CD Review: "Psychedelic Pill" by Neil Young & Crazy Horse"

Two studio albums from Neil Young and Crazy Horse in the same year – how awesome is that? Americana – the band’s rock ‘n’ roll take on an eclectic mix of (mostly) traditional folk standards – was released back in early June. And now here we are, before the year is out, with another CD.

Psychedelic Pill is studio album #35 for Neil Young. It’s also his longest studio album ever, and the first to span two discs. It clocks in at 87 minutes – despite the fact that it contains only nine tracks. It’s the first album of original songs he’s done with Crazy Horse since Greendale, back in 2003.

It’s been a busy and fruitful year for Neil Young. In addition to the release of the Americana CD, his autobiography – Waging Heavy Peace – was published by Blue Rider Press in September. The new album can be seen as a sequel to both of those projects: musically, it was built on a series of jam-sessions he did with Crazy Horse following the completion of their album of traditional material; lyrically, it explores many of the themes that Young raises in the recent book. And now he’s in the midst of a long tour that helps promote all three projects – although he’s more likely to be doing it for the love of playing live with the Horse, than for the need to push product that many Young fans – me included – will have already bought. Friends of mine who saw them play recently in Toronto and Kitchener say that both concerts were great.



Neil playing his 1952 Gibson Les Paul

Psychedelic Pill kicks off in an audacious fashion – the very first track is a loose, twenty-seven minute epic called “Driftin’ Back”. It’s pretty much a two-chord piece that goes on and on and on, with Neil providing extended lead-guitar solos over Frank Sampredo’s rhythm guitar. The song’s often-bizarre lyrics raise several topics that come up repeatedly in Young’s recent autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace. Much of it sounds random and improvised: “I used to dig Picasso / Then the big tech giant came along / And turned him into wallpaper”; “Hey now now, hey now now / Gonna get a hip hop haircut / Can’t get me no resolution.” About this song, Neil says, “Things that bother you fade away to maybe return as a shadow, not so big.” So the title “Driftin’ Back” doesn’t mean so much that he is returning with sentiment to the past, but that the things that keep bothering him, and that he tries to keep under control (“blockin’ out my anger”), seem to keep drifting back to haunt him.

As an opening track, “Driftin’ Back” ought not to work as well as it does. It’s an amazing risk he takes here – starting the album in such a guileless manner. But that’s the way Neil Young works. He invariably comes at you out of left field, and does the unexpected. What this introductory track really does is to boldly establish Neil’s modus operandi – to lay out the album’s basic aesthetic: loose, extended, guitar-dominated rock of often uncompromising intensity, with simple and artless lyrics that eschew any big statements. Sit back; turn up the music to LOUD; and let the extended guitar workouts carry you where they will.

Besides the rockin’-out epic tracks – of which more later – there are some short, more modest pieces. “Born in Ontario” is, in spirit, a sequel to Young’s CSN&Y track “Helpless” – invoking his childhood in Omemee with parents Rasa and Scott Young. He looks back with gratitude to those days, but he is often prompted to do that, he says, by a need to “try to make sense of my inner rage.” Neil’s playing of a pump organ in the final section of the song is a nice touch that adds to the nostalgic atmosphere of the track.

“Twisted Road” is a song that Neil’s been doing in concert for years. The song – given a rather brief rendition here – is a tribute to several of Young’s musical heroes: Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead and Roy Orbison. His image of Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone” is brilliant: “Poetry rolling off his tongue / Like Hank Williams chewing bubblegum.” Music from the past is also evoked in the album’s title track, “Psychedelic Pill”. He uses flanging (aka phasing) throughout the track to intensify the psychedelic atmosphere of the piece – a lyrical portrait of a sixties party-girl whose “every move is like a psychedelic pill / From a doctor I can’t find.” The use of flanging throughout the track is a mistake – the effect works better when it’s used sparingly. Recall, for example, its brilliant use in The Small Faces’ single “Itchycoo Park” (summer of 1967), where it is used three or four times during that recording in brief five-second snippets. There is another (unbilled) version of “Psychedelic Pill” tacked on to the end of the album, with all of the flanging removed. Many will prefer this unadorned interpretation.

“For the Love of Man” is a complete change of pace. Some might think it doesn’t really belong on this album. It’s a pensive, acoustic song about Neil’s son Ben – one of two sons that Young had who were born with Cerebral Palsy: “Some things can never be understood,” Neil writes; “These are the things that keep returning, making you wonder.” He and wife Pegi spent long and difficult years caring for the boys – finding the best care and treatment they could.



Neil and Crazy Horse (l-to-r): Billy Talbot, Frank Sampedro, Ralph Molina, Neil Young



 And those long years together with Pegi inspire “Ramada Inn”, my favourite track on Psychedelic Pill. The lyric portrays, from different perspectives, their life on the road. The refrain sounds a positive note: “And every mornin’ comes the sun / And they both rise into the day / Holdin’ on to what they’ve done.” But the last verse raises a more troubling tone: “A few drinks now and she hardly knows him / He just looks away and checks out / When she says it’s time to do something  … He just pours another tall one / Closes his eyes and says ‘that’s enough’.” The lyric is delivered with typically-sweet Young and Crazy Horse harmonies. But it’s the guitar playing – the improvised solos that run through the track – that lift this song to another level.

And what makes the guitar-work so astonishing is the sound he gets out of ‘Old Black’, his 1952 Gibson Les Paul. I talked about Neil’s obsession with recorded sound on my review of his book, Waging Heavy Peace. And what you hear on this album bares out exactly what he’s on about. The liner notes in the accompanying booklet explain the album’s A-A-D recording. The music was played through an old-fashioned (analog) tube console – a Universal Audio mixer called the “green board”. (Young talks about this equipment in his book.) It was recorded to Studer 2” eight-track analog tape, mixed to Ampex ½ inch two-track tape, and finally transferred to 24-bit digital. If you play this album through a decent set of speakers, the guitar tone you hear is awesome. The multiplicity of sounds that Young pulls out of ‘Old Black’ is astonishing. Play it loud!



"I used to walk like a giant on the land; Now I  feel like a leaf floating in a stream."



And then there’s Walk Like a Giant – the third epic on this album. This is a mesmerising piece of music. The theme of the lyric is about regret and failure – the failure of the sixties counter-culture to sustain its idealistic hopes for the future. “Me and some of my friends,” he sings, “We were going to save the world / We were trying to make it better.” But a cultural reaction set in: “the weather changed”, is how Young puts it. And there is regret and anger. The regret is expressed in this lovely image: “I used to walk like a giant on the land / Now I feel like a leaf floating in the stream.” The anger is expressed in an onslaught of incredible guitar sounds. Neil plays his heart out improvising. He’s all over the place on his fretboard – deep, growling howls of sound, and ringing tones from the higher strings. It’s extraordinary stuff – similar to the wonderful sounds on “Ramada Inn”. But the aggressive tone is softened by an incongruously jaunty riff that is whistled by the band intermittently throughout the song. And then the track ends with an incredible coda: it begins with Neil and Ralph Molina (the drummer) pounding out a huge, incessant, thumping noise – giving us an impression of a giant bestriding the land. They hammer away, coming in and out of synch with each other. This long thumping then evolves into sustained feedback. And so it goes for four minutes. Astonishing.

Another tremendous album, then, from Neil Young and Crazy Horse. It won’t be to everyone’s taste. It’s a typically uncompromising approach to music-making. Take them on their own terms, or don’t bother. There are a few rather inconsequential pieces here, but overall this is a straight-ahead, intense album of no-nonsense guitar rock. If you are familiar with the brand, you’ll love this. How do they keep doing it? Neil’s on an extended roll. Long may it run.

CD Review - "Americana" by Neil Young and Crazy Horse

Americana - the new Neil Young & Crazy Horse album

Neil Young doing an album of traditional American folk songs? Not too surprising, eh? Some nice, laid-back arrangements, presumably, dominated by acoustic guitars – similar to the easy-going vibe of Comes a Time (1978)?

 

Well, that’s not what this is at all. This is Neil Young and Crazy Horse. This is garage-band, rough-at-the-edges, crunchy rock, reminiscent of Ragged Glory (1990) - what Rolling Stone magazine refers to as “one of those fraternal freak-guitar slopfests”. I don’t know, is that meant as a compliment?

Traditions - yes,  Americana is an album of traditional folk, but it's done in the traditional Neil Young & Crazy Horse style: rough and loose, nearly all recorded live off the floor without overdubs – the way they like it. And the way I like it too.

There’s 57 minutes of music, here – 11 tracks with fairly tight arrangements - for these guys, anyway. They only really stretch out on “Tom Dula” (their version of “Tom Dooley”), which clocks in at 8:13. The sequencing of the tracks is artful. The less-interesting-because-overly-familiar songs (Stephen Foster’s “Oh Susannah”, for example, or “Clementine”) come early. But then the album presents some more intriguing choices and moves through several changes of pace towards a barn-storming finish.

Americana has been getting very mixed reviews, since its release just over two weeks ago. I reckon some critics have judged it too quickly – jaded by some of its content and alienated, perhaps, by its apparently slap-dash approach and incongruous (for some listeners) arrangements. Some seem to detect an arch and cynical attitude to some of the material, but I don’t hear that at all.

Neil Young - guitar hero

I don’t know about you, but I find I usually stick with my initial impression of a new album. But I will listen to it at least half-a-dozen times before attempting to write about it - even more times, if I find my response is particularly ambivalent. Americana begins with a very ragged intro: Neil picking out a few notes on guitar, then shifting around with some tentative chords – before Ralph Molina starts banging on the drums, and they slide into their groove after half a minute. Immediately it sounds like a jam session – and that ambience is emphasised at the end of the track when the band erupts into laughter off-mic and you hear Neil exclaim to the band: “It’s funky … it’s good … it gets into a good groove.” Indeed. My initial impression? Oh, yeah. Nice!

It may be ragged and hard, but it sounds good. Neil Young has always been concerned about the audio quality of his albums; and he has been a long-term critic of digital sound because of its limited frequency response – especially in the early days of CDs. No surprise, then, to see that this album is an A-A-D production: it was recorded on an Audio Tube console to 2” 8-track analogue tape; then mixed to ½” 2-track analogue tape; before finally being transferred to digital. Yes, it may be ragged, but it sounds good – especially the tone on Neil’s electric guitar!

Neil Young and Crazy Horse - back in the early days.

Americana was produced by Neil Young and John Hanlon. Crazy Horse features Ralph Molina on drums and vocals, Billy Talbot on bass and vocals, and Frank “Poncho” Sampedro on guitar, organ and vocals. Neil, of course, plays lead guitar and sings – with the rest of the band providing a kind of “Greek chorus” style of backing vocals. One of the secrets to the appeal of this long-standing relationship between Neil and Crazy Horse (which goes all the way back to 1968, and was first featured – memorably - on disc with Neil’s second album Everybody Knows This Nowhere in 1969) is the distinctive mixture of hard and smooth in their sound. And that shows here: they thrash away as a hard-rock band, but the vocal backing is sweet and harmonious - if a little ragged. But it's honest and real, instead of slick and air-brushed with auto-tuner.

What we have here, primarily, is a set of campfire songs done in the style of heavy, garage-band rock. There’s Foster’s “Oh Susannah”, the traditional folk pieces “Clementine”, “Tom Dula”,  “Gallow’s Pole”, “Travel On”, “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” (called “Jesus’ Chariot” here), and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”. And, despite the grunge-styled approach, the campfire mood is retained, and I find myself bursting out into song throughout.

Neil Young’s detailed liner notes for each song reveal an interesting aesthetic throughout. Although nearly all the material is traditional folk, they deliberately choose arrangements that pay tribute to pop and folk-rock versions of the songs from the fifties and sixties. “Gallows Pole”, for example, is based on the Odetta version from the ‘60s. And the group’s rendition of “Travel On” is based on a Paul Clayton arrangement - which is itself based on a 1958 version done by Billy Grammer. Reading the notes, then, heightens the sense of the historical continuity the band brings to these old songs. 

Neil - still rockin' out!

And there are some surprises. They do a very sloppy version of the doo-wop classic “Get a Job” – using the original arrangement by The Silhouettes. Neil claims this is a folk song – because of its proletarian subject matter. Hmm …  And one of the highlights of the disc, for me, is a bluesy rendition of “High Flyin’ Bird”, a song written by Billy Edd Wheeler for The Company. Neil and band copy the arrangement recorded by The Squires in 1964, which had Neil’s colleague Stephen Stills on lead vocals. This is a moving song:

“There’s a high flyin’ bird way up in the sky;

And I wonder if she looks down as she flies on by,

Just floating so free and easy in the sky;

But look at me here, I’m just rooted like a tree here,

I got them sit down, can’t fly, oh Lord, I’m gonna die blues.”

Oh, and if you are looking for a folky acoustic guitar piece - there is one that Neil does: it’s a lovely version of “Wayfarin’ Stranger”, based on Burl Ives’ 1944 recording.

But the two epics here are the Woody Guthrie piece and a clever version of “God Save the Queen” – no, not The Sex Pistols classic, but the British national anthem. For Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”, Neil adds a choir and brings in Stephen Stills and wife Pegi to help with the vocals. A real campfire feel here. Good to see, too, that Young goes back to the original Guthrie lyrics. Most people are probably only familiar with the adapted lyrics of Peter, Paul and Mary – where the song became a kind of paen to the beauty of the America landscape. Guthrie’s song is political protest – it’s actually about the tyranny of private property – how it separates the people from land that is rightfully theirs to enjoy.

“As I went walking, I saw a sign there,

And on the sign it said ‘No Trespassing’,

But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing -

That side was made for you and me.”

Neil Young

The album closes with an intriguing version of “God Save The Queen” – not designed, as some might think, or hope, as a tribute to Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee! No, it’s a folklorist’s approach – arranged as  a clever medley. The track starts with the first two verses of the British national anthem; and then morphs seamlessly into the American song “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”, which shares the same tune. The transition, Neil writes, is “in recognition of the War of Independence and America’s transition to freedom.” An interesting way to finish the album – for a former Commonwealth citizen, and now long-term resident of the United States.

So, this is probably the most interesting album that Neil Young and Crazy Horse have put together since 1996’s  Broken Arrow. And it’s not just grunge-rock renditions of old folk songs. There’s a lot more going on than that. And a few real gems. If you dig the Neil Young with Crazy Horse brand, you’re likely to enjoy their latest album. I did – but as a long-term folky and Neil Young fan, that’s really no surprise, is it?