NEIL YOUNG

CANNON BLASTS

Neil Young & Crazy Horse rewrite the Americana songbook

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: June 09, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com

Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Americana (Reprise)

It's no secret — and it hasn't been for quite some time — that Neil Young is proud to wear his eccentricities on his sleeve, flaunting the very quirks that make him ripe for parody. He's a legacy artist whose idiosyncrasies are so strikingly pronounced that Jimmy Fallon's audience knows exactly who he's about to impersonate whenever he appears in the requisite faded jeans and flannel shirt, long before he plays the first guitar chord or sings a single plaintive, imperfectly pitched, adenoidal note in a voice that is unmistakably and absolutely definitively Youngian. And yet, as easy as it may be to caricature a true character like Young, whether he's in Harvest hippy mode with broad-brimmed hat and harmonica holder, or violently attacking an electric guitar as he keeps on rockin‘ in the free world with Crazy Horse, he remains an unpredictable enigma, a restless soul fully capable of confounding expectations at any time. Get too comfortable with who you think Neil Young is, and he'll take off in some radical new direction, toying with electronics, as he did on 1982's prescient Trans, hooking up with Booker T. & the M.G.'s for a little study in retro r&b (2002's Are You Passionate?), or, more recently, exploring atmospheric guitar abstractions in the company of Brian Eno protégé Daniel Lanois on 2010's Le Noise.

       So it shouldn't come as a total shock that Young's new Americana, the 34th album he's released as a solo artist since his self-titled debut in 1968, isn't exactly what at first glance it might appear to be. For starters, it's absolutely not a twangy excursion through the dusty back roads of what's come to be known as "alt-country." Young kinda already did that back in 1985 with the then controversial Old Ways, an album featuring, among other Nashville luminaries, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. The disc was so country-to-the-core — i.e., not the rock album people were expecting from Young — that it took nearly two years of legal wrangling with Geffen before the label finally agreed to release it.

       Indeed, Young's notion of Americana as both genre and genome is expansive enough to include the Civil War-era murder ballad "Tom Dula" (a tune popularized in sunnier fashion by the Kingston Trio as "Tom Dooley" in 1958), a ‘50s doo-wop number originally recorded by the Silhouettes ("Get a Job"), the Woody Guthrie campfire classic "This Land Is Your Land,” and, oddly enough, "God Save the Queen" (not the Sex Pistols' angry salvo, but the British anthem that also furnished the melody for our own "My Country, ’Tis of Thee"). In many respects, it's an idea, or ideal, that dates back to Young's nascent experiences as a player in California's burgeoning folk-rock scene in the early ’60s, to the era when Dylan went electric in Newport and plugged-in bands, including Young's own Buffalo Springfield, borrowed freely from long forgotten sources unearthed two decades earlier by dustbowl troubadours like Guthrie.

       But Young doesn't approach this canonized material with anything resembling the sterile reverence so aptly lampooned by Christopher Guest and his cohort in the mockumentary A Mighty Wind. Instead, he hooks up with his longtime compadrés in Crazy Horse (bassist Billy Talbot, drummer Ralph Molina, and guitarist Frank Sampedro), and subjects them to a Rust Never Sleeps-style pounding that makes them roar and howl with new life. Young and Crazy Horse aren't engaged in "covering" the eleven songs on Americana in the conventional sense; they're reinterpreting them, freely and often radically, treating them as the open and ever-evolving texts that they were prior to record industry standardization.

TAKING LIBERTIES: Neil Young subjects folk classics to a pounding that makes them roar and howl.

       Young is explicit about that in his liner notes, which trace the lineage of each track and detail the degree to which he's taken liberties with them. "Wayfarin‘ Stranger," the only Americana track that sets aside grungy, overdriven electric guitars for folky acoustic strumming, is a “19th-century folk song. . . influenced by the Burl Ives’ 1944 recording," while "Clementine," a churn-and-burn rocker in Crazy Horse's hands, is based on an old tale – of a man's loss of either his wife or daughter – that's been credited to as many as three different writers in the second half of the 19th century, "using many of the original words and a new melody."

       But you don't have to be a folkologist to appreciate what Young's up to on Americana. Most of the song titles and plenty of the refrains here have the ring of the familiar, even as the melodies are muscled in unexpected directions, artfully contorted by the intuitive chemistry — a kind of electromagnetic bond — Young has spent years cultivating with Crazy Horse. As if to drive that point home, the disc opens with what sounds like four guys just messing around in the studio, searching for the right note, with Young sketching the outlines of a groove with some sinewy guitar soloing, and Molina pounding out a few snare hits and hesitantly riding a cymbal before they all land on the same chord and begin to pick up a head of steam that keeps them chugging along blissfully for a good five minutes. "It sounds very funky. . . it's really good. . .," you can hear Young enthuse as the Americana interpretation of "Oh Susanna" (originally performed on September 11, 1847 by Stephen Foster; updated in 1964 by Tim Rose and the Thorns) comes to a crashing close.

       Americana is peppered with small pleasures that, like “Oh Susanna,” erupt with a nearly palpable emotional intensity, with seemingly unguarded moments when you can almost feel the songs coming together in real time, and the band’s enthusiasm becomes infectious. Even “This Land Is Your Land,” a one-time protest song written in reaction to “God Bless America” that’s largely been rendered inert by too many facile sing-alongs, comes back to life as a barbed — and timely — social commentary, thanks largely to Young’s rescuing of several verses that might otherwise have been lost in the dustbin of history. “Through the shadow of the steeple, I saw my people” he sings against a clippity-clop country groove, “I saw my people by the relief office/I seen my people as they stood hungry/And I stood there asking, is this land made for you and me?”

       Young has a few other political points to make on “Americana.” But I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise of the snarling spin that he, Crazy Horse, and a children’s choir put on “God Save the Queen.” Americana embodies a larger artistic idea that transcends politicking: time doesn’t kill songs; people do. And, more often than not, it takes someone as defiantly unconventional as a Neil Young to reverse that process.