TOO YOUNG TO RUST TOO OLD TO DIE

TOO YOUNG TO RUST TOO OLD TO DIE

FEATURES

Robert A. Hull

In Oklahoma,

Bonnie and Josie,

Dressed in calico,

Danced around a stump.

They cried,

'Ohoyaho,

Ohoo"...

Celebrating the marriage Of flesh and air.

—Wallace Stevens, 'Life Is Motion'

He came dancing across the water With his galleons and guns...

—Neil Young, 'Cortez the Killer'

Neil Young is what oldsters still call a folkie and what youngsters prefer to call a wimp. He began his career wearing buckskins with the Buffalo Springfield, and to this day, he continues to wrap himself in flannel shirts and Indian blankets. In the chic and trashy 70's, he appeared as an anomalous figure traipsing through his own private wilderness, the doppelganger to the cinematic image of Arthur Hunnicutt in The Big Sky. Usually associated with the post-Dylan singer/songwriter ilk (neither folk nor rock fans allow him to escape this doom), Young consequently seems to sink deeper into morosity. No matter how hard he rocks or how sensitively he whines, the world turns without him and ignores his fate. He is irrelevant to a culture devoted to instant crazes (Star Wars, punk aesthetics, 'reality' television), even though he tries (like anyone groping for acceptance) to appropriate trends and move in a mainstream direction. Unlike great artists on the fringes, such as Van Morrison, Don Van Vliet, or A1 Green, Young is a sensible and somewhat conventional human being; nevertheless, it is difficult to think of him breathing the same air as Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, and Jackson Browne.

As a result, because he does not quite fit his destined role (one which he discards as if it were a fur coat made from an endangered species) and because he chooses to remain outside of his predetermined time ('everybody knows this is nowhere,' says Sitting Bull), no other popular artist—not Springsteen, not Lydon, certainly not Dylan—has defined, even outlined, the past decade better than Neil Young.

Yet it wasn't because he tried. Possessed by the ghost of an ancient American frontiersman, he did not fully realize that, as the past receded further into a distant blur, America—fearing the future and its imaginary aftermath—would want to completely retreat to the supposedly golden days of yesteryear. Although Young never retreats, lis music frequently recalls a vanished age (Hank Williams' cracked timbre, Appalachian hymns, the pioneering sounds of cattle drives and missiles to the moon): the place where most Americans now wish to hide. But Yourtg never hid. Instead, behind every harmonious instant of the past, he has envisioned an equal moment of grisly decay. If everybody had been listening to his music all along, no one would be shocked by Ronald Reagan's ascendance to the throne—for Young's entire oeuvre is both an evocation and a denunciation of those glorious Death Valley Days.

Ever since his first song with Buffalo Springfield, 'Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing' ('stopping the feeling to wait for the time'), Young has been obsessed with the passage of time, if not looking back, at least looking away. Perhaps this was central to his alienated persona, the Loner alone in time. You can see him casting himself is this role on the covers of the three Springfield albums: on the first, his eyes closed and his head resting on Richie Furay's shoulder; on the shelved Stampede (the original title and jacketfor Again)^sitting on some steps, lost in thought, apart from the others; on Last Time Around, his face turned away from an already fragmented band.

From there, Young departed from a rock group named after a brand of steamroller to lead one more his speed, the Rockets. Neither the rocket nor the steamroller, though, conveys the leaden, almost dirgelike quality of his musiCT-that honor must go to the hearse. Ignoring the explicit symbolism (Danny Whitten's heroin plunge at age 29 and Young's subsequent deathwatch) , the implicit idea is that time's progress is as gradual as the movement of a creaky hearse and that ultimately the conveyer of coffins is what marks one's escape from life's duration. No calendar or hourglass makes us more apprehensive of the passage of time.

It's no accident that Neil Young was riding in a black hearse on the Sunset Strip when Ritchie Furay and Stephen Stills recognized him as an old Canadian buddy from their previous folkie sojourn in New York. At that moment, Buffalo Springfield was born, and Young has been traveling in the hearse ever since. Although the hearse image may undergo various transformations (an ambulance picking up burnt-out bodies on back streets, a thrasher rolling prophetically in the morning sun), Young remains faithful to this mode of transportation—one not as sleek as Elvis Presley's long black limousine perhaps, but not a far cry from it either.

Of course, Young did not cross the past intending to mark its time—no popular artist does that. But by re-creating in memorium, he somehow managed to hook the past just as it slipped into the deep forbidden lake. His early songs with Buffalo Springfield are tinged with rusty nostalgia ('Broken Arrow,' 'On the Way Home'),

If everyone had been listening to his music all along, no one would be shocked by Ronald Reagan9s ascendance to the throne...

and his solo debut in '69 looked back to Dylan ('The Last Trip To Tulsa') and set the mood for the Western World John. Ford never made. His most commercial period (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, Harvest) may have been his richest, but it was also his lightest, reflecting the awakening of a new decade with an optimism (however dark) Young would not feel again until the end of the 70's.

In '72, just in time for the Christmas rush, Reprise released a two-record compendium of nothingness whose title blew the lid off Young's obsession—Journey Through the Past. In a silly, overly personalized essay entitled 'I Sing the Song Because I Love the Man,' Paul Williams has suggested that this soundtrack LP (released against Young's wishes) was such a misbegotten mishmash that it began to lower fans' expectations. As if in response, Young lowered his own tolerance for his once-undying audience.

More than anything else, though, it was Danny Whitten's death in '72 that provoked the bleak vision which became the. woeful triptych of Time Fades Away,On The Beach, and Tonight's The Night. Although these three albums are uneven and mired in their own sludge, together they represent Young's greatest achievement: the plaintive whine of a poor slob stuck in the midst of the me decade who does not, like other confessional simps, sing only of the self but of the self as an abstraction of what being adone really means.

Out of this ruminative period of isolation grew a sense of archaeological wonderment —the cryptic Zuma and Young's own assemblages of his past, American Stars 'n Bars and Decade. And in a bold move during the final two years of the decade he shaped without knowing it (at a time of radical innovation and hooliganism in rock), Young released his most tranquil work to date, Comes A Time (many may never forgive him for 'Lotta Love'), and his most balanced, Rust Never Sleeps (where he articulates punk by remembering its dead heroes, Presley and Rotten—paradoxically, yet true to form, only after the furor has faded away).

In addition, late in '79 he had the nerve to release his first live LP ever (Time Fades Away consisted of all-new material), Live Rust, almost as a summation of the decade's ambivalent close seemed redundant coming so close on the heels of Rust Never Sleeps (although Kiss can smooch Side 4's ass).

How Hawks and Doves enter into all this is beyond the human mind. If ironic distance is intended a la Randy Newman's Good Old Boys, it doesn't work; if it's not, then Young has become so enraptured by his reverie of the American past that he's been consumed by it. These are hard times, and the dance of the hawks and doves, a circle in the rain, simply does not speak to them. The foreboding message of Cortez' jingoistic dance across the water, although now only a scrawl in the sand, is certainly more alive and pertinent. In short, like Journey Through the Past, Young's latest work is scrapbook of unfocused ideas—his only excuse is that the decade that was once his is now behind him.

Yet, unlike Dylan and Van Morrison, Young can be forgiven his mistakes because he doesn't breathe salvation down out necks (although Hawks and Doves may be the awful step in that direction). He has never claimed to be saved {read: to know the one true answer), and no matter where his fantasies have roamed, he has remained steadfastly rooted in reality from the very beginning ('there you stood on the edge of your feather, expecting to fly'). Referring to the pragmatic question ('What am I doing here?') that Young suddenly asks in the middle of 'Love In Mind,' Kit Rachlis has written: 'It's not a storyteller's flourish, a magician's wave of the cape—but a cold slap across the face that resolves nothing, just breaks the dreamer's spell.'

Through his lyrics ('I have a friend I've never seen/He hides his head inside a. dream/Someone should call him and see/If he can come out'), Young has consistently slapped us back into reality. But it's not just that he knows when the dream is over (John Lennon and every scruffy English punk knew that): it's that he seems to aim for a personal fantasy yet always ends up staring at the chipped paint on the ceiling. For him, the acknowledgement of actuality means understanding one's limitations and then defying them, regardless of the dreams shattered. You can hear that sensibility in his voice, choked and mournful—a child's whimper begging for what may never come; an old man's weary moan replying to what has already been. Once, Roy Orbison too had that voice. .

'I can remember Crazy Horse like Roy Orbison remembers 'Leah' and 'Blue Bayou,' ' wrote Young in a brief comment on 'Down by the River' for the Decade anthology. A snapshot of Orbison also appears on the.credit sheet for Tonight's the Night. Who knows—the warbler behind the omnipresent tinted shades, who could move from rockabilly to melodrama, may be Young's hero. It certainly makes sense. During his love affair with the operatic ballad Orbison was wrapped in a cocoon of lush instrumentation, a dream-world from which he had to wring his deepest emotions. Isolated in this sappy maelstrom of swirling strings and crashing crescendos, Orbison's voice was all that mattered, and he made it work for him. His voice whispered, growled, soothed, and sobbed, but never, not once—even when you thought it would during the cliffhanging climax ('my god, he can still breathe!') — never did it crack.

Constantly straining his larynx, Young probably abuses his voice out of despair, not just because hereallzes his limitations...

But the voice of Neil Young (who surely has learned 'Only the Lonely,' 'It's Over' and 'Running Scared' by heart) invariably does crack. Withdrawn like his idol and wearing the dark shades to hide his tired eyes (rustics never sleep), Young will never approach his dream: that dramatically soaring moment when Orbison's vocal peformance reaches nirvana. Consistantly straining his larynx (listen to 'Tired Eyes'— he practically strangles himself), Young probably abuses his voice out of despair, not just because he realizes his limitations (that he can never sing like Orbison), but because he possesses the wisdom of a realist: He knows that nobody will ever sing like Orbison...because that awsome voice belongs to an irretrievable past. Wobbling and winding seemingly out of nowhere, Neil Young's voice is the voice of the ageless.

The Orbison-Young connection ' may seem somewhat contrived, but it also helps to know that Young's only cover of a country song is a brooding version of Don Gibson's 'Oh, Lonesome Me' (see Orbison Sings Don Gibson); Orbison too was stalked by tragedy (his wife was killed in a motorcycle accident and two of his children died in a household fire); and two years before After the Gold Rush, Orbison starred in his own Western, The Fastest Guitar Alive (if Young knows this, his resurrection of the concept will probably be his penultimate and most pretentious statement) .

Of course, no one would ever mistake Young for the fastest guitarist alive. Much can be made of the sorrow and the disillusionment present in his voice, but it's also his guitar leads that frequently jolt us back into reality. Listen to his guitar dwell upon the recurring 'no''s at the end of 'Last Dance' or how it punches into the message of 'Don't Be Denied.' On 'Like A Hurricane,' the guitar lines searingly undercut the metaphorical passion of the lyrics; on 'Cortez The Killer,' the intro, playing a funeral blues, warns of the approaching doom; on 'Southern Man,' the guitar break brings the burning crosses into view. And it is the maniacal guitar solo on 'Down by the River' that makes you believe the singer has actually shot his lady.

Despite the infatuation that they feel for their instruments, many guitarists have chosen to abuse them. Pete Townshend smashed his, and Jiml Hendrix picked his up with his teeth and then set it aflame—but Neil Young is the only rock artist ever to decide to disembowel his guitar. Unlike the wantonly destructive stunts of Hendrix and Townshend, Young's disembowelment has never been a mere act of showmanship: he slices into the heart of his guitar, entangling himself in its raw nerves, as if to draw blood; or, as if to remincT himself that being alive means never forgetting the presence of pain. 'Sooner or later, it all gets real,' sings Young on 'Walk On,' but the words are only an empty sermon—it is the jagged persistence of his guitar that slaps them on the pavement.

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Like all immortal primatives from Bo Diddley to the Ramones, Young employs minimalism as dn attack against the ennui of rock's slick tyranny. On 'Ambulance Blues' and 'Revolution Blues,' he comes as close as he ever has to bringing Dylan's '60's revolt back home (except that, in the '70's, blowing in the wind becomes 'pissing in the wind'). But to do that, he had to stand alone, which meant disavowing the counter-culture that nurtured him. It's this simple fact that has caused some to disregard Young as a wasted has-been, an ex-hippie who lost his way toward-mellow unconsciousness; yet it's also this fact that makes him probe the black landscape that so few dare even acknowledge ('still the searcher must ride the dark horse' could qualify as Young's motto), that which makes his music so truthfully alive (his critics might say slpppy, but in rock 'n' roll, that's usually the same thing).

Because of his constant repudiation of the Woodstock debris, Young has become a self-exiled hero. To call him the '70's equivalent of Dylan, though, says nothing beyond that both possess the poet's ageless voice, whining into oblivion. In a sense, although his music certainly isn't as profound as Dylan's, Young as a symbol embodies a greater profundity: He is the father of 70's punk. Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison, and countless others have been given that coveted title but only because they represented a consistent punk attitude from an early date. If they spat in the counter-culture's eye, they had nothing to lose—and everything to gain.

But by examining the miasma of a pop culture that permits its artists to live in a somnambulistic state without regard for the aftereffects, Young challenged his own comfortable condition as a singer/songwriter. Naturally it helps that he's a genuine slob, but his status as punkdom's finest spokesman also rests upon a formidable body of work, most of which remains the '70's best articulation of what it means not to surrender to rock's pervasive glossiness. On 'On The Beach,' you can hear what Young lost in the process, as he sings the blues like no other 70's folkie superstar could. In the song, no longer playing by the rules* the singer has become an outcast— he can't even face his audience. It's a frightening existence, gray and grief-stricken, where pictures fall off the wall and where there's a chance the world itself may very well turn away. At a radio interview, that life finally becomes unbearable—the singer ends up 'alone at the microphone.' After such a traumatic experience, his only recourse is to retreat to the beach.. .but the 'sea gulls are still out of reach. '

Throughout his career (although he never hid in the past), it seems like Young has always been living on that beach. He rarely does interviews, and considering his artistic status, articles about him in rock magazines are usually sporadic and incomplete (a quick rummage through a decade's worth of CREEM will definitely bear this out). One can only imagine what might occur at an interview actually initiated by Young, promising it as a moment of true enlightenment ('the perfect conversation,' he says over the phone, 'brief and to the point''):,

The interviewer enters a dimly lit room, small and vacant. Sprawled on a tattered sofa, Neil Young (a dark figure with even darker eyebrows hiding his eyes) is picking an acoustic guitar beside the glow of an oil lantern. Between sips of Wild Turkey, he is mumbling some new lyrics about Tonto and the Lone Ranger. Young notices the visitor out of the corner of his eye and nods toward him. .

There is no chair for the interviewer so he stands facing the shadowy figure on the, couch. He searches in his tweed jacket for his note pad.

Before the interviewer even has a chance to attempt small talk or to phrase the first syllable of his first question, Young leans over his guitar and picks up a worn paperback which has been lying next to the flickering lantern. It is a copy of William Faulkner's As / Lay Dying (Vintage Edition, 1964).

Young quietly thumbs to an earmarked page and then looks into the interviewer's eyes. Nothing is said so thd songwriter on the sofa proceeds to read.

It is the words of Addie Bundren that he reads; in Faulkner's great novel, she awaits death, patiently watching her coffin being built! Like a medium in contact with a ghost, Neil Young is possessed by the voice of the fictitious character.

'I would think how words go Straight up in a thin line*' he reads in a hushed manner, 'quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words. '

He closes the bpok and places it on top of his guitar. At first, the interviewer only - smiles, almost in sympathy, and starts to look at his notes for something to say; then, in mid-thought, he pauses, bows his head, and returns his notebook to his coat pocket