Neil Young Back in the Saddle

Q: What's your response to people who say your playing is primitive? A: Well, I think they're right. I'm proud of it!

………..…………………Unidentified middle-aged rocker at work…………….…………………

After an economically lackluster, if not disastrous, 1980s (artistically, it was pretty shaky, too) and a wrongheaded flirtation with right-wing politics, Neil Young, typically unpredictably, re-emerged energized, upbeat, and full of beans, confounding the many critics who’d tolled Young’s death knell. Two albums, 1989’s Freedom and 1990’s Ragged Glory, demonstrated, amply, that the 45-year-old had fully regained his edge. Young and I spoke in October, at the release of his third strong project in a row, the double live album Weld, cut with Young’s (as of today) 50-plus-year mainstays Crazy Horse. He’d just written all the songs for an album whose title he’d just settled on, Harvest Moon, which, of course, would solidify his comeback. He and the Stray Gators, the same band with whom he’d cut his quadruple-platinum Harvest (1974), Young’s only #1 record, were headed into the studio in two days.

Neil Young was, in short, feeling pretty good. Young has, famously, always tended towards the cantankerous and contrarian, but today he was a pleasure to talk to, on an autumn morning in Manhattan.

This is the first unedited audio interview I’ve ever posted (okay, I tweaked the sound a bit, but not a word has been removed). No editing was needed: this was an articulate, engaged interviewee who’d thought long and hard about his craft, and knew where he stood on multiple aspects of music-making, others’ as well as his own. It was a relaxed, open-hearted conversation—wide-ranging, too, considering that it clocked in at under 40 minutes.

I’ll say no more except to all but guarantee that you’ll all enjoy the interview, as well as learn a lot about about how this chap’s unusual mind works, about his immediate and distant past, and about music, period. Here are a few snippets, the tiniest of portions, from our talk; then on to the talk itself!

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Can you see yourself doing something as strenuous as the Ragged Glory tour ten years from now, at 55?

I think I could, but I don’t know if I would. This was a completely exhausting experience. Fifty-four shows in three months is a lot of shows of that intensity and duration. And so now I’m going to go out and play acoustic. Sit-down acoustic, not even walking around. Just me, in a small enough place for that to work. If everybody listens.

That’s the way my life is: extreme. I go from one opposite to the other. I don’t see how much further than Arc I could go into a kind of metal-crazed expression. [Arc is the nothing-but-feedback CD, all but unlistenable to these ears, that Young culled from the Weld tour.] I pushed the envelope on that one. I think it defines a whole new region of exploration for me, and possibly for others. To me, Arc is more art and expression than anything I’ve done in a long time. It’s elevator music for maniacs.

Do you ever think, “Wow, I’ve got to integrate these different sides of myself,” acoustic folk and screaming rock?

They don’t go together.

But you’re one person.

They get carried around together. But they don’t go together.

What’s your response to people who say your electric playing is primitive?

Well, I think they’re right! And I’m proud of it!

You don’t compare yourself to technique-happy guys; you approach it expressively….

Aw yeah—I have no technique! I do have technique, but it’s very gross. There are nuances and fine things about what I do, but they’re done in such a brash way they’re disguised; you don’t really recognize them as anything but noise. I’ll go for things I know are going to be wrong, with a vengeance, like “Eat this!”—one note, flat, and I’ll just grind on it, and slowly bring it up to tune. To me that’s an expression; it’s like a knife going into you and being turned until it reaches the target.

Does it ever feel odd to be the father of three and a middle-aged guy playing howling guitar?

Well, when I started playing I was an adolescent and no one else played it before; we were the first generation who started playing this psychedelic acid-rock kind of thing. And I just never outgrew it. There was never a reason to stop. What example is there to follow? Rock & roll was never there before—why shouldn’t it get old? I mean, everything else gets old, why can’t I get old and keep doing it? I can get old and still rock until I fuckin’ drop, who cares? There’s no rule.

So your next record is going to be called Harvest Moon and it’ll be acoustic.

Yeah, everybody’s been asking me to do this for years, and I’d go, “Well, I don’t feel it, I don’t wanna do it.” But after I did Arc, and took it so far out there, I wrote these songs and looked at ‘em and said, “Oh my God, there it is!” It’s with the Stray Gators, same band I used on Harvest. It’s gonna be beautiful and we start cutting in two days.