(Reprise)
!!! A+ RECORDING !!!
The records Neil Young made in the '70s are infallible. Sometimes lightning is just behind an artist. As good as Everybody Knows This is Nowhere had been, its follow-up seems to come up from the soil -- a dream of magic conjured from the ashen end of the 1960s. After the Gold Rush is an album whose final ethereal impact as a collection of hardened but gentle folk-rock tunes, written and sung to virtual perfection, is so timeless it can be surprising to learn how much of a document of its era it really is: written on acid trips, based partially on a psychedelic "unproduced screenplay" that sounds no more dreadful than many counterculture movies of the period that did get made. That's part of what has made Young a giant -- his work is too universal to be tangled up in such concerns and technicalities as time, place, intention.
The song "After the Gold Rush," for example, is either an LSD song or a veiled commentary about the environment, the industrial age and the future -- but every line of it means something whether we care to dully parse out the entire song's intentions or not. Its dreamlike piano line, one of many on the outskirts of ghostly familiarity played on the LP by Nils Lofgren, has the mournful quality of a "Let It Be" or "Moonlight Mile." It feels like something Young discovered rather than wrote, something that's singing him -- and forty years later, its mournful nostalgia is unquestionably permanent.
It's the quietest song on Side One (but not the smallest, that would be the sensual and intimate "Till the Morning Comes") but serves as its emotional climax much as the stunning "I Believe in You" is for the back half. "Gold Rush" is sung in an undaunted, plaintive falsetto, "I Believe in You" has more gruffness but is a more vulnerable and direct lyric and performance. This contrast is, as many have noted, likely the culmination of Young's increasingly varied career path in the prior year, performing with Crazy Horse as well as the folkier CSNY, wherein his talent so outpaced that of his bandmates that there's still some bitterness in some quarters that "Helpless" made it onto one of their records and not his own.
The Other Neil Young is in evidence here as well, as it was on the unlikely and hard-hitting CSNY protest single "Ohio." "Southern Man" -- one of the best-sounding performances ever recorded in rock history -- and "When You Dance I Can Really Love" are no less enormous despite being dwarfed by the quieter, heart-stopping acoustic pieces. "Southern Man" is a violent elegy for the Old South, "When You Dance" a note-perfect rocker, romance writ large. Both lay a roadmap for Young's mastery to come through the rest of the decade, and both sound a world away from the AM pop of the celebrated Harvest, which would appear two years later.
There are no extrapolated jams here, no lengthy guitar stabbings designed to annoy the George Harrisons of the world, only Young's flawless way with a melody accompanied always by his idiosyncratic but quite beautiful voice, capable of hyper-enthusiasm and soulfulness as much as the darkness befitting many of his despairing words. Young dabbles in abstraction for the most part, and this is generally his best lyrical work (the title cut, the choral ballad "Birds," the trifling earworm "Cripple Creek Fairy") but as he would subsequently prove time and time again, he is the master of a surface-level appreciation of heartbreak that can provide solace to anyone at the end of any given rope.
Issued as a single some time earlier, a lovely cover of Don Gibson's "Oh, Lonesome Me" reveals the source of the Beatles' "It Won't Be Long" before exorcising angst with haromnica, and "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" expresses a sentiment so bitterly honest it's a wonder no one had beaten him to it. The words are no more a monument to great poetry than Gibson's, but in either case, Young's cooing and calling atop the bed of piano and acoustic guitar is about the truest sort of breakup comfort possible. Just three albums into his solo career, his writing in terms of both words and music has already vastly eclipsed his estimable work with Buffalo Springfield, and his performances are at peak-level mastery.
The joy of Young in this period is the tightrope he walks: a song like "Tell Me Why" is fragile and beautiful but presented with utter confidence that makes it more reassuring, more moving. And "Don't Let It Bring You Down" has a reflective Crazy Horse menace about it, but the chaos is softened and the music breathes. Young cultivates those, like Lofgren and bassist Greg Reeves, who can appreciate, justify and maximize the emotional potential of his songs. After the Gold Rush is a truly magnificent record and, one assumes, one for which the primary appeal and immediacy has not changed since release. The longing, sad, beautiful prism through which it sees the world is absent some of the desperation of Young's other large handful of truly great records, but it would be surprising to meet a music lover who could not be led through a dark night by its warmth and monochrome splendor.
[SEE ALSO:]
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)
[Editorial note: Last pre-millennial album review here until 2014. The new release rush for 2013 begins in the next few hours. This blog will be kicking into overdrive with about two reviews per day until the middle of December. If I miss a day, there will be three the next two days, etc. Because I got a late start for various boring reasons, I sidelined the pending reviews of older records (except this and the prior two because they were already half-done). Quick shoutout to postponed reviews of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, Yo La Tengo and Camera Obscura times two that will now appear in January.]
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