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Neil Young: Crazy Horse
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The new Neil Young film, Heart of Gold, is shot in luscious sepia tones by Jonathan Demme, the director of arguably the best rock film ever made - the Talking Heads movie Stop Making Sense. Heart of Gold appears at first blush to be precisely the opposite kind of project to Year of the Horse.
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In fall 1978 Young did an arena tour called Rust Never Sleeps. He played old and new music, performing half the show by himself on piano or guitar, and the other half (which was memorably loud) with Crazy Horse, amid giant mock-ups of microphones and speakers. In June 1979 he released Rust Never Sleeps (#8) with songs previewed on the tour, including “Out of the Blue,” dedicated to Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols. The album ... featured “Sedan Delivery” and “Powderfinger,” which Young had once offered to Lynyrd Skynyrd, though the band didn’t record them. (Back in 1974 Skynyrd had written “Sweet Home Alabama” as an answer to Young’s “Southern Man.”) In November 1979 Young released the gold Live Rust LP (#15), culled from the fall 1978 shows and the soundtrack to a film of the tour (directed by Young) entitled Rust Never Sleeps.
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Young\'s focus began to wander in 1976, as he recorded the duet album Long May You Run with Stephen Stills and then abandoned his partner midway through the supporting tour. The following year he recorded the country-rock-oriented American Stars \'n Bars, which featured vocals by Nicolette Larson, who was ... prominent on 1978\'s Comes a Time. Prior to the release of Comes a Time, Young scrapped the country-rock album Homegrown and assembled the triple-album retrospective Decade. At the end of 1978, he embarked on an arena tour called Rust Never Sleeps, which was designed as a showcase for new songs. Half of the concert featured Young solo, the other half featured him with Crazy Horse. That was the pattern that Rust Never Sleeps, released in the summer of 1979, followed.
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Over the course of the mid-'80s, Young released three albums that were all stylistic exercises. In 1985, he released the straight country Old Ways, which was followed by the new wave-tinged Landing on Water the following year. He returned to Crazy Horse for 1987's Life, but by that time, he and Geffen had grown sick of each other, and he returned to Reprise in 1988. His first album for Reprise was the bluesy, horn-driven This Note's for You, which was supported by an acclaimed video that satirized rock stars endorsing commercial products. At the end of the year, he recorded a reunion album with Crosby, Stills & Nash called American Dream, which was greeted with savagely negative reviews.
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Various vintage Fender Deluxe amplifiers— Young's preferred amplifier for electric guitar is the diminutive Fender Deluxe, specifically a Tweed-era model from 1959. Neil purchased his first vintage Deluxe in 1967 for $50 from the drummer of Crazy Horse, Ralph Molina, and has since acquired nearly 450 different examples, all from the same era, but he maintains that it's the original model that sounds superior, and is a crucial component to his trademark sound. A notable and unique accessory to Young's Deluxe is the Whizzer, a device created specifically for Young, which physically changes the amplifier's settings to pre-set combinations. It has gone through many incarnations, and now includes effects pedals hardwired into its circuitry.
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American Dream didn't prepare any observer for the critical and commercial success of 1989's Freedom, which found Young following the half-acoustic/half-electric blueprint of Rust Never Sleeps to fine results. Around the time of its release, Young became a hip name to drop in indie rock circles, and he was the subject of a tribute record titled The Bridge in 1989. The following year, Young reunited with Crazy Horse for Ragged Glory, a loud, feedback-drenched album that received his strongest reviews since the '70s. For the supporting tour, Young hired the avant rock band Sonic Youth as his opening group, providing them with needed exposure while earning him hip credibility within alternative rock scenes. On the advice of Sonic Youth, Young added the noise collage EP Arc as a bonus to his 1991 live album, Weld.
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