Unpacking all of ’92 and most of ’93, to this point, is an exercise in frustrating near-misses. Regarding tonight and the connective tissue of lost opportunities, these extend well beyond the Blind Melon set that I was working too late during this, a weekday afternoon, to catch.
By most reasonable measures, this should not have been my next show. Who ever could have guessed that, a year and a half after catching Guns N’ Roses, that the following band I’ll see live in concert is…Dinosaur Jr.? And not only that, but I technically should have already caught these guys, too. Or take even tonight: Blind Melon, the opening act, at least makes some twisted sense in this passing of the torch, considering the whole Shannon Hoon-Axl Rose connection, that Melon’s lead warbler sang on a handful of Use Your Illusion tracks, et cetera. But no, we have gotten here too late for that set, also.
Everything is just this topsy-turvy, in this current musical climate where we now find ourselves. So much so that tonight’s headliner, Neil Young, has gained a ton of critical steam in the past year and some change, much of it centered around his newly declared status as The Godfather Of Grunge. Which only took off upon the release of Harvest Moon last year, an album that evokes in name, spirit, and mellow tuneage his Harvest offering of two decades prior, i.e. the mostly acoustic, really mainstream one, with prominent background vocals by the likes of James Taylor and Emmylou Harris. That is somehow when this whole Godfather Of Grunge business really starts gathering momentum. So yeah, makes total sense, right about now.
Well, Harvest Moon is by a factor of dozens my most familiar work by ol’ Neil, and let me state for the record that I’m not hearing a ton of grunge there. That album is also pretty much the only reason I’m here. As for Heather, my girlfriend at the time of this concert (a development which seems about as outlandish as everything else, I must admit), she knows even less about Canada’s answer to Bob Dylan. But is a good sport, and has never been to a concert, period, and figured why the hell not.
Like a lot of veteran rock acts from those distant decades, my initial exposure comes in random bursts, mostly on the radio, when I’m not really paying attention. But the first concrete memory confronting the name Neil Young stems from roughly 1988. My mom and stepdad, though barely into their 30s, are going through some weird phase where they haven’t listened to hardly any music at all for years, and cannot see a future where they will, either. My stepdad tells me to rifle through their vinyl LP collection and take what I want; such is my ignorance that a few years pass before I even bother. Right around this time, too, they go through what remains of their meager cassette collection and throw out almost everything. Aside from a couple sentimental favorites they hang onto for themselves, for whatever reason, they also decide to personally hand me a donation consisting of exactly two of these tapes: Neil Young’s Live Rust, and Deju Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. At a time when my entire cassette collection was the Dire Straits effort Brothers in Arms, I’m initially stoked and mildly intrigued to find it now tripled. Except I listened to both albums exactly once, probably not even in their entirety: not my thing. Weird country shit, I thought. Further inspired by my friend Brian Owens making fun of me for even possessing the things, I threw them in the same trash can all those others had graced.
Then it’s about a year later, specifically September 30, 1989. My stepdad’s cousins Howie and Lisa are over visiting, even though it’s late, and we’re all sitting around the living room watching Saturday Night Live. While it appears that Neil played three songs total that night, I’m pretty sure we only stuck around for the first one, Rockin’ In The Free World, which none of us had ever heard before. Therefore I’m not quite sure what to make of his crazy looking hilljack with shaggy hair, lurching up and down, around the stage, wailing away on his horrible sounding electric guitar, in hole riddled jeans and some highly incongruous leather (or is that pleather?) jacket. I was convinced this was among the most atrocious things I’d ever heard, and the adults were no less horrified.
“Would you look at this…,” my stepdad marvels, all but clicking his tongue, as they all shake their head at this sorry sight.
“You know who else I couldn’t believe how bad he looks these days is Bowie,” Howie remarks, a remark that will always stick with me. At the time I assumed that David, another name I knew in passing but not really, must be some drug addled hobo barely keeping it together. Such was the mental imagery painted by this comment. Now that I am much more knowledgeable about music, I wonder what he meant — to see a photo of Bowie, any photo whatsoever from the late 80s, he surely looks a far a cry healthier and saner than he had at any point during his heyday.
“Oh, I’ll bet, I’ll bet,” my stepdad says, nodding and shooting him a sidelong glance.
A few days later, though, I’ve got that Neil song stuck in my head, an afternoon where my brother and me and our neighbor Matt Montanya are in our backyard tossing a baseball around. To the extent I can’t stop repeating that line, keep on rockin in the free world…keep on rockin in the free world…keep on rockin in the free world, albeit mockingly, while we fire the ball around in this triangle.
“That’s the worst song I’ve ever heard,” I tell Matt, “I think it only has one line.”
And I seriously doubt Neil Young popped into my head again even once for the next few years to follow. Though you can look at various charts now and see that Rockin’ apparently reached #2 on the “Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks Chart,” I have no idea what that means, because none of the modern rock stations were playing that song in central Ohio that I ever heard, and it isn’t as though the classic rock ones were, either. Then when all these Seattle bands blew up and you started to hear the inevitable reverse engineering, concerning which forebears “led to” this phenomenon, Neil was often cited as one of its antecedents. And yet I still felt no need to investigate further.
All of which changes sometime in either the last months of ’92 or early ’93, when late one night, hanging out in my parents’ room for some reason (probably because they have the living room TV monopolized by something far less interesting), sprawled in their luxurious bed watching MTV alone, I catch the video for Neil’s title track from his newest CD, Harvest Moon. And it’s such a sweet, breezy song, with a correspondingly simple but sweet video — Neil as the janitor in some creaky old mountaintop roadhouse — that I am instantly smitten with both. And stop at the record store days later to purchase the disc. Which remains, apart from a handful of tracks I’ve absorbed from the radio, the extent of what I know about him.
Harvest Moon is by no means a masterpiece. For that matter, it’s not even as good an album as the bell ringing heralds are making it out to be. But the overall mood of the effort raises most tunes above where they would otherwise rate, which testifies that concerns such as instrumentation and recording methods really do matter. Also that, as noted with Guns N’ Roses and Appetite For Destruction, a coherent album can sometimes elevate a collection of songs higher than any of the tracks would manage alone, or in any other context. And so it is here, where an observable cohesiveness ties these tunes together from start to finish. Three or four cuts even make the all time Neil Young classic set list, which is a fairly major accomplishment for a guy who’s been around more than twenty five years.
So yeah, though originally purchasing this album on CD, as far as it relates to cassettes side one is definitely the superior of the two. Actually if I had this on tape I’m pretty sure that fast forwarding halfway through side B would become commonplace. Unknown Legend kicks off this album, and Neil paints a vivid picture of a lost love from years past, one whom he met in a diner and still can’t quite forget. The chorus in particular shines, with its soaring background vocals and a pedal steel guitar floating just behind lyrics that look somewhat less cool in print than they are in actuality:
Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a Harley Davidson
Her long blonde hair flying in the wind
But as music is listened to, not read, there are understandably some gaps and barriers to just how much words can convey. Describing the textile experience of these sounds hitting a person’s ears is well nigh impossible, and however hokey such a chorus might look on paper, this one definitely works. A point such as this is extended on the next track as well, From Hank To Hendrix, another slow, acoustic offering on a CD chock full of them. In lesser hands, or even in different form stemming from the man himself, this would surely make for a somewhat corny exercise — he might be the godfather of grunge, but if you took this track and gave it the second-wave-one-hit-wonder-faux-Seattle treatment, the phrase “novelty number” would certainly spring to mind. Here he recounts how long he has been with someone (presumably his wife, but you might invoke the Axl Rose “protagonist” clause here regarding whether this is truly autobiographical) in relation to various musical acts throughout the years, again a much cooler exercise to listen to than it sounds in print.
Which brings us to today. Given that Neil Young was the subject of my debut post in this “Today’s Daily Song” series (January 6, 2020), it makes sense that he would become my first repeat honoree as well.
You And Me comes next on the album, which I will admit is somewhat of a triviality even as I extol its virtues. It’s just extremely atmospheric, with a lovely, haunting vibe. But while Neil intended this album as a spiritual follow up to his 1972 release Harvest, and assembled the same backing band down to the backup singers, this is actually a duet with Nicolette Larson whom as far as I know does not appear on the predecessor.
Regardless, this tune presents another example of how much often conjures such personal and private images, and why debates rage so fierce over it in a way they just don’t concerning other art forms. Because when listening to Nicolette’s tremendous voice on this one, what I really always think about is Heather. The twenty mile ride through the countryside, specifically, between my hours and hers, late at night and I’m driving, one particular spot in the road as I’m heading home always pops up mentally when I hear this. Even though Heather in fact never really sang at all, so it’s not that I picture the two of us singing this together, not specifically. I also have never listened to this song while driving along that particular stretch of route 314, yet however this works, that’s what always comes to mind when I hear the track, a great example of the power that music holds over us, the vivid landscapes it paints without necessarily any connection to reality or reason.
