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Neil Young was already on his generation’s Mount Rushmore in mid-1976, when the brilliant and problematic era contained in this third installment of his sprawling “Archives” series begins. Over the previous decade he’d written hits and classics from “Heart of Gold” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” to “Cinnamon Girl,” “Mr. Soul,” “Down by the River” and “Cortez the Killer”; as a solo artist and as a member of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, he’d laid the foundation of the country-rock that was dominating the 1970s airwaves as much as anyone.
But he’d spurned mainstream commercial success as soon as he’d attained it, famously forsaking the middle of the road “for the ditch,” as he wrote in the liners to his 1977 retrospective “Decade” — “A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people.” In short order he became the most fiercely self-determined contemporary musician since Bob Dylan: His albums grew darker and harder, but swung up in mood with the rocking “Zuma.” He was riding that vibe when this set begins, with a load of 1976 live material (both solo and with his trusty bandmates in Crazy Horse), a pile of beautiful demos and a pair of tracks with Joni Mitchell from the Band’s Baby-Boomer-defining all-star “Last Waltz” concert.
But that’s just the beginning of this gargantuan 17-CD/5-DVD/198-track/28-hour-long set, culled from the vast archives of this astonishingly thorough self-documenter (even the set’s “unboxing” video is 22 minutes long). Like the previous two volumes, it includes familiar album versions alongside previously unreleased demos, outtakes and (sometimes tinny sounding) live recordings, interspersed with brief spoken explanations from the man himself.
So what’s problematic about this era? The same thing that flummoxed most of Young’s contemporaries: the eighties (cue scary music), which left him and virtually all of them creatively adrift and seeking relevance as their record companies ungently demanded more “commercial”-sounding material.
But for the first half of this set, Young is flying high, changing direction drastically but assuredly between the “Harvest”-esque acoustic material of “Comes a Time” and the punk-rock influenced “Rust Never Sleeps,” the last song of which features so much distortion that many buyers tried to return the album, thinking there was a factory defect. Indeed, when most of his peers retreated to their mansions and mocked punk rock, Young cut his hair, donned a Sex Pistols t-shirt and recorded with Devo.
During that period, he reeled off nearly as many classics as he had in the first half of the decade: “Long May You Run,” “Comes a Time,” “Thrasher,” “Powderfinger,” “Pocahontas,” “Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Blue),” and lots more. Highlights among many here include some excellent live material (including a California set where each of the many weed references gets a big cheer from the audience); a fascinating demo recording where he’s playing new songs for Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson, including “Long May You Run” (they crack up at the “Maybe the Beach Boys have got you now” line); and perhaps most fascinating, a version of “Hey Hey, My My” sung in characteristically quirky fashion by Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, who self-referentially alters Young’s famous lyric to, “This is the story of Johnny… Spud.”
But as soon as the decade turned, Young seemed to lose his way, and the next few years can be seen as a period of experimentation, creative flailing, or both. He started off the ‘80s by bounding from the corny country of “Hawks and Doves” to the tepid rock of “Re-ac-tor” to, most controversially, the synthesizer-and-vocoder-saturated “Trans,” which found Young transforming his voice into a computerized blur. That album, which Young described as being about “robots trying to teach a baby to communicate in a hospital,” was inspired by his own attempts to learn how to communicate with his young son Ben, who suffers from cerebral palsy. In practice, and with 40 years of hindsight, the album sounds both ahead of its time and, often, terrible — there are clear references to Kraftwerk and moments that sound kind of like a Daft Punk precursor, but even a comical robotic version of “Mr. Soul” doesn’t warrant repeat visits.
Not surprisingly, David Geffen, who had just signed Young to a lucrative deal on his then-new label, was less than pleased with “Trans.” His subsequent request for Young to record a “rock” album was met with the kind of response usually received by anyone who tries to tell Neil Young what to do: The singer formed a backing band called the Shocking Pinks, slicked back his hair and recorded a full album of 1950s-style rockabilly songs for an album called “Everybody’s Rockin’” (Hey, Geffen said he wanted a rock album!). A $3.3 million breach-of-contract lawsuit from Geffen ensued, accusing Young of making albums “musically uncharacteristic of [his] previous recordings”; Young filed a $21 million countersuit; the case was eventually settled and Geffen apologized. However, to be fair, Young’s creative conundrum is on full display here: In between “Trans” and “Rockin’” is a dreadful set of songs with CSNY-style harmonies and a Hawaiian vibe, along with tracks featuring Young accompanying himself on banjo.
Amid all those distractions, Young released a country album — “Old Ways,” represented here with live material featuring his fiery bluegrass-leaning band, the International Harvesters — before spending several frustrating months trying to record more contemporary-sounding music. After several unsuccessful efforts, he ended up with what may be the worst album of his entire career: 1986’s “Landing on Water.” Recorded with producer-guitarist Danny Kortchmar (James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Billy Joel), the album is filled with synthesizers and uncharacteristically ass-kicking drums, and the production sounds as excruciatingly dated as the soundtrack from a mid-1980s thriller.
Thankfully, that was it for Young and synth-pop. The final disc here is a set of solo demos, several of them excellent, that would emerge gradually on later albums over the following decades — they end “Archives Vol. 3” on a positive note.
After several years in the wilderness, Young was finding his way back — and once he did, a whole new musical generation was there for him, from Pearl Jam (with whom he’d record the “Mirror Ball” album) to Sonic Youth (who he invited to open his 1991 “Smell the Horse” tour) to the entire Americana genre that he played such a huge role in inspiring. That era will presumably be covered in the next volume, which, considering the rate at which the 78-year-old Young is furiously excavating his archives, should land within the next four or five years.
“Archives III” is a mountain of music that would take a couple of days to experience from end to end (after 17 discs, we just didn’t have the energy to plunge into the five Blu-Ray discs containing 11 films). To his credit, Young pulls no punches on himself in this collection — the cringeworthy material is presented alongside the great stuff, adding up to a warts-and-all document of those challenging years. And like the new material Young continues to release to this day, it ranges between brilliant and middling and flawed, but always unapologetic — as is the man himself, who keeps finding new ways to recombine the same handful of chords into new songs and sounds.
English (US) ·