I am just finishing up an enjoyable
four day weekend as part of my annual anniversary celebration with Sheila. Sixteen wonderful years, and going strong!
I’ve been buying a lot of hard
rock and metal recently (this weekend alone I got more Thin Lizzy and Motorhead and started collecting Helloween and Nightwish as well) but as
readers of this blog will know that’s only one of my many musical
interests. Here’s another.
Disc 497 is… Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Artist: Neil
Young with Crazy Horse
Year of Release: 1969
What’s up with the Cover? A man and his dog.
I don’t like this cover, and not just because I’m a cat person. The photo is poor resolution, or it is an
effect that makes it appear to be poor resolution. Also, that is the most awkward “I’m relaxing
against this tree” pose I’ve seen. It
looks more like Neil is afraid the tree is about to fall over. Even the dog looks uncomfortable.
How I Came To Know It: I’ve been a Neil Young fan for years, and this was
just me drilling through his collection.
This one came to me fairly late, and I’ve only had it for about ten
years or so.
How It Stacks Up: Neil Young has thirty-seven studio albums, but currently
I only have fifteen of them. “Everybody
Knows This Is Nowhere” is one of the stronger albums, but competition is tough
at the top, so I’ll put it fourth best.
Rating: 4 stars.
For his
second solo album Neil Young decided to go a little crazy – Crazy Horse that
is.
“Everybody
Knows This Is Nowhere” (hereafter referred to as “Nowhere” for the sake of
brevity) was the first album with Crazy Horse as the backing band. I find in the fifteen albums I know, the ones
with Crazy Horse tend to have a stronger rock edge. They change Neil’s sound – not making it
better or worse, just different. It reminds
me of what happens to Tom Petty’s music when he’s got the Heartbreakers alongside. They are both just a little bit…snarlier.
The
addition of Crazy Horse (formerly a band called The Rockets) makes for quite a
departure from Young’s first solo effort (recently reviewed back at Disc 435), as they add in a lot more electric guitar and driving riffs.
There is
none more driving a riff than the opening track, “Cinnamon Girl” which has a sixties psychedelic rock edge that is
very unlike anything you’ll hear on the previous album and is the foundation
for later Neil Young and Crazy Horse records like 1990’s “Ragged Glory.” The reverb-infused melody on the guitar licks
also makes it easy to understand how grunge acts were such fans of Young.
There
are two mammoth tracks on the album, the murderous “Down by the River” and the noodle-infused “Cowgirl in the Sand.” Both
are over nine minutes long and together account for a full half of the album’s
total content. Neither song drags or
gives you any reason to want them to be any shorter. I’d have been happy to have a third.
“Down By the River” is a song about a man murdering
his lover – one guess where the crime takes place. The song could almost be a blues track if it
weren’t for the folksy melodies that Neil mixes into the froth of guitar
groove. This is a song that is enjoyable
regardless of what you choose to listen to.
You can tune your ear to Neil’s sloppily perfect guitar solos, or you
can listen to Danny Whitten pluck away on his own shining moments. Both are fun, but on this listen I found myself
just enjoying Billy Talbot’s bass line for long stretches. There is a lot of good stuff to choose from
in this song, or you can just relax and let all the elements wash over you
together. You can’t go wrong.
“Cowgirl in the Sand” is an equally
layered, complex and beautiful epic song. You can still ride whatever instrument
or section of the song makes you most happy, and while there seems to be some
kind of relationship issue in the lyrics, no one dies.
Another
standout is the title track, which although the sentiments are very ‘summer-of-love’,
still hold up more than forty years later.
In fact, I have a remake of this song by Dar Williams from 2005 which proves
that good must just doesn’t get old, it just gets seasoned. It doesn’t matter if it is 1969 or 2013,
sometimes our lives can get so busy we just dream of getting away and taking a
breath or two. Having just taken a few breaths
myself over a long weekend, I can attest to the restorative powers of – as Neil
puts it – getting away from this day-to-day runnin’ around.”
When I
recently reviewed Neil Young’s self-titled debut solo effort, I found it was just
a little too quiet overall. It had the
same wistful call for a simpler life but it lacked the edge to make the
listener feel like you really needed an escape.
With “Nowhere” Neil adds on the dynamics of a harder sound (and murder –
don’t forget the murder!) which helps the album have a few more peaks and
valleys. These mood changes make the
journey more notable. “Nowhere”
recognizes that it isn’t enough to go on a retreat; you need something to
retreat from.
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