Transforming Trans: Neil Young's electronic adventures revisited...

Maybe thinking about that whole misshapen Chris Gaines debacle made me think of other albums where the concept and the things surrounding its creation are more interesting than the music itself. Inevitably, I ended up with one of the most infamous albums that was a mix of weird ambitions, selfindulgence and a genuine sense of discovery: Uncle Neil and Trans. Now, to be fair, it's not that the music isn't interesting (it is) or downright bad (it isn't) , but that it didn't sound like anything Young did before (and would after). Infamously, it was of course also the album that had Young's new record label Geffen shaking their head in disbelief, the first step leading to the label suing Young for making 'uncommercial and uncharacteristic music' later on, when he added the ridiculous rockabilly exercise Everybody's Rockin' six months later as a fuck you to Geffen, when they had rejected country album Old Ways. Now, Everybody's Rockin' really is Young's worst album, a joke that finally was on the listener, in a 'the food was terrible, and such small portions, too' way. Customers paid full price for 25 minutes of awful ersatz rockabilly. In order to annoy Geffen further, Uncle Neil agreed to a promotional video for the better-than-the-rest original "Wonderin'" (a repurposed country number from around 1970), but mugged for the video to ridicule the whole exercise and also looked like a deranged serial killer:

But I digress. Trans, baby! Most of you will probably know the backstory to this album (and there's always Wikipedia), so I'll keep it brief for the few that don't: Young was heavily occupied in the early 8às with caring for his handicapped son Ben, who - like Young's first son, Zeke - was born with cerebral palsy, and was thus unable to communicate verbally. Long, repetitive routines to try to communicate with Ben were part of Neil's daily life, and this repetitiveness crept into Neil's music: in his awful last album for Reprise, Reactor, and obviously Trans. But the latter was a rather pointed way to analyze and put into metaphor Young's family situation. As he said, Trans was a fantasy about robot nurses in a hospital getting a young boy to push a button to communicate, parallelling Young's attempt to rewire one of his electric train systems in his house to communicate with the non-verbal Ben, who could imitate his father's movements via a self-constructed headset. 

While his family situation gave the album its thematic background, the sound was equally appropriate. The robotic, relentless beats from the sequencer mimicked the long, arduous therapy sessions, and Young's new love for synclavier and vocoder led him even further down the rabbit hole of how people are able to communicate. The vocoder makes the lyrics often difficult to grasp, and sometimes impossible to make out (as on parts of "Transformer Man"), but maybe therein lay a message as well: Human connection can transcend words, and maybe electric connection can as well. The idea of communicating with his son via robots and their sounds are at the core of Trans and at the core of "Transformer Man" - but at its heart lies a very human realizaton: The words don't matter, if the sound of them comes out right. And you can hear Young's love and encouragement for Ben in "Transformer Man", despite the lyrics being grabled, maybe especially because their garbled, when he moves into his falsetto and the vocoder turns his words almost indistinguishable. As Young himself said: "On that record, you know I'm saying something, but you can't understand what it is. Well, that was the feeling I was getting from my son."

Old school Young fans were of course recoiling in horror, when the vocoder first comes in roughly a third into "Computer Age". But here's the thing: I'm not like most Young fans. I felt like the inclusion of three tracks that have nothing to do with the concept, thrown in more or less to fill up the album, was a huge misstep that undermined the fascinating and - in its own weird way - quite wonderful record. One thing that was almost always missing, even from some of Neil's most popular albums, was cohesion. Uncle Neil simply never had much use for it. Need to fill an album up to album running time? Just throw in a couple of refurnished (or not) outtakes, or a live track or two, or whatever else was lying around. Even Harvest, the Young classic that even people who don't know much about Young have at home, was hardly a paragon of cohesion: In between the two heavily orchestrated numbers, the live track, and the one rock workout coming at the end of a predominantly acoustic album, cohesion wasn't the name of the game - one reason why I reworked it as Harvest Time, still the most popular album in One Buck Records history. 

So while most Neil Young fans would probably clamor for less vocoders and sequencers, not more of them, but our One Buck Record of the day is going the opposite way, bullheaded like Uncle Neil himself.  This version of Trans is not for folks who didn't like its sound in the first place, instead it doubles down on it and presents an album that stays with Young's concept from beginning to end, thus it's nicknamed the fully automated version. The three conventional tracks sung in Young's normal voice stick out like a sore thumb on the original Trans, especially "Litte Thing Called Love" and "Hold On To Your Love", both taken from another planned album completely (for years thought to be called Islands In The Sun, though on Archives III Young names it as Johnny's Island). And the concluding epic "Like An Inca" seems to be an entirely different thing together, unfortuately a deathly dull ramble stuck to a relentless synth beat, and thus never able to break out into hidden Young classic territory. So those three had to go (or almost). There are no Trans outtakes of any kind on Volume Three of his Archives, so it stands to reason that the six electro-and-vocoder tracks (counting the mix'n'match remake of "Mr. Soul") are all that exists of electronic Trans music. Which of course made building an entire electronic Trans retroactively somewhat challenging.

Challenging isn't impossible, though. I first thought of having some sort of little overture for the album that inroduced its sound and vision. So I looped the first bars of the 12" version of "Sample And Hold" and overlaid Young repeating the album title in a robotic vocoder voice, thus creating "Trans", the track, a short intro before the familiar beat of "Computer Age" takes over. Then I had to decide which version of "Sample And Hold" to use, the five-minute original album version or the eight-minute 12" cut. And guess what, I kept both. If there can be two "My My, Hey Hey"'s and two "Rockin' In The Free World"'s, then why the hell not two "Sample And Hold"'s? Especially since the feel and sound of both versions are quite different. Interestingly, the most guitar-heavy number on the entire album, the short version of "Sample And Hold" is co-credited to The Trans Band and not Crazy Horse, who are co-credited on the thumping "We R In Control" (whose little 'woo-woo-woo sound' I love) and "Computer Cowboy", the most humorous track on the album, and also one of my favorites. The eight-minute 12" version of "Sample And Hold"is significantly different, almost entirely electronic, with the guitars pushed further back in the mix, with additional lyrics and vocoder interplay. I figured both versions were different enough from each other to merit inclusion. Needless to say, it was also a cheap way to fill out the album to reach an acceptable album running time. I'm borrowing Uncle Nel's tricks!

I still thought that that was a little thin as far as the track list goes, so I decided to rescue one of the thrown off tracks - and tried to, well, transform it. I ran "Hold On To Your Love" through the vocoder to bring it closer in sound to its Trans colleagues. Granted, it's didn't come out a hundred percent how I wanted - for that I probably would have had to separate the vocals from the rest, then put the vodocer on it, but that starts to be outside of my capabilities, especially since I never got to working well with the AV5 audio editing program and finally abandoned it. This version of the track is thus an experiment that maybe isn't perfect, but it more or less does what I wanted it to. It brings the fully automated version of Trans to a 36 minute run time and now carries nine tracks, which makes it an authentic-enough looking simile of what the album could have also looked like in late 1982 or early 1983. 

So, this is obviously a way tougher sell than Harvest Time, but hell, a challenge's a challenge, right? So, be a pal (or a girl pal), and try out the fully electronic Trans experience. It might not transform your opinion of this most misunderstood album of Young's career, but you never know...