Neil Young's work with Crosby, Stills, and Nash and the success of After the Gold Rush brought the singer-songwriter into the public consciousness. That was 1970. No new material was released in 1971, but the following year, Young would enter the realm of superstardom with the commercial smash hit, Harvest.
Harvest
1972, Reprise Records
Upon listening to Harvest, one may notice the lack of electric guitar on the record. Only two songs feature the instrument and neither is nearly as aggressive as, say, "Southern Man" or "Down by the River". Most of the songs on Harvest feature Young playing either the acoustic guitar or the piano. The reason for this is injury. Sometime after the release of After the Gold Rush, Young hurt his back while working on his ranch in California. Unable to stand for extended periods of time (let alone while playing an instrument), he began writing, performing, and recording songs he could play while sitting down.
However, this does not account for another factor: Harvest is decidedly more country tinged than any other record that he'd recorded up to that point. Country influences were not unusual in Young's previous work (think "The Losing End (When You're On)" or "Oh, Lonesome Me"), but the extent of the influence was still strange. However, calling it "country" instead of "country tinged" would be inaccurate: "Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Harvest, aside from its commercial success, was the presence throughout of pedal steel guitar, played by Ben Keith in a unique style which highlighted the instrument without relying on many identifiable country music clichés. Similarly, it was noteworthy that the album was recorded in Nashville, yet was not a country rock album in any narrow sense" (Echard 17).
Actually, even saying that Harvest was recorded in Nashville is not entirely accurate, either. A plurality of songs (four) were recorded in Nashville, but that still leaves six. The three songs with a full band (whom Young dubbed the Stray Gators) were recorded in California. "The Needle and the Damage Done" was taken from a 1971 live performance at UCLA's Royce Hall. Finally, "A Man Needs a Maid" and "There's a World" were cut with the London Symphony Orchestra; both were arranged by none other than Jack Nietzsche.
In terms of sales, Harvest was, and still is, Young's most successful album. Since its release, it has gone four times platinum. The commercial success can be attributed to two singles and two musicians, among other things. "Heart of Gold" was #1 on the Billboard charts for one week in 1972 (the only #1 single of Young's career) and "Old Man" also cracked the Top 40. The presence of James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt probably didn't hurt things, either, although it's hard to say whether they help springboard the album or the album springboarded them, or a little of both.
However, I have mixed feelings about the album. In general terms, I'd say that the beginning and the end of the record are solid, but the middle gets bogged down in either inferior takes or subpar songwriting. I remember rolling my eyes when, for their 500 greatest albums, Rolling Stone implicitly called Harvest Young's second best record. Yet I am also not one to dump dirt all over Harvest just because it's not as great as sales would show. It's an album that's somehow simultaneously overrated and underrated. It's pleasant, and that the story.
Now, let's take a look at the individual tracks, shall we? (* denotes author's pick; all songs are written by Neil Young)
* "Out on the Weekend" - 4:34
When I went back and relistened to this song, I realized that it was much deeper than I had given it credit for. "Out on the Weekend" has mellow instrumentation: soft harmonica, slow beat, and cool stings of pedal steel. It has a laid back feel, yet the mood is an indefinable mixture of melancholy, happiness, reflection, and many more states. Adding to the mystery are the lyrics, partly about a lover, partly about where Young is in life:
Think I'll pack it in and buy a pickup
Take it down to L.A.
Find a place to call my own and try to fix up
Start a brand new day
Is Young at a point of resignation when he says that he'll pack it in, or is he preparing for a brighter future, a brand new day? Perhaps he himself has conflicting thoughts (an idea which runs through quite a few of the songs), as he does about love: "The woman I'm thinking of, she loves me all up/But I'm so down today." "Out on the Weekend" is one of the best aging songs in Young's canon, and certainly deserves a look.
Oh, and Lady GaGa used the chorus (sort of) as the intro to "Fooled Me Again". It's not that bad, but I'll take Neil's take every day and twice on Sunday.
* "Harvest" - 3:09
The title track is even more mellow but slightly less inscrutable than "Out on the Weekend". Unlike the previous track, where the mystery was partly from the music, here, the lyrics are the sole source. Most of the song is made up of questions; in fact, other than the second half of the refrain, there's only one non-interrogative sentence in the song. The end of the refrain provides some reassurance for the rhetorical questions. For instance:
Will I see you give more than I can take?
Will I only harvest some?
As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp
Or fuse it in the sun?
Did she wake you up to tell you that
It was only a change of plan?
Dream up, dream up, let me fill your cup
With the promise of a man
Rather than asking, "Is it real?" (as in "I Believe in You"), "Harvest" poses the question, "Where are we?" which may be even harder to answer. Anyway, it's a solid follow up to the opener.
"A Man Needs a Maid" - 4:05
Here is where things start to go astray. However, perhaps surprisingly, the lyrics are not at fault. Written during the resurgence of women's liberation, some feminists weren't too pleased with the song, especially these lines:
I was thinking that maybe I'd get a maid
Find a place nearby for her to stay
Just someone to keep my house clean
Fix my meals and go away
However, a critique based on those lines would mess the larger point. The speaker is confused about love and life. Does he want to get involved in a relationship with the potential for getting hurt? Perhaps he's experienced trouble in the past, for the song opens:
My life is changing in so many ways
I don't know who to trust anymore
There's a shadow running through my days
Like a beggar going from door to door
Once these lyrics enter consideration, there's much more ambiguity in "A Man Needs a Maid". To quote from Echard again: "Early on, critics took note of Young's strikingly ambiguous rearticulation of masculine clichés. Perhaps the song most widely discussed was "A Man Needs a Maid", which simultaneously portrays a deep personal inadequacy and seems to endorse a traditional attitude of male entitlement" (19).
Lest I forget, the song is also autobiographical:
A while ago, somewhere, I don't know when
I was watching a movie with a friend
I fell in love with the actress
She was playing a part that I could understand
Here, Young is referring to actress Carrie Snodgress, with whom he developed a romantic relationship; the movie is Diary of a Mad Housewfie. If you ask me, the lyrics have the potential for greatness. What holds things back is the orchestra. Even though the song's structure is cinematic and could theoretically support an orchestra, it just ends up muddling the song. In the end, the version is okay, but this should be more than that. The solo piano version on Live at Massey Hall 1971 is much, much, better, because it better portrays the vulnerability inherent in the song. And speaking of that version...
"Heart of Gold" - 3:07
I do find it strange that Young's best selling song is a spinoff of another song. Early in the Journey through the Past Tour, "Heart of Gold" was part of "A Man Needs a Maid". Not just a verse, but the whole song was in it. Eventually, Young split the two ideas (labeled on Live at Massey Hall 1971 as "A Man Needs a Maid/Heart of Gold Suite"), and a hit was born.
Looking at the lyrics, I can kind of see why "Heart of Gold" and "A Man Needs a Maid" were once one. The determination with which Young is searching for love in the former provides a counterpoint to the confusion he experiences in the latter: "I've been to Hollywood, I've been to redwood/I've crossed the ocean for a heart of gold." Doubt still exists (After all, "it's such a fine line that keeps [him] searching"), but there's much more certainty than in its counterpart.
Both Top 40 hits from Harvest feature the backing vocals of Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor. The end, at which point Ronstadt and Taylor actually start singing, is the most memorable part of "Heart of Gold". The rest, while pleasant, is strictly okay. There's nothing spectacular, but I don't complain when I hear it on the radio once every six months.
"Are You Ready for the Country?" - 3:23
Now the trough in Harvest has fully developed. The first song from the California sessions is just terrible. The number one problem is that everything sounds so muted. It's not even in the same as it was as on his first album; here, everything's impossible to hear. I've no clue what happened, but it took me forever to figure out that Young was playing piano, let alone make out the pedal and lap steel guitars. The lyrics are uninspired; the title is the best line in the song. I can't detect any passion here, and any momentum Harvest had instantly dies with "Are You Ready for the Country?"
"Old Man" - 3:24
I remember hearing "Old Man" and not being able to stand it. I'd skip over it on his greatest hits album to get to something like "Like a Hurricane". Well, when I later heard the version of Live at Massey Hall 1971 (I sure bring that one up a lot), I thought that it was really good. "Why didn't I like that one before?" I thought to myself. After hearing the album take a few more times, I can boil it down to two words: "too much."
Okay, the mood on "Old Man" is reflective and finds Young in yet another contemplative state. It's about realizing that at the core, you're very similar to a man that's been around for three times as long as you have:
Old man, take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
The whole day through
Oh, one look in my eyes
And you can tell that's true
To me, this kind of song demands to be stripped down to the bare essentials: one instrument, one voice. Now take those lyrics, add a whole mess of instrumentation, more vocals, and James Taylor plucking on the banjo. It doesn't have nearly the same effect. In fact, it becomes uninteresting and boring. Just like "A Man Needs a Maid", this take has way too much going on. And speaking of too much...
"There's a World" - 2:59
Remember how I said that "A Man Needs a Maid" could theoretically work with an orchestra? Well, if you removed that possibility and shaved off a minute, you'd end up with "There's a World". Setting the London Symphony Orchestra aside for a moment, this song could barely work without it. Young says that he wrote "There's a World" at Vancouver International Airport; I still wonder if he looked at it after getting on the plane. It's all predicated on a simple observation: "There's a world you're living in/No one else has your part." At least, I think it is. The lyrics are abstract in a very plain sort of way:
In the mountains, in the cities
You can see the dream
Look around you, has it found you?
Is it what it seems?
It's a tough nut to crack, but it's the kind that I suspect is hollow. Young's piano is dull (although it does add ominous qualities). Add on the layers of stringing as the bombastic drums, and the quality slides even further. If you throw a heavy pile onto something with a weak foundation, it's bound to collapse.
* "Alabama" - 4:02
"Alabama kicks off the final third of Harvest. The last three songs on the record, in my eyes, constitute a transitory piece between Harvest and Young's next album Time Fades Away. The mood change between the first seven tracks and "Alabama" is jolting (though softened by the somewhat dark "There's a World"). This song features a tone seen nowhere else on the record: accusatory.
As another source of inspiration for Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama", comparisons to "Southern Man" are inevitable. However, to think of "Alabama" as a rehash of "Southern Man" is unfair. Certainly the two songs are similar, in that they both deal with racism in the Southern United States, but differences exist. Whereas the imagery in "Southern Man" is of the past, especially the antebellum period, "Alabama" hones in on the present (or at least the more recent past): "the old folks tied in white robes" and the Cadillac with "a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track."
More to the point, "Southern Man" is fueled by raw anger, but "Alabama" is centered upon frustration. Young isn't asking for the state's head on a stake, but for why, to him, the state is taking so long in coming around. The final segment of the tune makes this much clearer:
Oh, Alabama
Can I see you and shake your hand?
Make friends down in Alabama
I'm from a new land. I come to you and
See all this ruin. What are you doin'?
Alabama, you've got the rest of the Union
To help you along
What's going wrong?
* "The Needle and the Damage Done" - 2:09
Referring back to After the Gold Rush, I mentioned how Danny Whitten's health was deteriorating because of heroin addiction. This had a profound effect of Young's music in the coming years, and this trend first became evident on "The Needle and the Damage Done": "Since I left Canada, about five years or so ago, moved down south...found out a lot of things I didn't know when I left. Some of them are good, and some of them are bad...Got to see a lot of great musicians before they happened, you know, before they became famous, you know, when they were just gigging five or six sets a night...things like that. Got to see a lot of great musicians that nobody ever got to see for one reason or another. But strangely enough, the real good ones that you never got to see was because of heroin. And then it started happening over and over. Then it happened to someone everybody knew about, so I just wrote a little song" (Young).
Neither truly pro or anti-drug, the song takes an observant yet mournful approach. That he neither condemns nor condones drug use caused concern for certain critics, as did the final stanza:
I've seen the needle and the damage done
A little part of it in everyone
But every junkie's like a setting sun
First, he asserts that the addictive element is to some degree present in every person, which we'd probably like to think is not true. Second, Young compares a heroin addict to one of the most beautiful scenes in nature. "[T]hough his final simile...clearly suggested the early death awaiting an addict, some felt it was too attractive an image to make the point. 'The effect of that final line is to glorify heroin addiction,' wrote Johnny Rogan in his biography Neil Young: The Definitive Story of His Musical Career (1982), "something which Young surely had not meant to do" (Ruhlmann 1). The point is valid, although I feel the depressing concept of the setting sun outweighs the attractive imagery.
Unlike the other songs on Harvest, which are surprisingly oblique, "The Needle and the Damage Done" is strikingly direct. Just twelve lines (four three-line stanzas), played solely on acoustic guitar, punctuated with polite applause at the end, this song is Neil at his most blunt. Whitten's demise would continue to influence Young's music through the end of 1973, but this simple tune represents the peak of that effect.
* "Words (Between the Lines of Age)" - 6:40
While "Alabama" foreshadowed the tone of Young's next few albums (anger, frustration) and "The Needle and the Damage Done" foreshadowed the inspiration and content (drugs and the death of his friends), "Words (Between the Lines of Age)" foreshadowed the playing style: loose, bordering on sloppy. The meter is asymmetrical, and the Stray Gators sound like they're improvising during the workouts, which is seen nowhere else on the album. The lyrics don't make much sense, but they only serve as a foundation to build the instrumental workouts around, much like the earlier work on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
The album closer is somewhat of a black sheep on the record. Young didn't perform in concert until 2000, as heard on Road Rock Vol. 1 (and in case you're wondering, no, there is no Road Rock Vol. 2). The fact that it was rarely played is a shame, because it's actually a very good mood piece. I usually describe it as "a very damp autumn evening". Maybe I'm crazy, but that's what it sounds like.
Analyzing Harvest again has brought me a new found appreciation for the record. Young has probably made a dozen better records than Harvest, but I will say that it's a unique specimen and is important in understanding the history of Neil Young's career.
Join me next time (which at the rate I'm going, will be just in time for the midterm elections) where we head off into the ditch for Time Fades Away.
Works Cited
Echard, William. Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. Print.
Ruhlmann, Williams. "The Needle and the Damage Done". Allmusic. Web. 02 Aug. 2010.
Young, Neil. "The Needle and the Damage Done". Rec. 14 Jan. 1971. Live at Massey Hall 1971. Neil Young. Reprise Records, 2007. CD.
Title: Lake Placid 2
