After the Gold Rush by Neil Young

"There was even a credit for Susan Young's patches, featured in the back-cover close-up of Neil's ass."

 

 

After thinking for a long time that The Beatles were my band, the group that I enjoyed most completely above all others, I've had to admit to myself they are not. This comes after years of having invested a lot of time and money into their music and I was reluctant to give them up easily. But if I had to pick one artist whose music really means something to me, it is Neil Young. This is aided in no small part by learning more about the man after reading Jim McDonough's biography Shakey.

You can always question how much you really learn indirectly. I get the impression that McDonough gets as close as anyone is likely to to someone who, as Pitchfork's review of the book observed, is both 'inscrutable' and 'media-shy'. It's a book already heavily quoted in these pages. What comes across is a willful passionate musician who is compelled to make the music in him at the moment in time it hits him. I've never got that sense with The Beatles, hence I can now understand why, while greatly admiring them and their music, I have never fully felt connected with them.

With the exception perhaps of the early blues recordings, for me, most of Neil Young's records encapsulate the magic and fascination I have with recorded music; capturing a real performance, and in so doing, documenting a moment that can move you.

Despite being the album of Young's most likely to be reeled off in greatest album discussions, After the Gold Rush is the album of his I have taken longest to fully appreciate. Harvest is an obvious and easy starting point and by the time I came to hear On The Beach and Tonight's The Night I was immediately intoxicated by their powerful intense and dark looseness (or sloppiness even). Along the way, After the Gold Rush got slightly overlooked.

Pitchfork's review sets things straight: "Members of Crazy Horse appear in various combinations on a few of tracks, and songs like "Southern Man" and "When You Dance I Can Really Love" have the hypnotically stoned but sneakily intense groove of the previous record. But more precisely crafted songs like "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", "Birds", and especially the astonishing title track, which has become a rock standard, show Young's gift as a writer of original melodies of extraordinary beauty in full flower. It's an aspect of Young's work that can be overlooked: the guy can write a simple tune over a chord change that hollows you out completely. Sure, the record has a phrase or two that might sound a little dippy to those with an aversion to hippies (Young was one of those, though of a very individualistic sort), but After the Gold Rush is basically unassailable. There's a reason why it's the favorite Neil Young album for so many."

As for the back cover, as Jim McDonough notes: "Young's album packaging was becoming more personal: Gold Rush included a foldout insert of handwritten lyrics, plus - just to make everybody wonder - a list of songs that didn't make the cut. There was even a credit for [Neil's first wife] Susan Young's patches, featured in the back-cover close-up of Neil's ass."

Joel Berstein was again the photographer (see also Harvest), with art direction by Gary Burden.

Harvest by Neil Young

Harvest was the first album that got me thinking about this blog. In the context of Young's diverse discography it has almost moved into the territory of ‘guilty pleasure’, tainted by a ‘middle-of-the-road’ tag that has been fostered by Young himself. It's reputation cannot fail to be impacted by the darker shadow cast by what came next.

His hand-written liner notes for “Heart of Gold” on his 1977 compilation Decade famously remarked, "This song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I met more interesting people there." "Heart of Gold", one of the two singles from Harvest, is perhaps his only genuine 'hit'. As the Pitchfork review for the Harvest reissue notes, this meant that “To embrace Young as an artist after Harvest would mean accepting his many flaws, which have made his career unusually rich and varied as well as maddeningly inconsistent.”

But the back cover puts lie to the perception that Harvest is just a slick mellow album. It captures the creation of some of the ragged, more spontaneous sounding tracks of the band playing live…in a barn (naturally).

An extract from the excellent Neil Young biography 'Shakey' by Jimmy McDonough captures the circumstances of the back cover shot:

"Young's back problems would draw out the completion of the Harvest album. In March [1972], Young went to London with Jack Nitzsche to record a pair of songs live with the London Symphony  - "A Man Needs a Maid" and "There's a World." In April, Young returned to Nashville to cut "Harvest." September would bring the first recordings done on [Young's] ranch, with "Words," "Are You Ready for the Country?" and "Alabama" cut by backing up a remote-recording truck to a dilapidated old barn on the property, where Nitzsche would join Young's Nashville outlaws [session musicians dubbed the the Stray Gators] for these sessions, playing piano and, for the first time in his life, slide guitar....

...Much to Nitzsche's embarrassment, he was soon sitting amid bales of hay accompanying Young on a Kay guitar he barely knew how to play. Bernstein would capture the barn vibe in a photo Young used for the back cover of Harvest: all the Stray Gators, hands at their instruments, staring apprehensively at Young bent over his guitar, his long mane of hair totally obscuring his face, indifferent to their attention..."

For more images by Joel Bernstein go to: www.joelbernstein.com