Staying Young

Neil Young

Released 1969

Throughout the late ’50s and early ’60s, Neil Young’s… Neil Young

Released 1969

Throughout the late ’50s and early ’60s, Neil Young’s career was a nomadic journey through various bands on a gradual trip from his native Canada to California. It was there that he stopped to meet Steven Stills, Richie Furay, Dewey Marin and Bruce Palmer to form Buffalo Springfield.

The year was 1966. A few months before, Bob Dylan had already plugged in for Bringing It All Back Home and — despite the taunting from the Newport audience — laid down the groundwork for a beloved branch of music that has come to be known as folk rock.

On the three albums that comprised the life of Buffalo Springfield, the band tested this new genre with set of quick and direct songs — usually under three minutes and rarely expanding beyond three chord theory and verse/chorus/solo format, but still always engaging and far enough away from the mainstream to beg repetition.

By 1968, though, the group was done and the members began to look for new projects to invest in. Almost immediately after Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan had released Highway 61 Revisited and the first single, “Like A Rolling Stone,” clocked in at six minutes and shattered the three-minute radio myth. For Young, it seemed high time to test these new waters with a solo career that began with his self-titled album released in 1969.

Though Neil Young is not his best album, or even in the top five for that matter, there are three elements of the effort that make it his most interesting in retrospect. The first is the attitude of the shorter songs. The second is the experimentation of the longer songs; and third, the simple but important fact that two of the 10 tracks are instrumental.

On Buffalo Springfield’s self-titled debut, Young co-wrote “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing,” which has become one of the group’s staples. By Buffalo Springfield standards, the song is lengthy and a bit radical — containing major seventh chords. On the other hand, “Here We are in the Years,” track seven from Neil Young, makes “Clancy” sound as radical as the Monkees. “Here We Are,” contains four distinct and unique musical sections, two instrumental bridges (including a horn solo), and offers critiques of city boys who visit the country, the urbanization of farm land, generational irresponsibility and the Apollo moon mission in three minutes and 14 seconds — just under “Clancy’s” running time.

The songs on Neil Young cover typical themes of the folk rock era. Themes of insane alienation, such as “The Loner,” “If I Could Have Her Tonight” and “I’ve Been Waiting for You;” the subtle past tense of loss in “What did You do to My Life?” and “I’ve Loved Her So Long;” and the fatalistic inevitability of “The Old Laughing Lady” and “The Last Trip to Tulsa.”

The last two are the longest on the album filling six and 9 1/2 minutes, respectively. With them, and the two instrumental tracks, Young began an approach toward folk rock that accentuated musical ability to compete with lyrical ability.

The new long format would be the most powerful selling point of his next album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. It could be said that if Dylan popularized the rambling lyric, then with Everybody Knows, Young popularized the rambling backing band.