Neil Young – On The Beach / American Stars ‘N Bars / Hawks & Doves / Reactor
As with most major artists, the lion’s share of Neil Young’s Reprise catalog was converted to CD in the late 1980s, digital’s frontier days, with little consideration given to sound quality, presentation or artistic intent. At the time, not much was made of the six unreleased titles: the four above-mentioned, as well as the essential tour scrapbook Time Fades Away and the less-than-essential worktapes-as-soundtrack Journey Through the Past (both still among the missing). But over the years, the “lost albums” have assumed a near-mythic status among Young connoisseurs, a half-remembered Rosetta Stone to the artist’s vast, unwieldy oeuvre. Now that they’re finally available (at least in part) to the general public, the casual listener and/or recently initiated fan may feel understandably underwhelmed, even cheated.
In Young’s own, oft-quoted words, “the middle of the road…soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.” Consider these albums boozy dispatches from his more unruly off-road ventures. Loose and unpolished, naked and unguarded, at their best (more often than not) they present an intimate, telling portrait of an artist flirting with extremes. At their worst, they explain, at least in part, why Geffen, his next label, famously (and laughably) sued him for not sounding like himself.
The earliest (and best) of the four reissues, 1974’s On The Beach, envisions an eve-of-apocalypse dystopia with Young as Cassandra. After an answer song as statement of principle (“Walk On”) and a wispy throwback recalling the fractured lyricism of his solo debut (“See The Sky About To Rain”), Young scans the blighted SoCal landscape. Corporate vampires rape the land as militia groups gather in the margins. Meanwhile our hero croaks an ode to diminished expectations after imagining (invoking?) a Laurel Canyon massacre. This choked air of entropy and despair is distilled to its bitter essence on the album’s final three songs, a fractured suite of quiet dread — haunting and lovely, resigned though not defeated. Greater than the sum of its parts, it’s the rangy, funky flipside of Tonight’s The Night’s dark night of the soul.
Despite its willfully discursive ramblings and shuffle-crawl tempo, On The Beach registers as a (semi-)coherent whole. American Stars ‘N Bars, on the other hand, is what it seems, a true hodgepodge. And yet its first half, a good-natured country rock side-trip, remains a modest triumph. Functioning as a de facto public rapprochement with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Young’s honky-tonk love plaints climax with the unrepentantly lecherous “Bite The Bullet”. The second half is an odds-and-ends assemblage from the songwriter’s vast archives. Less than the sum of its parts, its strongest cuts, the slight yet charming “Star Of Bethlehem” and the perennial concert fave “Like A Hurricane”, are showcased to better effect on the following year’s early-career 3-LP summation Decade.
After Decade came the strong, enduring Harvest-distillation Comes A Time and finally the decade-capping major statement Rust Never Sleeps. Seemingly positioned for lasting success on his own terms, Young perversely, if characteristically, balked (back to “the ditch”). The artist’s next two albums effectively bifurcated his carefully honed Rust persona — Hawks & Doves privileging the cracked folkie, Reactor the primitive guitar genius, with both aspects attenuated to predictably indulgent extremes.
Hawks & Doves ultimately gets the nod, if only because even on autopilot, Young’s incomparable tune-sense is A-list. Upon its initial release, rock critics bemoaned the album’s apparent rightward shift; but with King W imposing new world order and our nation’s infrastructure smoldering in ruin, Young’s genuinely committed, genuinely conflicted worldview seems positively timely today. The album’s least ambiguous title (“Comin’ Apart At Every Nail”) and most harrowing line (“When I get to shore I hope that I can kill good”) effectively encapsulate the apparent contradictions of an album that accrues meaning and significance with each listening. And “Lost In Space” is simply lovely, confused re-sinking of Atlantis allusion and all.
The impact of Reactor is nowhere near as complex or enduring. Its minor, though tangible, pleasures are a distillation of texture and sonics — the boy alone with his toys in the playroom, the mad scientist torturing guitars in his lab. And yet the album’s strongest moments, “Surfer Joe And Moe The Sleaze” (sedan delivery redux) and “Shots” (metal machine music redux), pulse with a raw, unhinged urgency. But its low point, “T-bone”, choogles in neutral for a mind-numbing nine minutes, while much of the rest is simply dull.
So what to make of Young’s recently unearthed treasures: one near-essential anti-statement and three left-field curios? Probably best to view them as facets of a whole, a corpus which up close may appear unkempt and haphazard, but at the proper remove assumes a certain ragged grandeur. Embrace the eccentric pleasures, give history its due, and acknowledge that the artist would never have mounted his many lofty peaks without also having traversed this less hospitable terrain.