When people find out that you are a fan of Bob Dylan, they often assume you are a fan of various other Bob-adjacent artists. Springsteen is a big one. As are Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen. Since Dylan played with The Band, you are assumed to be a fan of them as well. Frankly I don’t like any of those. The closest I can really say I’ve gotten into is Neil Young. So for my last series of one-hour intros for the years, I decided to do a deep dive into Neil Young. Much like David Bowie, I’m not overly familiar with their work. I know the hits, but I am going to go through each every album and try and find the bright spots that stick out to me.
There are several reasons why I’ve never really gotten into Neil before. For one thing, he has a tendency to only do songs live and not have a definitive studio recording of many of his songs – even his big hits like Rockin’ In The Free World and Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black) are only available through live recordings.
Another issue I’ve had with Neil Young is that his songs can be very, very long. And it’s not like Dylan who is just writing 92 verses to justify this 10+ minute song, usually it’s just lots and lots of guitar solos – something that feels somewhere between padding and showboating to me.
That being said, I do enjoy Neil following his cranky muse wherever it happens to lead him. Those are the moments in his catalog that I appreciate the most, when Neil goes off and tries something he is not really equipped for and allows himself to risk looking stupid. As a result I am far more familiar with (and into) Neil’s 1980s work than of his more popular periods.
But we’re not nearly there yet…
To start, before he was a star himself, Neil was in bands. This is not a good fit for Neil. Neil does not play well with others (as we will see time and time again in this series of posts). But before he had the pull to go on his own, he had to start like anyone else does. His first band does have him as the lead singer-songwriter. They were The Squires, essentially a garage band in Canada doing early rock’n’roll that got a couple of low-quality recordings made. It’s mostly interesting in showing where Neil started and the seeds of what he would become.
Neil’s next band was slightly more professional. They were the Mynah Byrds and they got signed to Motown. However traveling from Ontario to Detroit to record the album, the band found out that their lead singer was actually AWOL from the US Navy and that was why he was in Canada. So this singer fled before the album could be finished. In a truly surprising twist of fate, when that singer’s legal problems were finally sorted out he returned to the states and renamed himself Rick James, bitch. Yes – Neil used to be in a band with Mr. Superfreak – but in that band he was just a guitarist not a main creative partner.
From Motown, Neil drove his hearse to L.A. where he nearly ran over his old friend Stephen Stills. They quickly formed a band called Buffalo Springfield. And that band quickly became famous. And even more quickly than that, the band started fighting and breaking up. In their two-year career, Neil quit half a dozen times. The problem was that the songwriter, Stephen Stills wanted to sing lead and play lead guitar. And the lead singer, Richie Furay wanted to write the songs. And the lead guitarist, Neil, wanted to sing lead and write the songs. A lot of Neil’s songs on the third and final Buffalo Springfield album came from abortive attempts at a solo career while he had quit the band.
So it’s not surprising that when Neil finally did release his first, self-titled solo album Neil Young after the final dissolution of Buffalo Springfield it sounded a lot like Broken Arrow and other songs that he had brought to the table during his tenure in the band. Only now instead of having a solid backing group he was relying on Jack Nietzsche to produce and arrange the studio musicians. In a weird way, this was almost as antithetical to Neil as being in a band and as a result, his first album doesn’t feel very much like Neil Young, even though it has his name on it.
To really find his voice, Neil was going to need a band that was a band – and he was going to need to be the unquestioned leader of that band. Once he found his way into that scenario, he was going to be unstoppable by anyone but himself…