Indeed I do, since I started the Secret Santa's mystery song thing, and two and a half are possibly waiting for the solution. And I admit it upfront, the game was kind of rigged. It was almost impossible for you to find song and artist in question, unless you were really motivated, fired up Audacity and sped that sucker up, cranked to eleven). Either way, I hope you enjoyed the little (ahem) piece of music either way. The friends we made along the way etc.
So this super secret surprise song came about like Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin - a total accident. I was working on my Fully Automated Version of Trans, mucking around with "Hold On To Your Love" on Audacity, trying out different filters and effects to make the song more, uh, Trans-ier. Results proved inconclusive to unsatisfying. Just before giving up I clicked on something called 'Paulstretch' - as Marc Cohn put it once in one of his great song intros 'life is pressing a button you never pressed before' - and immediately went 'uh oh', when the program announced it needed about 25 minutes to finish the task (though it probably ended up finishing earlier). Being in a 'let's see what it does when it wakes up' kind of mood, I wandered off, probably for something glamorous like loading the dishwasher, and color me surprised when I came back to my PC and Paulstretch had really stretched things. "Hold On To Your Love" went from going about three and a half minutes or so to lasting more than thirty!
Yes, the ambient piece hiding in the Secret Santa's Mystery Box is nothing other than an extremely slowed down - er, I mean paulstretched - version of Neil Young's "Hold On To Your Love". Well at least now I know how folks on Youtube create 'ambient' or 'meditation' versions of songs - a simple press of a button will do. Lazy bastards, the dirty lot of ya! Interesting though, how in one touch you can bring out your inner Vangelis...
As a prize for everyone playing along you'll get Johnny's Island, the kinda-sorta (mini) album Young recorded in Hawaii with a band dubbed - with usual Young-ish style - The Royal Pineapples, from which "Hold On To Your Love" originated, before it got mashed up with the Trans material. The sorta title song "Johnny" is the only one not with the band, a DIY home recording with Neil on synclavier and synthesizers, still somewhat in Trans mode before sliding into a mellower mood for the Island material. Includes the original version of "Silver & Gold".
So, I hadn't really planned to follow up my alternate Trans post with another Neil Young post so soon afterwards, but as these things go. A comment by C in Cali about a fab live version of "Sample And Hold", my own comment discussing "Landing On Water", in short: the little discussions about (mostly) Eighties Neil and his various misadventures led me to check a live bootleg from the mid-80s that I remembered as really good. It's the famous and a thousand times bootlegged 1986 show from the Cow Palace in Daly City that has absolutely outstanding sound quality. One could argue better sound quality than certain records of Uncle Neil with Crazy Horse. This is, however, no coincidence. Two shows just three and two nights before were recorded for a new album, with some tracks heavily tinkered with, that would turn out to be Life in July 1987. So, two conditions were fulfilled: High end recording equipment was used to tape this show for radio braodcast, and the band was well rehearsed and in fine form.
Beware though that this is just a small sampler, a companion compilation to that Trans album that thus leaves tons of old Neil warhorses on the side - good as they might be - to focus on his Eighties work. It has three Trans numbers: the "Mr. Soul" electro-remake (without vocoder, but otherwise still very much in the Trans vein), plus really excellent takes on "Computer Age" and "Sample And Hold" (which might be the one you have, C!). It then has most of Neil's best stuff from the rock-oriented Geffen albums of the 80s (no country stuff which I might reserve for another comp in the future): "Violent Side", "Mideast Vacation", "Around The World" - "Hippie Dream" is missing, but most of the good stuff is here. I even had space to smuggle in "Too Lonely" which might be better than that on Life.
The same is even more so true of Reactor number "Opera Star". If you want a version of "Opera Star" in your collection, make it this one. On record, the number is completely ridiculous, especially the duel of ho-ho-ho's between Neil and Crazy Horse, sounding like a drunk Christmas munchkin sing-off, or everyone taking the piss and no one giving a fuck. This version, with barely a ho-ho-ho heard, pounds that original studio version into fine dust, then stomps on its remains just for fun. This is, generally speaking, true for all the rock songs on this. They rock much freakin' harder than their studio counterparts. I do miss the swirling synths Neil added to "Around The World", but this version is a barnburner nonetheless.
If ever the question is asked what Crazy Horse brought to Neil's music, you might as well play that person some of this - they're just crushing it here. A good example: their great take on "Powderfinger", which I smuggled n as the only-non-80s number in here...So, as said, this is just a teaser to remind you of, and collect in the same place, some of the strongest work of what was admittedly a complicated period for Uncle Neil. But there are songs from that time period that have stood the test of time, especially in these extra heavy versions from Neil and Crazy Horse.
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 retroactivelysomewhat 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...
Something funny interesting happened on my journey to assemble cover versions for the recently started We've Got You Covered series on David Bowie: Finding a bluegrass cover of "Under Pressure" I stumbled on the (in)famous Pickin' On series, that has graced Walmart and truck stop check out racks for the better part of thirty years. I vaguely remember seeing a volume or two of those more than twenty years ago, and I dismissively figured them for exactly what they were: A cheap way to produce content for undiscerning music listeners ho'd grab that on their way to pay for their snacks or groceries. What I didn't know was that the series and its endeavors have evolved since their tentative start in 1993.
Not only has that series grown to encompass hundreds of volumes on all kinds of artists, from Aerosmith to Modest Mouse. But they also upped their game in the early 2000s. The surprise success of 2003 Metallica cover album Fade To Bluegrass by Kenyuckian bluegrass vets Iron Horse led the series to reinvent itself: Instead of giving anonymous studio cracks some instrumental bluegrass versions of known hits to play, they got real bands to do these albums and would now propose fully sung and played albums on current and less current stars from the rock, pop and country world. This isn't a PR blurb, though, so let's cut straight to the chase: I got immersed in the whole Pickin' On deal and came out with a couple of prospective albums, the first of which is our One Buck Record of the day.
Does this look like a person to pick on? Surprisingly...yes!
The idea to cover Neil Young in a bluegrass idiom is not particularly far-fetched. After all, when Uncle Neil isn't going eletric with Crazy Horse (or, in the last decade, Promise Of The Real), he is most often armed with an acoustic guitar and a set of down-home songs that live between folk and country. So the through line to buegrass is way more obvious than for some of the more surprising acts in the Pickin' On series. Unsurprisingly, the set list covers a healthy number of songs from Harvest (and don't forget to check out Harvest Time, by far the most popular album on this blog) and generally focuses on the early albums of Young's career.
This album is drawn from two albums from the Pickin On' series. All vocal tracks are by Tim May from an album called A Bluegrass Tribute To Neil Young, while the instrumental tracks are done by a bunch of studio cracks led by multiinstrumentalist David West from, well, Pickin' On Neil Young or the much better alternative title Gettin' High On Neil Young.
May I?
Tim May has been flatpicking in Nashville for a quarter century, has toured with Patty Loveless and recorded with Charlie Daniels, and has played in groups Crucial Smith and Plaidgrass, while also maintaining some duos and session work in the capital of country music.West has led bluegrass group The Dead Strings for about a decade and is nowadays mainly producing and doing session work.
So, what about the music, you say? Well, it's lovely. The songs are, if safe choices, well-chosen and well-played (the only slightly left-field choice is probably On The Beach's "For The Turnstiles"), as far as the instrumentals go, I'm especially fond of opener "Till The Morning Comes" (actually the closing reprise on the original album), on which West plays relatively unsual instruments like a dulcimer and a tabla, which give the song quite a distinctive and atractive sound.
Go West, Young Man...
Even if the place of origin for the album might be a little iffy for the self-respecting music fan, the music within is not, so go and spend some time with Tim and his friends while they pick on Neil Young...who is helpless, helpless, helpless...(alright, alright, I'll see myself out...)
Edit: The Harvest Time download link has now been updated. [Frankenstein voice: It's aliiiiiiiiive!]
It's been a while that I posted something by Uncle Neil. My re-imagining of Neil Young's classic Harvest as Harvest Time was one of the more popular posts in the early days, the first to creep over a hundred hits. Yay Neil! The old warhorses always sell, even for free! So, time to check back in with Uncle Neil, circa 15 years later for another album that wasn't but could have been...
Making alternate Neil Young albums seems like a singularly fitting activity because a bunch of Young's albums are kinda sorta alternate albums anyway, considering that there are probably a dozen or more unreleased, rejected or withdrawn projects in Uncle Neil's drawers, and that he was never afraid to mix and match stuff from his extensive archive with new recordings. This also means that no Young project or song can be safely placed in the dust bin of Young's musical history because you'll never know when Unce Neil decides to pull out an old, slightly ratty tune, dust it off and put it on an album anyway. Case in point: "Wonderin'", first played in the early 70s as one of his hokey country tunes, but never put on an album, only to emerge an entire decade later as a hokey doo wop tune on Young's rockabilly abomination Everybody's Rockin'. That 24-minute abomination was of course Young's knee-jerk reaction to troubles with Geffen Records who had rejected an earlier album called Old Ways, that didn't resemble the finally released all-country all-the way Old Ways. The original Old Ways was half old-school rockabilly, half old-school country. Which, in a roundabout way brings us to our One Buck Record of the day.
Neil Young's headlong plunge into straight up country music in the early-to mid-80s was of course preceded by numerous forays into the genre, notably on American Stars'n'Bars and Hawks And Doves. But really, Harvest already dipped into it, and once Young had a foot in the genre he never really left. His early 1980s shenanigans - openly embracing Reaganomics, offering the weird electro record Trans, getting invested in the fate of farmers and Farm Aid - showed again how mercurial and unpredictable Young could be, so how exactly David Geffen could be surprised by what he bought and almost immediately have buyer's remorse is a problem of appreciating his asset. Geffen thought he would get the Harvest hitmaker - not...well...Young, the guy who had always marched to his own drum.
You probably all know already the details of Young's turbulent tenure at Geffen records (Getting sued for making uncharacteristic music with Trans, subsequently threatening to play only country music until the end of his stay with Geffen), so let's skip ahead a couple of years. Old Ways (version two) has come and gone, Young has gone out with a group dubbed The International Harvesters, Geffen has dropped their lawsuit and gotten a weird, pretty bad synth-rock record (Landing On Water) out of it, while Young was prepping and altering live performances from a tour with Crazy Horse from the year before to publish as Life, his last album for Geffen. But while he was fully back in guitar rock with Crazy Horse, country still wasn't entirely out of his system. So he went into the studio and cut a couple of country tracks, some of them already roadtested with The International Harvesters in 1985. Like a lot of other projects, these songs would get filed away and never see the light of day. "Beautiful Bluebird" got reworked as more of a folk-rock tune for Young's 'sequel' Chrome Dreams II in 2007, proving once again that no Young song is ever truly dead and gone, in terms of being issued or reworked for new purposes. "Nothing Is Perfect" and "Interstate" were prepared for a release on an EP supposed to support Farm Aid that never came out. In short, Young compiled a back log of country tunes that sat around unused and unissued.
Which brings us back to the record of the day: What if Young finally decides in the late-1980s to assemble all the straight country offerings that have fallen to the wayside in the years before? That's how we can end up with My Country, which gathers tracks he cut live with The International Harvesters (issued on the archival A Treaure) and an Old Ways outtake issued on the Geffen Years comp Lucky Thirteen and the above-mentioned outtakes from 1987 plus that beautiful first version of "Interstate" cut for that Farm Aid EP.
Uncle Neil never much cared for coherence, but the One Buck Guy does, so the work from the Old Ways era, including the lovely tribute to his then-new born daughter "Amber Jean", will take up what would be side one of a vinyl album (tracks 1-5), whereas the 1987 material would fill up most of side two before ending with "Interstate", a perfect album closer. I tried to improve the sound quality of the 1987 demos a bit and - as with all my comps using different sources - volume EQ'd the whole thing for your listening pleasure. Cover photo by Jacob Legge, showing a lake close to Omemee, Ontario where Young spent his childhood. His country, indeed.
On Harvest, Uncle Neil asked "Are You Ready For The Country?". On Old Ways, he proclaimed to "Get Back To The Country". So, are you all ready to go back to the country with Uncle Neil?
Time to open the alternate album section here at One Buck Records, and what better way to do it than taking a good but flawed album and make it better (?!) or at least more coherent. And for that kind of exercise, who better to turn to than uncle Neil. Mr. Young, the most mercurial and unpredictable of musicians, whose work is - quite by design - one of the least coherent. From album to album, and sometimes from song to song within an album. Neil Young's principle for what to include or not in an album has always seemed relatively arbitrary. A performance is technically flawed, but he liked the spontaneity of it? Put it on the album! There's a bunch of live performances lying around that he likes? Put 'em on the album! There's a couple of old outtakes that sound nothing like the songs he's working on now? Put 'em on the album!
Harvest is Neil's most popular and succesful album, but it isn't a particularly great album. Part of it is uncle Neil's above-described M.O. The acoustic material is of one piece, but there's also a couple of electric performance, one live aoustic track dropped right in the middle, and the album's two huge missteps: the orchestral rock of "A Man Needs A Maid" and "There Is A World". The decision to let Jack Nitzsche add his orchestral bombast to these songs were, respectively, ill-advised and disastrous. "A Man Needs A Maid" is a sturdy enough song to survive the orchestration, despite it clearly being counter-productive to the song's sentiments of confusion and loneliness. But "There Is A World" is barely a song to begin with and completely buckles under the strain of Nitzsche's additions. Uncle Neil's decision to include these in that shape and form is dubious at best. Especially since the sessions for Harvest yielded a number of other songs, predominantly in the acoustic vein of the rest of the material, that could've and would've been a better fit than "There Is A World".
So, time to harvest a better album. "World" is gone, while "Maid" stays, in a stripped-down acoustic live version. Harvest Time also reinstates the outtakes "Bad Fog Of Loneliness", "Journey Through The Past" and "Dance Dance Dance". The latter exists as a studio outtake, but I preferred a more spontanous sounding live acoustic take. And that's it. I sequenced "Old Man" in the midst of the songs similar in sound and sentiment, but otherwise kept the general structure of the album intact.
"Out On The Weekend" is still one of my favorite album openers of all time, with maybe my favorite opening stanza: "Think I'll pack it in and buy a pick up/ take it down to L.A./Find a place to call my own and try to fix up/ Start a brand new day" which introduces the album's loose theme of wanderlust and new beginnings, while the very next lines "The woman I'm thinking of she loved me all up/ But I'm so down today" hints at the album's undercurrent of quiet world-weariness bubbling under the gentle acoustic surface. It sets the mood perfectly, for the original Harvest and for Harvest Time. A lot of the album might be overly familiar, but hopefully this gives you a fresh way to listen to Uncle Neil's classic.
