Interview: Neil Young
“You don’t mind doing this on the move, do you?” Neil Young asks as he slides behind the wheel of his 1950 Plymouth Special Deluxe, one of the roughly 35 cars in his ever-expanding collection.
Spring has barely arrived, but the temperature in the hills south of San Francisco has already hit the nineties, and Young is dressed accordingly – his shirt is open, and he’s wearing a pair of frayed cutoffs, sneakers and blue shades. Bits of gray have streaked his familiar sideburns and shoulder-length hair, but Young still looks very much as he did 17 years ago, when he moved up here to redwood country and bought what he now calls Broken Arrow Ranch.
The ranch was one of the rewards of Young’s first burst of success. After the Gold Rush, the third solo album he recorded after leaving Buffalo Springfield, reached the Top 10 in 1970, and both Déjà Vu and 4 Way Street, recorded with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, hit Number One.
For a while, CSNY seemed like the American Beatles, and Young was their John Lennon, the passionate, slightly eccentric rocker who gave the group its edge. But CSNY self-destructed, and after reaching Number One in 1972 with Harvest and the single “Heart of Gold,” Young moved away from the mainstream. “This song put me in the middle of the road,” Young wrote about “Heart of Gold” in his liner notes to his three-album retrospective, Decade. “Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there.”
By 1979, when Young last sat for an in-depth interview with Rolling Stone, he had reached another peak, both critically and commercially, with the country-tinged Comes a Time and the punk-inspired Rust Never Sleeps. The Village Voice named him Artist of the Decade, and there was every reason to think he’d continue to maintain a high level of success in the Eighties.
But Young signed to David Geffen’s newly formed Geffen Records early in the decade, and the pairing proved to be a frustrating one for both sides. The five albums Young recorded for the label rank as the worst selling of his career. His intermittently brilliant but quirky stylistic experiments – techno-rock on Trans (1982), rockabilly on Everybody’s Rockin’ (1983) and country on Old Ways (1985) – caused even his staunchest supporters to lose their patience.
Young insists that the label is the real villain behind that slump, and he even claims that his best work during the period was never released. Geffen, for its part, refuses to respond to Young’s allegations. “I don’t want to get into a pissing match with him,” says label president Ed Rosenblatt.
No matter who was at fault, Young is clearly delighted to be back on Reprise, the Warner Bros. subsidiary he was with in the Seventies. He is also determined to prove that Geffen – which at one point even sued him for deliberately making noncommercial records – was wrong. But in typical Neil Young style, his first album for Reprise – though his strongest, most consistent effort in years – is hardly a sure commercial bet. This Note’s for You features Young and the Bluenotes, a horn-powered nine-piece band; they work up a sweat on 10 blues tunes inspired by such early Young faves as Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker. And the album’s title cut finds Young railing against rock & roll’s increasing involvement with Madison Avenue.
“There’s a line,” Young says, “one of the first fucking lines that’s ever been drawn where pop stars really have to show their stuff, show where they’re really coming from. I mean, if you’re going to sing for a product, then you’re singing for money. Period. That’s it. Money is what you want, and this is how you get it.”
Over the course of the two sessions that made up this interview – the second one was also conducted on the move, in Young’s 1954 Cadillac limousine – Young, who’s now 42, was equally emphatic about his loyalty to the Bluenotes and even indicated that the gut-wrenching rock & roll he’s played with Crazy Horse may be a thing of the past.
But Young has never been a one-band man, and he’s already recording a new Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album up at his ranch. That LP is expected to be released this fall, and in the meantime Young and the Bluenotes will be hitting the road for an extended U.S. tour. As for the distant future, Young will no doubt keep everyone guessing – just as he has for the past two decades.
What prompted you to get back together with Crosby, Stills and Nash?
Well, there’s a certain energy you get from singing with people you’ve known for 25 years. People who have been through all these changes with you. Gone up and down with you. Seen you do things that are wrong and seen you do things that are brilliant. Seen you fucked up to the max, you know? And you’ve seen them do all these things. And yet we’re still here. Just to hear what it sounds like when we sing together after all these years – I was curious. I’ve wanted to do it for the last two or three years. And now it’s possible. I think that CSNY has a lot to say. Especially Crosby. His presence is very strong. Him being strong and surviving and writing great songs and being part of a winner is really a good role model for a lot of people in the same boat.
So he’s really cleaned up?
He’s doing fine. His emotions are slightly shattered, because he’s just abused his emotions for so long by not letting them out. But now that he’s pure and can let his emotions out, his highs are real high, and his lows are real low. Those are just the extremes of his personality. But he pulls out of his lows, and they don’t turn him toward any problem areas or anything.
Interview: Neil Young, Page 1 of 7