(Reprise)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Sadly drowned out in what might have been the greatest year in history for classic rock albums, Neil Young's breakthrough solo effort Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is both a quantum leap over its predecessor and an assertion of a true artist whose work exists wholly outside the plane of his brilliant material crafted with Buffalo Springfield, whose work he would soon overshadow. Young's sophomore record captures here a stirring and unique moment of self-assertion. Triumphant though it is, and remarkably out-of-time, it's absent of the warmth and passionate subservience to beauty that would render Young the premier rock & roll singer-songwriter of the '70s. There's a streak of darkness to it, a desolate bleakness untempered by the harmonious grace of CSNY's "Helpless" or even the showboating rockist relief of "Southern Man" or "The Loner." Living up to the John Ford expanse and emptiness suggested by its title, Nowhere can be described as an often truly unforgiving record.
This is best exemplified by the deceptively lilting but finally mad "Round & Round," a circular duet that gradually magnifies its dirgelike intensity until the rubber band seems poised to snap. The other moment of heaviest dread is the bogged-down "Running Dry"; both songs seem more conceptually significant than the brighter country-rock interludes, the title cut and "The Losing End," that nevertheless suggest the most bottom-hitting kind of heartbreak. All are as evocative as the best of Young's later work, and all continue to lure despite the dour mood they strike up.
Nowhere is structured intriguingly, with three pillars linked by these contextual episodes. The three major songs are among the most memorable and harshly confrontational in the classic rock catalog; shirking his own lyricism, Young goes for the jugular. The riff rocker "Cinnamon Girl" is nicely economical and does slightly call back to heavier Springfield tunes like "Leave," but its towering guitars give vent to their own agenda while the wonderfully unhinged vocal seems to come from a different world entirely, that delightful incongruity a key element of Young's '70s appeal falling into place. The track wouldn't sound out of place on any of his subsequent major albums, save perhaps Harvest.
That highlight is inevitably shoved aside by "Down by the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand," as much as it sparkles out amidst the songs that amount to conceptually charged interludes. "River" is a large masterpiece that illustrates the entire LP's structure by opening and closing with the melodic bliss of Young's nasty, nihilistic, delirious murder ballad and generating in between the two renditions nearly seven minutes of stark guitar catharsis that sometimes seems as wildly off the handle as Dave Davies' much shorter frenetic solos on the earliest Kinks singles. What's most disturbing is how Young lends such sing-song beauty to his horrifying lyric, though he gives the game away entirely in the complex muttering, pleading, obsessed screeching of his vocal. Like David Bowie, he can sound horrendously off-mode with the expressive ideals of a brute without ever being difficult to listen to or admire. That's conceptual mastery, the skill he's gained seeingly overnight here.
"Cowgirl in the Sand" might be an even stronger piece, even if its deceptions are less complete and less artful; it's a responsible paean to male aggression, toward a married woman or simply a strong-willed woman, that sympathizes with but challenges the reductive and vaguely misogynist reasoning of its babbling character. Adoring and angry, fiery and complicated, it's a lot to get your arms around but marvelously eloquent and felt ("hello ruby in the dust / has your ring begun to rust?"), challenging to Young's maleness, the maleness of his audience, and to itself. It's a mark of the times that it satirizes the half-assed sex revolution feminism of so many young men, but by absorbing such attitudes into a larger and more surreal study that bears out the larger pattern of the LP, it transcends its time and place.
The mystery is why we want to visit that time and place so often; it doesn't seem pleasant, certainly not naturally cathartic and righteous like what we hear in the later Young records. But its brooding sense of loss and futility carries a surprisingly constant power to move and relieve. As suggested in the darkest, most haunting and hopeless moments of "Down by the River," it's a mournful, desperate fever dream -- true art, messy and viable.
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