Neil Young and Richie Furay; and Nash broke off from The Hollies when they refused to record "Marrakesh Express" and "Lady of the Island." What they created as a trio was markedly different than anything they had done. CSN's influential soft-rock was pretty, sweet and note perfect to the point of sterility. The social and political references made them the high priests of hippiedom, and at their best — "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," "Guinnevere," "Helplessly Hoping," "Wooden Ships" — their dulcet harmonies and precise arrangements conveyed a melancholy sweetness that proved effective, even if their shallow mysticism rarely made sense. Neil Young's addition brought needed weight lyrically and musically. His contributions — "Helpless," "Country Girl," and "Everybody I Love You" (a Stills co-write) — carried the appropriate acoustic setting and melodious sullenness. But their straightforward earthiness counter-balanced the drippy idealism of Crosby's "Almost Cut My Hair." Overall, DEJA VU has a toughness the previous album lacked. Even Nash's tender offerings, "Teach Your Children" and "Our House," deal with real-world issues that the dreaminess of his earlier songs lacked. The idea behind CSN proved to be a popular one. Before long, several folk-rock bands featured multiple singer-songwriter who shared leads, with each member advancing their own songs and musical ideas within the group format. In this case, however, bickering made togetherness too difficult. After an uneven live album, the group disbanded, only to regular re-form in various groupings for recordings and lucrative stadium tours. CSN [Box] Framed by acoustic guitars and a little light electricity—"wooden" music, as it was then called—theirs was the vocal sound of the hip new West Coast (as distinct from the seemingly old hat Beach Boys), where the muse was inspired by plentiful Acapulco Gold and the ministrations of your flaxen-haired "lady" (usually Joni Mitchell). Stills had the gritty voice, multi-instrumental and studio skills, Crosby had the mid-range, drug problem and Buffalo Bill moustache, and Nash had the upper register plus, in a band not exactly untroubled by tweeness, a sentimental streak of world-class proportions. He's the bastard responsible for "Our House," currently doing the business for a building society. Neil Young lasted for one album, 1970's multiplatinum DEJA VU but returned 14 years later for the AMERICAN DREAM album. Throughout most of the '70s and '80s, "musical differences" sundered the trio whose self-titled debut provided the core soundtrack for the Woodstock Generation. Over the last two decades, reunions apart, we've been vouchsafed numerous solo and duo efforts, and this lavishly tooled four-CD/cassette box collects the cream of 30-odd albums, or so it is hoped. As ever, any distillation of so voluminous an oeuvre down to 77 tracks will present the odd controversial choice. Yet the omission of DEJA VU'S Country Girl and The Stills-Young Band's "Long May You Run" seems perverse indeed when one has to suffer some of the Me Decade's most toe-curling musical offerings, such as "I Used To Be A King," "Simple Man," "Bittersweet" ("a song about duality, if you want to be intellectual about it") and "Another Sleep Song" ("it's for all you people who need waking"). Once again, Graham Nash is the main culprit. But the box's booklet is a thing of joy forever, not least because the extensive quotes, both about particular songs and CSN's, ahem, philosophy in general, reveal so much. "What we've tried to do is what Thomas Paine did, just issuing broadsides. And say to the public, No you're not crazy. This is really going on," muses Stills. "When we heard about the Berlin Wall, we ran right over there and blew 20 grand just to stand on the Wall. We wanted to do as much as we could to give these people some support." Ridiculous people, but some sublime
music—even "To The Last Whale…," Crosby's tribute to his
fellow large mammals. Sadly, most of the reasons not to give Graham Nash
a sound thrashing are stacked at the beginning. At half the length, CSN
would be twice as good.
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