Classic Album Reviews, Pt 1
Neil Young’s Harvest (1972)
“Somewhere in her head”
Something in me loves a writing series, especially one about music. Another part of me (the “greater” part of me?) wishes he had been a music critic, or rather, a Rock and Soul critic, compiling thoughtful reviews for Spin or The Village Voice. I know: there’s still time, or at least there are all of these fabulous publications on Medium that have granted me the space to do pretty much what I want. And while I used to sing in various school and church choirs/musicals, I am not trained classically or classic rock-ily in any form of music. I think I can read it well enough, but let’s face it,
Those who can’t do, write prolifically.
So consider this an image of me playing air guitar, air drums, or whatever air-play you’d rather imagine.
In this series, I want to review records as I might have back when they were released, as I thought about them then, and with a bit of distant insight mixed in. My scoring will be up to five guitars 🎸, and I will also try to be completely subjective!!!
Also, while I’m starting this series on The Riff, I plan to continue it across those musical platforms I write most frequently for. Hoping for a lot of fun here, so let’s take a stand!
As New Yorker critic Kelefa Sanneh writes:
“If we truly adore a new album, we might call it ‘classic’ or ‘timeless,’ words that link excellence with endurance. With old songs or new ones, the assumption is the same: that musical judgments grow more accurate with the passage of time” (Major Labels 443).
I bought Neil Young’s Harvest the week it came out in March 1972. I hadn’t even turned sixteen, and truth be told, my mother bought it for me for $3.99 at our mall’s Musicland store.
I had great expectations that this record would not only live up to After the Gold Rush, but would exceed it. And in some ways, it did.
Having heard “Heart of Gold” on AM radio everywhere, I still didn’t expect how “country” Neil had decided to go. There was precedent for that in a way, going back to the title track of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere; the instrumental “Emperor of Wyoming” from his first solo record; “Helpless,” from CSNY’s Deja Vu; and even some of the tunes on those three Buffalo Springfield albums (the Richie Furay song “Kind Woman,” and perhaps even Neil’s “Out of My Mind”).
Still, the steady strains of side one, from “Out on the Weekend” through “Are You Ready for the Country?”, (which surprised me even more when Waylon covered it), took me aback. I wanted to argue that this was still a Rock album, but even I wasn’t sure and didn’t know how to explain it to my friends who had already castigated Neil’s voice as something other-worldly (meaning “feminine”).
Neil, though, didn’t care (though he kind of did when “Heart of Gold” went number one and he proclaimed that his work had thereby fallen into some sort of ditch, which meant that he was about to give those who found his music charming something else to consider, [see On the Beach, Time Fades Away and Tonight’s the Night]).
But Harvest itself, isn’t all Nashville-based steel guitar and folkie/country. Side one’s “A Man Needs a Maid” uses orchestral arrangement to pedal steel our emotions and make even a boy like me wonder what was so great or alluring about living all alone, though I understood in that adolescent way that my life, too was “changing in so many ways,” and that “trust” was cheaply had.
I knew that The Moody Blues used orchestras, too, and synthesized sounds, but Neil? How do I feel?
Still, because I went to movies with friends and fell in love with actresses, I found “A Man Needs a Maid” piercing me and begging me to think about words and images that I was becoming accustomed to considering through Young’s work.
Like these from the title song:
“Did I see you down in a young girl’s town With your mother in so much pain? I was almost there at the top of the stairs with her screaming in the rain?”
That later “promise of a man,” motivated me to think and do better, considering all the “lonely place[s]” there would be.
So, I loved/love side one, and could sing every word, trying to ape Neil’s falsetto and likely causing my parents, two rooms away, to howl or at least turn up the TV.
Side two, though, made me wonder…what’s going on? I didn’t then and still don’t care for the first two songs, “Old Man” and “There’s a World.” Maybe the “lonely boy, out on the weekend” from side one got too familiar, too nostalgic, too optimistic with side two’s openers, despite the backing vocals from James and Linda on that first track and the orchestra reprising itself on the second. I never skipped these tracks, but I also couldn’t wait for them to move into a pretty stirring final three to end the album: the semi-plodding country rockers “Alabama” and “Words (Between the Lines of Age)” sandwiching the live from UCLA’s Royce Hall solo acoustic, “The Needle and the Damage Done.”
Of course, being from Alabama, I listened over and over to that song and agreed: who knew what my state was doing (who knows now, too, as our former dictator-in-chief recently declared that Alabama is the standard by which we should measure other states, or something to that effect, which is akin to saying that the jelly bean is the standard by which we should judge every food group)?
“What are you doing?” indeed.
George Wallace was running again for President when Harvest was released. Think about it.
These three ending songs also show us how complex Neil’s music is, how uncategorizable he was/is. Folk, Rock, Country, Protest.
But in the end, he’s always and foremost a poet:
“Someone and someone were down by the pond Looking for something to plant in the lawn Out in the fields, they were turning the soil I’m sitting here hoping this water will boil When I look through the window and out on the road They’re bringing me presents and saying hello… Singing words, words, between the lines of age.”
“If I were a junkman selling you cars washing your windows and shining your stars Thinking your mind was my own in a dream, What would you wonder and how would it seem? Living in castles a bit at a time, The King started laughing and talking in rhyme.”
I didn’t know how to feel then, still don’t, because harvesting goes on and the riches aren’t always predictable.
And when I accidentally scratched my record (right in the middle of “A Man Needs a Maid,” too), I almost cried.
Still am.
4/5 🎸🎸🎸🎸
Thanks for reading (think Alabama today) and please join us Sunday at 4:00 for this month’s Riff album discussion when Nicole Brown will lead our discussion of Tina Turner’s Private Dancer. Here’s the zoom link:
ID: 85061627151 Passcode: a4vErU+0
And here’s a Neil story from the past: