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Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy
By William Echard Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2005 William Echard
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02837-2
CHAPTER 1
Words
A NEIL YOUNG RECEPTION PRIMER
There are two things often said about Neil Young that form central threads in this study. First, there is the idea that Young is one of the most unpredictable songwriters and performers of the 1960s rock generation, working within an exceptionally wide range of styles and at times defying expectations so forcefully as to endanger his career. Second, there is the fact that many listeners attribute unique expressive intensity to much of Young's work. In both cases, a broad perspective on Young's career is required to assess the claims, first because we need to establish that these themes have indeed been central to Neil Young reception, and second because the claims themselves imply a long frame of reference (the first obviously so, but also the second insofar as the unique intensity of periods such as the mid-1970s or the early 1990s comes into sharp relief when situated within the overall profile of Young's work). In order to set up such a context, this chapter presents an overview of Neil Young reception history, juxtaposing a summary of writings in the rock press against a survey of the major aspects of Young's work at these various times. For readers not familiar with Young's career, the chapter can serve as an introduction both to the details of his history and also to the main themes in the critical commentary. Since there are already several existing biographies of Neil Young but no detailed studies of reception history as such, I have placed more emphasis on critical reaction than on establishing basic facts.
In addition to summarizing the reception history, I will at times enter into lengthy theoretical discussions, placing certain aspects of Young's work in a broad culture theoretic perspective. Like the historical summary itself, these theoretical capsules are not meant to present complete arguments, but rather to sketch out the principal issues associated with Young's work. In many cases, they provide the opportunity to comment upon topics which are of crucial importance to popular music studies in general but do not arise elsewhere in the book (where discussions more specific to musical signification take precedence). These mini-studies are connected to moments in the historical narrative which seem to invite them. For example, a discussion of gender is given in conjunction with Harvest, since Young has frequently spoken of his more pop-oriented material as being "feminine," and a discussion of camp and irony is attached to the 1980s, a period which saw Young's most mannered stylistic experimentation. But I do not want to imply that the issues raised in conjunction with a particular career phase are only relevant to that phase. Indeed, a whole book could be written about Neil Young and gender, or irony, or industry, and so the discussions presented in this chapter are only meant to provide general background for the more detailed arguments developed in other chapters.
Early Solo Years
Neil Young's involvement in Buffalo Springfield, beginning in 1966, was his entry point into the Southern California folk-rock scene. In both image and song writing, Young appeared ambivalent and introverted, in contrast to the more extroverted Stephen Stills. He left and rejoined the band several times, seemingly caught between a desire for stardom and deep reservations, and his lyrics at the time tended to explore feelings of loss and alienation in an abstract, oblique style. The image of Young as a brooding, poetic loner, established during his time with Buffalo Springfield, would carry over into his solo career. There was also a sharp dualism in Young's contributions to the bands musical output, as he was responsible for some of their most elaborate production numbers ("Nowadays Clancy Can t Even Sing," "Broken Arrow") and also some of their most direct rock songs ("Mr. Soul"). This tendency to move between different styles and working methods would also remain in place, and be amplified, throughout Young's subsequent solo career. A final feature to note about the Springfield years is that it was during this time that Young became associated with First Nations themes, albeit in a mostly theatrical manner (dressing in a seemingly random assortment of Native clothes in contrast to Stills' cowboy image). This detail is important both for what it may say about Young's politics (discussed later), and also since the costumes of this time represent the first of many personas deployed by Young throughout his career.
Neil Young's first solo album, released in 1968, built upon both sides of his Springfield persona. Some of the material was quiet and reflective and some was in a loud rock vein. The album was carefully arranged and recorded in a painstaking manner, making use of many overdubs. What reviewers tended to notice was the overall mood of contemplation and poetic reflection. However, despite the generally introspective and often psychedelic quality of the record, the album also contributed in an indirect way to Young's slowly growing reputation as a proactive and controlling businessperson. This was the result of a new technique tried on the mastering of the record, which produced a poor-sounding final product. Young was unwilling to accept the result and negotiated with Reprise for a new version of the album to be quickly released. This incident, along with the album's complex production values, began to build for Young a reputation as a perfectionist who controlled and attended to details of arrangement and was an active player in his business relationships.
In 1969, Young picked up a Los Angeles rock band, The Rockets, renamed them Crazy Horse, and made them his backing band. At about the same time, he also joined the new supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash 8c Young. CSNY played folk-rock music with intricate arrangements and specialized in lush vocal harmonies. Their lyrics were explicitly counter-cultural, but the music was highly accessible, and CSNY quickly became one of the largest moneymakers in the rock industry of the early 1970s. Through his involvement with the group, Young would at last be exposed to a truly mass audience, and he would also deepen his association with commercially oriented folk rock. However, Young's work with Crazy Horse, unfolding in parallel with CSNY, was markedly different. Young characterized Crazy Horse as "funkier, simpler, more down to roots [than CSNY]," and pointed out that the bands had almost completely exclusive repertoires, with CSNY playing the more technically advanced material. Young wrote many of the Crazy Horse songs quickly, later saying that three had been composed in one afternoon while he had been ill. The band was given only minimal rehearsal before making an album, which was recorded mostly live with as few overdubs as possible. In interviews of the time, Young explicitly contrasted this working method with the elaborate overdubs of his first solo record and noted further that he was trying to capture the sound of a band which had just recently been drawn together "because that never gets recorded ... just the bare beginnings." The seemingly live, unpolished sound of Crazy Horse would eventually prove one of Young's most characteristic and widely praised devices. At the time, however, critical reaction was mixed. For some reviewers, immediacy and roughness were less an exciting new development in their own right than a step down from Young's more carefully polished productions.
It was also around 1969 that the distinctive timbre of Young's voice began to be the subject of extended comment in the press. The following description includes most of the interpretive moves common among critics of the time:
Neil Young does not have the kind of "good" voice that would bring praise from a high school music teacher. ... [But] rock & roll does not flourish because of "good" voices. ... While Neil Young is a fine songwriter and an excellent guitarist, his greatest strength is in his voice. Its arid tone is perpetually mournful, without being maudlin or pathetic. It hints at a world in which sorrow underlies everything.
By the beginning of 1970, then, many of the major features of Neil Young's persona were in place. His work had divided into distinct streams, one of them in a quieter singer-songwriter style with elaborate production values, the other in a studiously minimalist garage-rock vein. This stylistic split was paralleled by divergent group memberships. Two of the main critical value judgments associated with his work had appeared: Crazy Horse had been characterized as technically limited but energetic enough to make up for it, and Young's voice had been characterized as unusual, even bad by conservative standards, but uniquely expressive. In the middle of all this, another characteristic trait would emerge: Young refused to resolve or explain the contradictions, and instead openly expressed feelings of restlessness and a willingness to frequently change bands and styles when he felt the need.
Young's third solo LP, After the Gold Rush, combined all these tendencies into one package. The album was attuned to the more cynical, disillusioned tone of early 1970s rock culture, and it was during this period that Young first began to be described as a kind of sensor or prophet of his generation, although of a very different kind than other 1960s figures like Bob Dylan or the Beatles. Neil Young had been skeptical and apprehensive about large movements and proclamations since his time with Buffalo Springfield. His new status as generational spokesperson in the early 1970s was based largely on an increasing malaise within rock culture, which caused Young's loner stance to seem more relevant, rather than being the result of a shift in Young's own work toward a more prophetic or politicized stance. At the same time, some of Young's idiosyncrasies were drawing increasingly hostile responses. On the one hand, he was being described as a "genius, [a] broken voice now finding the true path," who "with his plaintive voice and subtle but brilliantly incisive guitar ... has an unmatched ability to create a mood." However, some also found the music to be inadequately prepared for recording, Young's voice to be uncontrolled and childlike in an unappealing way, and the overall tone at times to be one of "irritating bathos." Some critics attempted to acknowledge both aspects of the work at once, in the process reaching for ideas that would be key to Neil Young reception thereafter. Perhaps most influential among these strategies was the argument that the music was not best approached from an intellectual stance and that the technical flaws were revelations of a deep emotional statement.
Early Years, Auteurship, and Lyrics
Neil Young was clearly one key figure in the development of a critical discourse of rock auteurship. More will be said about auteurship in chapter 2, but a few exploratory comments can be made here. Several theorists have discussed the manner in which the community of rock critics, a new phenomenon in the late 1960s, created a set of values emphasizing individuality, oppositionality to the mainstream, and creative agency strongly mirroring modernist notions of auteurship already established in areas such as film and European concert music. It would be an oversimplification to imply that there was just one ideological framework shared by all rock critics. Nonetheless, there was a general tendency for rock critics at the time to celebrate values which artists like Neil Young seemed to embody: self-assuredness, distinctiveness verging on iconoclasm, disruptively intense seriousness, and formal experimentation. As a model of cultural production, auteur theory has been rightly criticized and in popular music studies largely superseded by less naive viewpoints concerning the constraints on individual agency. Nonetheless, ideologies of authenticity and the figure of the auteur continue to loom large in popular culture. The case of Neil Young is especially interesting since his work and persona were a topic of intense debate at the very time these ideologies were coalescing into a practice of rock criticism.
Differences of opinion evident among early critics regarding Neil Young help to show how the very terms of auteurship and achievement were topics of intense negotiation. Some critics seemed intent to base rock's cultural capital in its ability to approach a level of complexity and virtuosity comparable to that seen in Western classical music. For such critics, Young's work presented a problem since it could in certain respects be aligned with these values (for example the elaborately constructed suites such as "Broken Arrow" or "The Old Laughing Lady"), but in other respects seemed to defy such an aesthetic (especially with Young's idiosyncratic voice and rudimentary guitar technique). On the opposite side, critics such as Lester Bangs, who based their model of auteurship precisely on the rejection of such values, could point to Young's work with Crazy Horse as an achievement worth celebrating and construct him as an auteur of another kind. One area in which there seemed to be unanimity was on the question of emotional engagement and honesty (a model of authenticity common among those invested in the singer-songwriter tradition). Although, interestingly, on this count there was critical disagreement as to whether Young's clearly high level of expressivity was perhaps too intense, representing a lamentable lack of control. Another point of general agreement was that Young had developed a truly distinctive style of singing and playing guitar. As Gracyk has noted, rock musicians often spend as much time creating their distinctive sound as they do on songwriting or other aspects of performance practice, and artists like Neil Young and Bob Dylan are often valued by critics as much for this achievement as for anything else. Although not all critics valued Young's uniqueness in the same way, none questioned that he was in fact unique and that this made him a figure to whom critics were obliged to respond in some manner.
There is an inherent paradox in auteurship. Auteurs are celebrated for their supposed individualism and control, yet they only become auteurs when validated as such by a critical community. Similarly, they are celebrated for originality, but such distinctiveness is premised upon deep involvement with a network of pregiven generic and stylistic norms. Who is the author of the auteur? As we will shortly see, Neil Young himself certainly became aware that the individuality accorded him by critics and other listeners was not entirely of his own making, and could serve as a constraint. It would be an oversimplification, though, to say that there was one Neil Young persona in play at this time and that auteurship was one of its properties. Every critic created a different Neil Young (and some, as we will see, constructed strikingly different Neils at different times). One thing that put these diverse constructions in resonance with one another was the generally accepted idea that auteurship was an important issue; but auteurship did not represent in each case exactly the same set of values. This kind of multiplicity is to be found in the persona of any public figure, but it was especially striking in the case of Neil Young since his multi-faceted work and his own personal ambivalence toward participation in public life highlight the manner in which personas develop as diverse, partly overlapping instances rather than as single coherent entities. Which is not to say that there was not, in fact, some kind of a core or average "Neil Young" who would be familiar to most critics and listeners of the time and about whom various people could agree on many points. Or rather, any particular person would have such a naturalized Neil in mind, based on the way that person had personally weighted and blended the various specific Neil instances he or she had encountered at various times. This brings us close to a general theoretical issue — identity as an emergent synthetic property — that will be central to many other arguments in this book.
A good deal of Young's early persona and critical reputation was linked to his lyrics. The central lyrical themes and poetic devices tended to remain fairly consistent through Young's early stylistic changes, and so helped to establish a sense of coherent authorial identity. However, the themes and devices in themselves exhibited certain instabilities and tensions resonant with Young's overall changeability. Indeed, one thing which made Young's artistic vision distinctive was the degree to which he took his own changeability and ambiguity as central themes, and this reflexive impulse, along with the generally poetic register of his language, placed Young firmly in the singer-songwriter tradition, although his tendency toward obliqueness and abstraction generally prevented his work from seeming frankly confessional. Similarly, while it seemed clear that Young's work was somehow vitally concerned with American identities and histories, the exact nature of that connection is vague. Some songs evoked particular times and places ("Southern Man"), but others pointed to American history and contexts more obliquely, sometimes simply by evoking images in the song titles themselves ("After the Gold Rush," "Cowgirl in the Sand"). This constant yet often subtle remobilization of Americana was one factor placing Young among artists like The Band and Bob Dylan, who made American histories and identities a key part of their work. By contrast, despite his early years as a Canadian and occasional passing reference to Canadian places, Canadian identity has never been a central theme in Young's work. Nonetheless, some have suggested that Young's distinctive attitude toward American themes — a mixture of attraction and pessimism, fellow-feeling and alterity — mirrors that of other late 1960s musicians of Canadian background and is partly attributable to that background.
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Excerpted from Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy by William Echard. Copyright © 2005 William Echard. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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