Favorite Soundtrack challenge

Your Eyes Shine Like the Sun

Wondering, wondering

Okay Christopher Robin. Challenge accepted:

https://readmedium.com/high-fidelity-bba1bc16b1a1

I can’t tell you about the soundtracks I own and love; for whatever reason, they don’t fly so easily into my waking mind. Saturday Night Fever — yep, got that one. Woodstock, check. The Strawberry Statement: am I the only one who knows/remembers this one? Somewhere on its first or second side comes the time I first heard Neil Young’s “Down By the River” a murderous anthem originally found on his Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere album — an album I’m too fond of, darkness and all. I think I found that record in a Woolco budget bin (and if you’ve heard of Woolco, then let’s have some coffee soon and talk), and I don’t know why I noticed it except that somewhere/nowhere on its cover, Neil Young’s legend blazed out at me.

And you know that I considered myself back when I was sixteen, the world’s biggest Neil Young freak.

I’m such a freak, that I must be one of the ten people on this planet who remembers and will claim to have been in a theater audience, intentionally there for a screening of Neil’s film, Journey Trough the Past. My screening occurred at some point in the mid-1980’s when I was a member of the University of Tennessee Film Committee, which meant I was in the select group of thirty grad and undergrad students who picked films for the entire campus (30.000) students to view. And we showed films five nights a week.

So someone indulged me as I begged for us to screen Journey. We all had/have our indulgences, just as we relented and let the same three guys screen The Wild Bunch at least every other semester. It’s a violently outstanding film, but having seen it twice, I think I’m good.

And while I’ve only seen Journey Through the Past once, at one point I had so memorized its soundtrack that I thought I might be the red-hooded octogenarian riding in that old car, though I don’t know now if he was a priest or a Klansman (I’m guessing the latter). So yeah, it’s an odd film, and Neil trudges through time and car graveyards looking for someone’s past, for sure.

In the film and on the soundtrack we see/hear tunes from Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, and The Stray Gators. Crazy Horse kind of fell into a ditch on this record (“Southern Man” is there, but you’d think there’d be more), but that’s for them to settle with Neil. My favorite moments boil down to these:

Neil’s alternate takes with the Gators on “Alabama” and “Words (Between the Lines of Age),” both originally on Harvest. And then, there’s the tune that ends the record: The Beach Boys’ “Let’s Go Away for a While,” one of the most beautiful instrumental love songs from any era.

But right before that last song comes a solo Neil tune — a song that never made it on any other album, but which you can find on the extravagant Neil Young Archives Vol. 1, or on Decade. Apple Music doesn’t have the original soundtrack, so unless you’re like me and bought a vinyl or original CD copy, I don’t know what to tell you — a song called “Soldier.”

“Soldier, your eyes shine like the sun. I wonder why.

Jesus I saw you, walking on the river. I don’t believe you, You can’t deliver, Right away I wonder why.”

The song is only Neil accompanying himself on a piano, as a fire below him burns and sparks.

When I was sixteen, these lyrics — hell the entire song — haunted me, not because I thought Neil was wrong or right about Jesus. But since I lived in a bastion of bible belts where disc jockeys urged teens to burn Beatle records because of something John once said or insinuated about Jesus’ popularity with the young folks, I feared that someone in my neck of Alabama might hear the song and want to burn Neil even more brightly than they already wanted, given their reaction to some of the other southern tunes I’ve mentioned here.

Or maybe it was that I feared I might get turned crossways in those blazes.

“Jesus, your eyes shine like the sun. I wonder why.”

And there you have it: something I’ve wondered, too, about Jesus, and all of us down here, seething and melting through our reckless adventures in the past and present sun. The sum of our days echoing loudly as we continue our journey, making all the same mistakes.

Never knowing or even wondering why.

Thanks again Christopher, and to Songstories, and to everyone taking up the challenge: Kevin Alexander, Sarah Paris, Samantha Drobac, Kathryn Dillon, Gary Chapin, Rob Janicke, Vince Coliam, and Steven Hale.