Neil Young—Time Fades Away

Neil Young—Time Fades Away

Time Fades Away—Neil Young has written and recorded innumerable songs in his more than 50-year career. Counting live and soundtrack albums, as well as his compilations, which often feature until-then unreleased material, he has nearly recorded his age in albums. There are at least ten others that were rejected by his record labels or shelved by the artist in favor of others. Despite his apparent dissatisfaction with albums like Homegrown or Chrome Dreams that led him to relegate them to the archives, he generally lets the material itself eventually see the light of day on other releases or in live performances. Some of his albums are harder to find today than others; Trans (1982) has only been reissued twice on CD, and not for almost twenty years. However, there is one album that, since its initial release, has completely disappeared from the radar, and that album is Time Fades Away.

Harvest (1972) and the #1 single "Heart of Gold" took Young to true stardom. He famously remarked in the liner notes of Decade (1977), "This song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there," which has led fans to refer to the three subsequent albums (Time Fades Away, On the Beach [1974], and Tonight's the Night [1975]) as "the Ditch Trilogy." These three albums also document a period in which life was rough for Young and his bandmates; most of them were abusing drugs and alcohol heavily, due in part to the grief associated with the deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten in November 1972 and roadie Bruce Berry in June 1973 from drug misuse. The majority of material that appears on Time Fades Away was recorded after Whitten's death, but shortly before Berry's, from a period of time February 11–April 1, 1973.

Young toured with the Stray Gators, a band that had evolved into a jumble of members of different groups: David Crosby, Graham Nash, Jack Nitszche, and members of Young's studio band from Harvest, but with new drummer Johnny Barbata, who replaced Kenny Buttrey mid-tour. The assembly of musicians coming in with different expectations and lifestyles resulted in friction concerning how the music was played onstage as well as compensation, and so Young only reluctantly released Time Fades Away in October the same year. He persistently remembered the tour so bitterly that he never once reissued the album until 2014 as part of a box set and as a download on his own music distribution service, Pono. Nevertheless, Time Fades Away has been an enduring part of Young's catalog, being widely bootlegged and pirated—the most taboo Neil Young album, if there is such a thing.

The rollicking "Time Fades Away" begins with the line, "Fourteen junkies/Too weak to work," possibly referencing the band and their associates themselves, reminiscent of "The Needle and the Damage Done." The song continues Young's long-standing relationship with time, nostalgia, and things lost ("Sugar Mountain," "Words (Between the Lines of Age)," "Old Man"), as he does on the lovely "Journey Through the Past," which makes its first official appearance after being a concert favorite for years already and the title of his 1972 film and accompanying soundtrack. "Yonder Stands the Sinner" is a sideways take on self-loathing; "L.A." is a subversive tribute or lampooning of the City of Angels, which, nota bene, is where Danny Whitten died. "Love in Mind" is the odd one out, dating from 1971 during Young's Journey Through the Past tour, documented more fully in the concert album Live at Massey Hall 1971 (2007), which was nearly released in place of Harvest.

"Don't Be Denied" is Young's statement on staying true in the face of adversity, obliquely referencing Led Zeppelin ("Well, all that glitters isn't gold/I know you've heard that story told"), which likely relates to Young's decision to refrain from reprising Harvest (Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album and the song "Stairway to Heaven," which references the centuries-old proverb, were contemporary works). "The Bridge" is a minor but pleasing ballad that foreshadows Tonight's the Night. "Last Dance" is a ragged acknowledgement of everyday mundanity that, fittingly, usually closed the concerts or was played as an encore.

Though it's unfortunate that Neil Young had to suffer through the period of its recording dates, Time Fades Away is an engaging spectacle with some forgotten gems. It is a victory for fans that this music has recently become more available, giving them a fuller picture of one of the most rewarding stretches of Young's career.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse—Rust Never Sleeps

Neil Young & Crazy Horse—Rust Never Sleeps

Rust Never Sleeps—When Neil Young released the career-spanning Decade in 1977, it marked the end of an era. The 70s were not always kind to Young, who scored a hit with Harvest in 1972, but lost his friends, Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. The grief he experienced was channeled into much of his music from the time, most notably Tonight's the Night (1975, but recorded variously from 1970-73). That album was released in place of Homegrown, which was meant to follow On the Beach (1974), but was shelved by Young, who called it "a very down album." Many of Young's albums from the subsequent period of time around the turn of the decade were unfinished or hodgepodge. When he scrapped Homegrown, he began slowly dispersing its songs through Zuma (1975), Long May You Run (1976), American Stars 'n Bars (1977), and Decade, at which point he had begun work on Chrome Dreams, which also would never be released. Some of its songs were holdovers from Homegrown and ended up taking up most of American Stars 'n Bars, while the rest have become miscellany and, more notably, the genesis of Rust Never Sleeps.

After the sidestep of Comes a Time (1978), which was his most straightforward country-rock record since Harvest had scored him a hit, and the production of his movie Human Highway, Young began a new tour where each show featured separate acoustic and electric sets. Rather than attempt to emulate the performances in-studio, Young decided instead to use concert recordings with overdubs, effectively making Rust Never Sleeps a live album aside from two songs on the acoustic side. The notes to the CD issue say that Rust is "a loose-knit concept album built around Young's conviction that an artist's reach must always exceed his grasp; that the alternative to creative growth was stagnation and irrelevancy." The record is bookended by differing versions of the same song; side one opens with "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)," co-written by Ducks bandmate Jeff Blackburn, which remarks that the recently-deceased Elvis Presley sadly "faded away." He then name-checks Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten, wondering if Rotten will meet a similar fate: fading into obscurity, drug-addled and overweight. What's exceptional about the song is that it says all this despite its sparse lyrics and arrangement.

Young reaches a new high on the autobiographical "Thrasher," commenting on his rocky tenure with the commercially-upheld Crosby, Stills & Nash, offering, "I searched out my companions/Who were lost in crystal canyons" before he left for the California countryside prior to the release of Harvest. "When the thrasher comes," he sings, referring to the onset of crass commercialism, "I'll be stuck in the sun like the dinosaurs in shrines/But I'll know the time has come to give what's mine," stating he will remain true to his principles. The song closes out with a moving harmonica solo. "Ride My Llama" is a bucolic number that recalls Zuma, except when Young sings, "I met a man from Mars/He picked up all my guitars/And played me traveling songs." "Pocahontas," named of course for the Native American icon, details the slaughter of those people by settlers, positing "We'll sit and talk of Hollywood/And the good things there for hire/And the Astrodome and the first tepee/Marlon Brando, Pocahontas, and me." It also includes the satire, "I would give a thousand pelts/To sleep with Pocahontas/In the morning on the fields of green," as Young cleverly rolls down to a melancholy lick as he does every time the song hits on a mournful observance. "Sail Away" is the simplest message, accompanied by Nicolette Larson, who was featured heavily in a backing role on Comes a Time (for which he probably considered the song).

"Powderfinger," basic enough that it could be about any number of things, details a premature death, with the powerful lyric, "Raised my rifle to my eye/Never stopped to wonder why/Then I saw black and my face splashed in the sky." Young originally offered it to Lynyrd Skynyrd and recorded it himself for Chrome Dreams as a shorter acoustic ballad. "Welfare Mothers" is the most puzzling song in the set: "Welfare mothers," who "make better lovers," wash "down at every laundromat in town now." It does rock, however, as does "Sedan Delivery," which may be something like the story of a parallel-universe Bruce Berry. "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" helps support this theory, being the darkened mirror image of the opening song, with the key lyrical difference being "You pay for this, but they give you that;" Young previously employed the tactic of closing Tonight's the Night with a more ragged version of the title song, and on Rust it not only ends ragged but positively mucked-up.

Having already made numerous masterpieces, it would have been easy to mark Neil Young for lean years as the 1980s approached. Instead, he delivered his most astounding work yet, without a single average-or-worse cut, and set a watermark for thoughtful, inventive rock and roll, which, as he puts it, is here to stay.