As a perverse contrarian, Neil Young’s tenure with Geffen records in the Eighties is the one period of his career with which I am truly familiar. We’ve done not one, but two podcasts on this era. While Geffen did end up suing Neil for producing “uncharacteristic” music, it’s hard to really feel bad for Geffen since they not only should’ve seen this coming, but they were often making things worse for themselves.

The first album Neil submitted to Geffen was called Island In The Sun which Geffen rejected. So Neil came up with something less commercial, which Geffen in turn did accept. They would do that a lot. The new album was called Trans and features a lot of vocoder disguising Neil’s voice as well as synthesizers and drum machines making that album feel more like Devo or Kraftwerk than Neil Young.

Geffen was not amused. They told Neil to make an album with real instruments, so he did a country-ish album titled Old Ways. Geffen rejected it telling Neil they wanted “rock’n’roll”. So Neil recorded the rockabilly/doo-wop album Everybody’s Rockin’. Which Geffen did release. You have to wonder what they were thinking, but they were not amused and sued Neil.

So Neil re-did Old Ways making it even more straightforward Nashville country and threatened to keep making records like this until it was considered “characteristic”. Neil and Geffen eventually settled the suit out of court.

As a goodwill gesture, Neil tried really hard to make his next album very commercial. However Neil had no idea how to really do that in the mid-80s so he skipped the vocoder, but brought the synths back and than cranked up the snare drum to ludicrous levels, creating a very odd sound for the resultant record Landing On Water. He even had the San Francisco Boys Choir on a couple of tracks. Needless to say it wasn’t quite the commercial success that Neil was aiming for – although subconsciously he may have been trying to sabotage the project.

Neil’s last album for Geffen, Life, is the least interesting of this run. The synths are back, but not nearly as prevalent as on Trans or Landing On Water. Going back to the Rust Never Sleeps model, we recorded the album live and then removed the audience’s reactions. However, the songs aren’t as strong or interesting and the resulting record is usually pretty forgotten.

But Neil had finally fulfilled his Geffen records contract (there was even a subtle nod with the prisoner on the cover of Life having made 5 checkmarks on the wall). Now that he was back with his usual company Reprise, he was going to stop this goofy genre-hopping.

Right?