Summer Song Writing Challenge

On the Run in the 1970's

Being soothed by After the Gold Rush

I suppose I came to Neil Young later than many, but just in time for me in the Alabama summer of 1972. I had known Neil’s songs only from CSNY’s Deja Vu: “Helpless” and “Country Girl.” They alone were enough to hook me, because even at fifteen, I felt a hopeless romantic kinship with Neil, especially in his plea:

“Country girl, I think you’re pretty. Got to make you understand… Have no lovers in the city, Let me be your country man.”

Man oh man, I thought: if I could only convince some pretty girl to let me be her teenaged “man.”

That order was seemingly easy for some guys I knew, who had a string of girlfriends starting somewhere back in the sixth grade. They’d tell me about their make-out sessions during the mixed parties I was only rarely invited to.

Who knows why some kids are deemed “cool” and others aren’t? In my town, it wasn’t a money thing, or who lived in the biggest houses. Some, like me, were shy, or in a term I didn’t know then but that feels better to hear now, “introverted.”

So up until that summer, the most I’d do was to pass the occasional note:

“Do you like me?”

“Would you like to like me?”

I swear that I asked that latter question to a girl named Ann. She said “Yes,” though neither then nor now could I understand if she did like me, or if she would only like to do so someday.

I suppose when you get a “yes” of any sort, you take it and run, which I did, never really pursuing the matter with her again. Besides, she found an older guy soon after, and eventually married him.

I spent many hours from the late 1960’s to that summer of 1972 mowing other people’s lawns, and all my profits went into buying records. I loved pop music and shamelessly spent money on bands like Bread and Paul Revere and the Raiders, and on solo artists like Tom Jones, O.C. Smith (actually, my grandmother bought OC’s Little Green Apples for me), and Michael Parks of TV’s Then Came Bronson, because I envied that motorcycle man’s “Long Lonesome Highway.”

About the hardest rock I got into was Santana’s Abraxas and Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. Many of my friends loved Black Sabbath, but I couldn’t fathom any band with a song like “War Pigs.”

What I could fathom, or at least chose to try, was Neil’s third solo album, After the Gold Rush. What did I expect, more ballad-anthems like “Country Girl?”

Neil’s voice never bothered me as it did some of my friends who could neither deal with his falsetto nor his normal shaky tenor. But at this point in my life, it was his haunting poetry that I couldn’t understand. I wanted either a catchy rhythm or lyrics I could relate to. I had never listened to his female counterpart Joni Mitchell either, so I didn’t grasp, and didn’t think I wanted to, the images and symbols of something more ethereal and abstract.

So even on the opening track of ATGR, “Tell Me Why,” I wasn’t certain of what Neil was driving toward:

“Is it hard to make arrangements with your self? When you’re old enough to repay but young enough to sell?”

But then I got to the title track:

“Well I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying in the yellow haze of the sun. There were children crying and colors flying all around the chosen ones.”

Oh, dreams. What to make of Neil’s and mine?

I didn’t know it, but I felt it, particularly this part:

“I was lying in a burned out basement With the full moon in my eyes I was hoping for replacement When the sun burst through the sky…”

I was lying on my bedroom floor in front of my portable turntable, wondering what this all meant in another endless summer without a girlfriend or even close to one.

If only, I thought, I could write something like Neil did, even if I couldn’t understand what he was saying; even if the record itself was not as easy to sing with, or to want to, as I had hoped.

Then, as it finally does to most teenaged guys, I found love.

It started with a party that I couldn’t believe I was invited to, at the home of Vicky Adams, a girl I once carpooled with to kindergarten. She had lived up the street from us when we were little, but had moved to the “Carriage Hills” subdivision at some later point, and attended a different high school from mine.

A party with girls who knew nothing about me. Nothing about whether I was cool or not.

My friends Jimbo and Don were invited, too, and my dad drove us to the party and would pick us up later.

We all stood in an enormous circle, the boys and girls who didn’t know each other — all except Jimbo who found someone he had met at Vicky’s party the previous year. I was wondering what we were doing, what we would do, as the summer pop hit music like Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime” wafted out into the backyard of Vicky’s house on this late June night.

As dense as I was, even I finally noticed that for some long minutes, a girl had been standing next to me. Couples had begun pairing off by then, and this girl, despite no advances or even recognition from me, stood her ground.

And then, I noticed that our shoulders were touching.

Her name was Gloria, and when I so boldly put my arm around her shoulder, she did likewise. Jimbo caught my eye, then, and as he turned with the girl he found again to head off into the woods, he gave me the OK sign.

Finally, I was OK.

What Gloria and I did next is not for your eyes, because some memories need to stay private forever.

All I can say is that before this night, I had neither seen silver spaceships flying in any haze, nor had I ever really kissed a girl.

I kept repeating Gloria’s phone number all the way home until I could write it down. I called her the next day, and she seemed just as excited to hear from me as I was to call.

Through the kindness of a family friend who volunteered to drive me the twelve miles to Gloria’s house, we got to see each other one more time.

One more time, because the night after, she told me about “Andy.”

Her boyfriend.

I have always hated the name Andy ever since. It makes no sense now, almost fifty years later, but I still hate it.

I was not an easy loser, and I’m sure I wore my agony for all to see, experience, and get sick of seeing for a full three days, including at a fashion show that Don and I had to model in, since his cousin was the one arranging everything and introducing us. As I modeled the AJ August line of boys’ new fall wear, she actually remarked on my scowl. Such good memories.

Maybe thinking I was in love and being so quickly and decidedly overthrown brought me closer to Neil. Though it didn’t exactly fit my situation, I found on side two of After the Gold Rush a lamentation that I so wanted to believe in:

“I Believe in You.”

“Now that you’ve made yourself love me, Do you think I can change it in a day? How can I place you above me? Am I lying to you when I say, That I believe in you?”

Of course it didn’t fit, but when you’re heartbroken and have believed that one, or more kisses would seal you forever with a girl who wanted you, then it’s not the lyrics so much that matter, but their synching with the longing chords. Here:

I moved on after Gloria through a summer that would bring greater, stranger pain, including a driver’s license that brought with it a sort of freedom, but no new girlfriends. Despite love and loss, though, Neil refined himself into me, and I would buy his other albums, losing myself in a kind of rock music that only one or two of my friends wanted to hear.

Neil became my measure for cool, and any girl I met for the next year, my first question to her would be:

“Do you like Neil Young?”

Quite the litmus test.

Fortunately, the woman I married a decade later, a country girl from another country, knew the right answer.

Thanks to Jessica Lee McMillan for the writing challenge!