How I Like Neil Young: The Albums, pt. 4
Part 3 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 1 is here. My handy dandy profoundly subjective numerical rating scheme is decoded here.
Silver & Gold (2000) – 3
Road Rock, Vol. 1 (2000) – 4
Are You Passionate? (2002) – 3
Greendale (2003) – 9
Greatest Hits (2004) – 6
Prairie Wind (2005) – 5
Living With War (2006) – 6
Living With War – In The Beginning (2006) – 8
Chrome Dreams II (2007) – 7
Neil’s fourth decade as a solo artist kicks off so placidly that I actually regret Phish passed on backing him for a tour. A trampoline or two could only have improved things. Maybe they heard his increasingly tender croon and were like “thanks, but no thanks.” CSN, finally dropped by Atlantic and paying for studio sessions themselves, heard Neil's softer mewl and said “thanks!” The project became CSNY and got picked up by Reprise. The ‘99 reunion is certainly easier on the ear than the 1988 one, but that says more about studio technology than the songs.
Silver & Gold - coming almost four years after his last full-length (the previous record was two) - is also easy on the ear, but Neil’s concept of country has turned so saccharine and demurring that only the aptly titled “Razor Love” cuts through the sleepy treacle. Road Rock Vol. 1 has the same band (Comes A Time vets over a pro rhythm section) rocking out on cuts even deeper than Year Of The Horse. It’s refreshingly haggard in comparison, but in a blowhard, Dylan At Budokan way. Ironically, the audience sounds shipped in from Cheap Trick At Budokan. Who knew that many people wanted a 10+ minute version of “Words”?
A scrapped Crazy Horse session gives Are You Passionate? its only track I enjoy. The rest of the album has Neil failing an audition for Stax Records in front of the MGs, Poncho replacing Steve Cropper (if you don’t listen, you can barely tell). Where ‘80s Neil would have made this a real freak show, ‘00s Neil mostly offends in his mannered inoffensiveness. The maniac who sang “I was Rambo at the disco/I was shooting to the beat” on Life’s “Mideast Vacation” is now “going after Satan/on the wings of a dove” in his post-9/11 centrist hoorah “Let’s Roll.”
Interrupting the Middle Of The Road Trilogy is a rock opera about an extended family in a small town and the millennial hippie who leaves it to save Mother Earth in Alaska. I have little interest in seeing the related vanity film of actors miming to the album, but storytelling inspires Neil to drop a lot of wild specifics and never bring up the state of his heart (which isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of affecting moments). Considering the ambitious concept, the music is ironically spare - Crazy Horse sans Poncho for the first power trio album of his career. In exchange for funding the vanity film, Young let his label put out Greatest Hits, a disc of classics so explicably selected you know he had nothing to do with it.
Greendale’s return to eccentricity gives Harvest V or VI a goose - the dude quotes Chris Rock by name, for Christ’s sake - but it’s still too tepid an hour of Naptime Public Radio for me to bother with. Though he recorded it before his 2005 aneurysm and the death of his father, it often sounds like Neil’s writing a letter to grandkids he thinks he’ll never meet, stuffing the envelope with Werther’s Originals. Maybe I’ll dig it more when he’s dead.
His last will and testament written, all he had to say a year later was “NO WMDS??? THEN WHY DID WE ROLL??? FUCK BUSH! IMPEACH HIM FOR LYIN’! WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HIPPIES???” While it’s sweet he thought the defiant anthems and wordy cries of disillusion on Living With War should feature with a hundred-person choir and a trumpet, their idiosyncrasy is served best by his familiar, isolated shriek on Living With War: In The Beginning, backed by Rick Rosas and Chad Cromwell - his most simpatico rhythm section outside of the Horse - and the trumpet. This version was only released on a CD/DVD package, but it’s cheap used and available to stream.
Released amid a bunch of live Archive releases I’m not going to bother to rate (they’re good, but blur with the also-good boots I’ve scored off Doom And Gloom From The Tomb over the years), Chrome Dreams II unites three musicians from three different backing bands to run through a grabbag of outtakes actual or in spirit (the 18 minute single was recorded by his Bluenotes in 1988, because why wouldn’t one of their best songs sit on the shelf for 20 years?). The stylistic variety is both annoying and intriguing. I wouldn't be surprised if the musicians were selected for being the most deferring member of each combo.
Up next: grandpa gets an electric car and takes a hard left.