Neil Young and Bob Dylan stay true to their inscrutable muses
By: |Published: November 7, 2012 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/pop_rocks
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| BACK TRACKING: Young recaptures the churning fury of classic Crazy Horse |
"The
first time I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone,’ I felt that magic and took it
home," a stoically nostalgic Neil Young recalls at the start of
"Twisted Road," an homage not just to Bob Dylan, but also to his own
formative years as a rocker. "Gave it a twist and made it mine," he
continues, bolstered by barbed guitars and the incessant drive of his longtime
compadres in Crazy Horse, "But nothing was as good as the very first
time." The song is the opening track on disc two of Psychedelic Pill, an epic new album by Young and Crazy Horse that
aims to recapture the overdriven sound and churning fury the band first
harnessed in the mid to late ‘70s, on classics like Zuma and Rust Never Sleeps,
and largely succeeds.
Young's nod to Dylan, who, at 71, also
has a fairly epic new disc out titled Tempest,
is one of just nine tracks on the 66 year-old singer, songwriter, guitarist,
and bandleader's 35th studio album. Spanning 87 minutes, it's also his longest
to date. And, it arrives at the end of what's been a remarkably busy year for Young,
who released Americana, a collection
of freewheeling reworkings of tradition folk tunes amped up by Crazy Horse, a
little less than six months ago, and who published the memoir Waging Heavy Peace just a couple weeks
ago.
As that title suggests, Young's never
shied from controversy or been afraid to be topical. In the ‘70s, he addressed
the plight of Native Americans in two of his more stirring, Crazy Horse-powered
tunes, "Cortez the Killer" and "Powderfinger." He ended the
‘80s with "Rockin' In the Free World," an angry salvo targeting the
Reagan/Bush years. And he was anything but subtle on 2006's Living With War, a disc that found him
raging against the policies of another chief executive on tracks like
"Let's Impeach the President" and "Lookin' for a Leader."
But, like Dylan, he's too mercurial to be pinned down as single-minded protest
singer, just as he was wound a bit too tightly to stick to folksy acoustic
guitar picking when he first emerged from the ruins of Buffalo Springfield as a
solo artist.
Young has a bit of fun with his own
twisted legacy at the start of "Driftin' Back," the nearly thirty
minute-long opening track on Psychedelic
Pill. Referencing one of his own Rust
Never Sleeps-era classics, "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)," he
mellowly strums an acoustic guitar and, with earnest fragility, intones
"Hey, now now/Hey, now now/I'm drifting' back/Dreamin' about the way
things sound now/Write about them in my book/Worry that you can't hear me
now/Or feel the time I took/To make you feel this feeling/And let you ride
along." But, as he's heading into the next refrain, a stormy surge of
distorted guitars and pounding drums washes away any trace of a folk singalong
and, suddenly, he's plugging in with Crazy Horse and alighting on one of the
expansive tune's many reverb-drenched guitar solos.
Psychedelic
Pill evolved out of the sessions for Americana,
a disc that marked Young's first collaboration with Crazy Horse in nearly ten
years, and you get the sense that it was all a happy accident of sorts. Having
spent the months leading up to Americana
finishing Waging Heavy Peace, Young
was clearly in a reflective mood, and happy to be back in the company of
guitarist Frank Sampedro, bassist Billy Talbot, and drummer Ralph Molina. It's
certainly as raw and untethered as anything Young's ever recorded, with quite a
few long and roiling solo guitar excursions buffering scattershot bits of verse
that, in "Driftin' Back," touch on everything from hating MP3s and
wanting a "hip-hop haircut," to "big tech" turning Picasso
into "wallpaper."
Young sticks to more straightforward
narratives on the disc's two other long-runners, both of which clock in at just
over 16 minutes. "Ramada Inn" wistfully follows a couple through the
vagaries —"good times" and "ups and downs" — of a couple’s life,
from bringing up kids and having drinks with old friends, to simply
"holding on to what they've done." And the more obviously
autobiographical "Walk Like a Giant" is a minor-key meditation on the
hopes and dreams of the Woodstock generation. "Me and some of my friends
were going to change the world," Young sings plainly. "But then the
weather changed, and the white got stained, and it fell apart, and it breaks my
heart, to think about how close we came."
Elsewhere, Young taps into echoes from
his Crazy Horse past, carving out a monster “Cinnamon Girl”-style riff on the
disc’s title track, which comes in two forms: a oddly phase-shifted version,
and a more bristling and metallic alternate mix that features a searing
one-note guitar solo. And the romantic sway of “She Loves to Dance” brings to
mind the fevered dreaminess of “When You Dance I Can Really Love.” Both tunes,
like the bulk of Psychedelic Pill,
ultimately reflect Young’s unshaken belief in the liberating power of rock and
roll, even if it still breaks his heart that he and some friends weren’t quite
able to change the world some forty years ago.
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| FACT AND FICTION: Dylan conflates the two on Tempest's title track. |
Dylan is one of those friends, but he
gave up on the idealism of the ’60s quite some time ago and has been going off
on unpredictable tangents ever since. Tempest
surely counts as one of them. Another long player that clocks in at an hour and
change, it’s an eclectic collection of quiescent, darkly hued tunes that
reveal, like so many of his recent albums, Dylan’s own uniquely skewed vision
of Americana. It does open on a relatively bright note, with the pre-rock
ragtime swing of “Duquesne Whistle,” an old-timey train ride with some
typically quizzical lines like “I can hear a sweet voice steadily calling/Must
be the mother of our lore.”
Dylan, his weathered voice sounding dry
as the dustbowl wind, hasn’t lost his penchant for inscrutable verse. “Two
timing slim/Who’s every heard of him?,” he asks nonchalantly in the countrified
“Soon After Midnight,” before threatening “I’ll drag his corpse through the mud”
— that, in a song that hangs its main hook on the line, “It’s soon after
midnight/And I’ve got a date with the fairy queen.” And, in the bluesy “Long
and Wasted Years,” he’s all over the place, relenting “I ain’t seen my family
in twenty years. . . they may be dead by now,” warning “Don’t you know, the sun
can burn your brains right out,” and explaining, in nice rhyme, “I wear dark glasses to cover my eyes/There
are secrets in ’em I can’t disguise.”
Stranger, yet, are two of the album’s more
transparent tunes. The title track, “Tempest,” is a 45-verse retelling of the
Titanic voyage that conflates historical fact and contemporary fiction by
including an odd reference to Leonardo DiCaprio and his sketchbook. And,
although it’s admittedly a moving and seemingly heartfelt John Lennon elegy,
“Roll On John” seems somewhat randomly tacked onto the end of the disc, particularly
when you consider that Lennon was shot 22 years ago. The song does fit the general
tenor of Tempest, which is full of
death, murder, violence, and tragedy. But, it leaves one to wonder why Dylan
waited over two decades to write it. I’m sure he’s got his reasons. And, it’s a
good bet he’s not telling.
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