The ABCs of Neil Young: Two Views of Waging Heavy Peace

This is the third or fourth book I’ve read about Neil Young. One was Shakey by Jimmy McDonough, which began life as an authorized biography and quickly ended up being done at an arm’s length (Shakey, or rather, Bernard Shakey is Young’s pseudonym). The next one was called Long May You Run (by Daniel Durcholz and Gary Graff), and it’s a good companion to have on hand while reading Young’s just-published autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace (Penguin Books), since it is an illustrated history filled with pictures, posters, memorabilia and more. Then there’ve been special issue magazines, and whole sections on Neil in books about Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. But now we have the man’s own perspective. Neil Young’s own words … and, just like Bob Dylan’s long-awaited Chronicles (Volume One came out in 2004), it puts a whole new spin on what we know about its author.

Knocked Out Loaded: Neil Young’s Le Noise

Neil Young’s Le Noise is a centered, focused and authentic recording designed to both inspire and knock you on the head. Young has also knocked himself on the head. Le Noise features the kind of raw ambience that he hasn’t achieved since Ragged Glory (1990). And he’s served it up with some serious lyrical content. Young has had a career of tripping up his muse to continually stir up his creativity. In fact, looking over his long body of work, he’s spent decades shifting both his and our expectations of where he would go next. Freedom (1989), which contained electric and acoustic versions of “Rockin’ in the Free World,” dipped into a variety of musical styles. That album led unexpectantly to the quietly conceived best selling Harvest Moon three years later. Next, he rocked out with the members of Pearl Jam on Mirror Ball in 1995 before following that with the under-recognized country/roots record Silver & Gold (2000). Five years later, he returned with the beautifully rendered and reflective Prairie Wind.

Back to Basics: Neil Young's A Letter Home

Neil Young. (Photo courtesy of The Canadian Press)

There's a certain irony to the news that Neil Young considers his newest release to be "low-tech." After all, he's been complaining for years that the Mp3 is an inferior audio technology for music, even though all of his music is available in that format. He's even developed an audio system, and player (Pono), that uses FLAC audio files, larger in size and presumably in audio quality. That said, his new album, A Letter Home (Third Man Records), was recorded in a refurbished 1947 Voice-O-Graph, quite literally the size of a phone booth. Jack White, who co-produced this album, purchased one for his label storefront in Nashville. In this small space, Young has recorded 11 songs that he considers chestnuts of the folk and country music catalogue. A good friend of mine sent me a pre-release copy on CD no less, although the album has been released on LP. A limited edition package containing CD and LP formats plus a DVD is scheduled for release on May 27.

The album itself has a rawness that resembles the original Edison recordings of the 19th Century rather than anything from 1947. But the spirit of the music and Young's performance is all that matters, and he's really done more here than simply cover the most familiar songs in contemporary music with an antiquated technology. Most other artists might treat this as a novelty, but this is Neil Young, an artist who likes to surprise us. So he's done something comparable to what we heard a few years ago on his album, Le Noise (Reprise, 2010), where he featured new, personal songs enhanced by Daniel Lanois’s interesting soundscapes. Since A Letter Home looks to the technology of the past, the sound is deliberately dreadful. The fidelity is tinny, razor sharp to the ear with little bottom end. It's in mono, which is fine, but the production values are lean. If it wasn't for the performance value, which is strong, this could be considered Young's worst sounding album ever.

Hey Hey: Neil Young’s Wanderings Can Never Disappoint

In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, director Jonathan Demme explained why he’s been inspired to shoot three documentaries about a certain iconic rocker: “His music was my companion for decades before I even met him.” Amen to that. The Toronto concert footage at the center of Neil Young Journeys includes a rendition of “Ohio,” his wrenching song about four people killed 42 years ago by the National Guard during an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University. This was a defining moment in an era that tore America to shreds. Young’s May 2011 performances deliver a gritty reminder, enhanced by a visual display with the names and photos of the May 1970 victims.

Three months later, “Ohio” was also the tune emanating from the sound system of a drug store on the Champs Elysee in Paris, where my husband and I – newlyweds – had landed in an attempt to flee the madness of the United States. “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/ We’re finally on our own/ This summer I hear the drumming/ Four dead in Ohio...” I froze. There is no exit from man-made hell, as Sartre suggested. Wherever we went on a trip through Europe that was more escape hatch than honeymoon, the turmoil back home found a way to haunt us.

Everything's Cheaper Than It Looks – Neil Young's ROXY: Tonight's the Night Live

Neil Young perfoming Tonight's the Night at the Roxy. (Photo: Getty Images)

Any worthy art stands on its own, as a formalized and unitary capture of experience, apart from the facts of how it was created or released into the world. To be overwhelmed by Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, for instance, you needn’t know a thing about the conditions of its making, its first release, its mutilation, or its eventual rediscovery in a janitor’s closet in an Oslo mental hospital. You needn’t have read a single book about Joan herself, or be aware of Dreyer’s other films. But some works – like, in fact, The Passion of Joan of Arc – are so informed by circumstance and so infused with the extraordinary that to regard them in isolation from their histories seems perverse, and not in the fun way. That applies to Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night as much as it does to any rock album. One loved it before ever knowing much about the deaths behind it, or the story of how it came to be; but over time, as that knowing accumulated, the album inevitably took on whole new dimensions, haunted thoughts that are now inseparable from one’s experience of the music itself.

Arc of a Song: On Broadway

Songwriters Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, circa 1966 (Getty Images)

In the history of popular music, or music written since 1900, we currently enjoy an evolution of 113 years worth of the art of the song. I’d like to take a look at one song, “On Broadway,” and four contrasting versions that reflect the times in which they were recorded.

“On Broadway” was written by Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, two of the most successful songwriters to come out of the famous Brill Building, the songwriter’s haven of New York City. It was first recorded in 1962 by a girl-group known as The Cookies, whose version was more of a light novelty pop song. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who shared an office with Weil and Mann in the Brill Building, took the song to a different, now familiar, version, setting the tune to an R&B rhythm and changing the phrasing to reflect an more nuanced and personal story about a young person looking for hope “on Broadway”. The result of Weil/Mann/Leiber/Stoller collaboration was the remarkable 1963 recording by The Drifters.

Intimate and Satisfying Deeds: Pegi Young's Foul Deeds

Pegi Young’s Foul Deeds is a very satisfying album. (Pegi Young's music career has traditionally been seen in the shadow of her famous husband Neil. Yet she has written her own songs and released a few albums featuring members of Neil's band.) But it’s sad to learn that Ben Keith, the long-time pedal steel guitarist who died July 26, 2010, has turned up on Foul Deeds as his last recorded statement. After a good career in Nashville as sideman and studio musician to such greats as Patsy Cline and Faron Young, Keith was hired to play on Harvest (1972), one of the most beloved albums in Neil Young's catalogue. Listening is the most important element to good musicians and Keith's ears were second to none. His work on Foul Deeds is exceptional in giving the record a sound and musical quality that's "in the pocket." Keith's style and tone supports the singer and the song while fueling the tempo. "Side of the Road," featuring Neil Young on harmonica, makes the case.

Chasing Phantoms - From Del Shannon to Neil Young: "Runaway" and "Like a Hurricane"

When I was six and driving in the car with my parents, the radio often provided comfort either by giving me voices in the larger world beyond the roads we travelled, or music that could take me inside the world of the singer. For myself, the rock & roll I heard in 1960 was about finding a place, to paraphrase John Lennon, where I could go when I felt low. The songs of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly could reach out to the friendless and disenfranchised and invite us to to be part of something larger than ourselves. Even if their tunes were about heartache and loss, the mere sharing of that pain gave credence to the idea that one could transcend it because the music was about giving pleasure. In one of his last recorded songs, "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," Buddy Holly playfully teases himself about how foolish he was to be driven crazy by the woman who abandons him. Not only does the singer survive the loss, he understands the price he was willing to pay in the process so he could move on. (It was only in real life, unlike in the nowhere land of the song, that Buddy Holly could lose his life in a plane crash he couldn't control.)

Fun for the Holidays: Select Offerings in Music, Collections, Books, DVDs and Magazines

Real World 25, from Peter Gabriel's Real World label is one of many great gift possibilities this holiday season.

It’s the holidays, the stressful time of year when you scurry about trying to match the right gift with the right person. There’s so much to choose from out there, in music, books, collections and DVDs... so where do you begin? Here are some selections I think you’ll like, something for every kind of taste.

The Fall and Rise of Jonathan Demme

Many fans of the works of Jonathan Demme think he made a major mistake when he directed his Academy-Award winning film The Silence of the Lambs (1981). Although the film was a huge hit and received critical acclaim, it was a step away from the type of funky, loose, music-filled films for which he had become known: Something Wild (1986), Married To The Mob (1988) and Melvin and Howard (1980), etc. Though I'm not among the naysayers (because I've always liked the picture), I appreciate their point of view. After Lambs' success, he got trapped in the world of 'prestige' pictures that seem aimed at garnering awards and attracting acclaim. Though a picture like the overly earnest Philadelphia (1993) won Oscars and was a hit at the box office, he went on to do the disastrous Beloved (1998) and the ridiculous remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004). By embracing this type of film, he seemed to have lost that light touch (even in darker material like Something Wild) that made his earlier pictures so appealing.

Podcast: Interview with Scott Young (1984)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. 

One of those interviews was with Canadian journalist, sportswriter, and novelist Scott Young (1918-2005). Along with publishing over 45 books in his lifetime, he was also the father of musician Neil Young. In 1984, McClelland and Stewart published his memoir, Neil And Me. I sat down with Scott Young to talk about the book, his life, and his famous son around the time of the book's publication. Often, as readers, we're used to devouring memoirs by the sons and daughters of famous people where they assess the legacy that parents leave their children. With Neil And Me, the reverse takes place, as a father takes stock of the famous son he helped raise with the added bonus of trying to glean from his songs when and where he might be a character within them.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Scott Young as it aired on CJRT in 1984.

Tom Fulton was the host and producer of On the Arts for CJRT-FM in Toronto for 23 years, beginning in 1975.
 

Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.  

Blame it on Hamilton: A Celebration

It’s Tuesday after Juno week in Hamilton. The big poster designed by Tom Wilson still overlooks James Street. Swag bags are emptied though, and the blue boxes are filled with was passed for swag in some of those bags. Booklets, ads, tickets are blowing down the road. All that remains are the memories. Memories of that week when all the clubs were full of people, and music was played everywhere. Even Limeridge Mall had an event. A music event! Not a sale. The libraries had an event, believe it or not. Hamilton Public hosted a concert in the round on their 4th floor. And McMaster Libraries did a demonstration of electronic instruments for attendees! Give your head a shake. I was there, participating, demoing the Makey Makey and my colleagues showed off the Atari Punk Console, the Little Bits Synth Kit and a theremin that was also built from a kit. The theremin was the big draw. After people bought their beer at the bar they were pulled over by the sounds of alien invasion coming from the weird black box. They then stayed to twist the knobs of the punk console or bang away on the banana piano. Yep, it’s a piano with bananas for keys (or forks, or tofu, or even raw meat). Fun wow!

Simply Chronicling: The History of Canadian Rock by Bob Mersereau

Bob Mersereau is a producer with the CBC. Alongside thousands of reviews for various newspapers and magazines he has authored two of the most entertaining and informative books on Canadian Rock and Roll. The Top 100 Canadian Albums and The Top 100 Canadian Singles are must have volumes for the maple leaf music lover. They are smart, well designed, and just plain fun. Open either of them to any page and you’re drawn immediately into an argument about which single didn’t make the cut, which should have, why is Neil Young so heavily represented, where is Pagliaro in all this. I regularly return to these volumes to remind myself of albums or singles I bought, lost, traded, hated and loved. Unfortunately Mersereau’s new book, The History of Canadian Rock (Backbeat Books), is not the sequel I’d hoped it would be. It’s not his fault, though. It’s incredibly difficult to maintain that level of sport when you’re just chronologically reporting on act after act, single after single. The same is true of The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll. It was called Rock of Ages and had three authors (Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes and Ken Tucker). It dealt with the whole international history of rock & roll (well, essentially American, including the British Invasion[s]), but suffered because you just can’t include everybody.

Graham Nash: Wild Tales, A Rock and Roll Life

The photographs on the front and back of Wild Tales: A Rock and Roll Life, Graham Nash’s autobiography, were taken by Nash himself, in mirrors. The front cover shows him circa 1972; the back is more current. In between the two photos is another self-portrait, in words. The story begins with him leaving the place of his birth, walking away from his wife, his band (The Hollies), and his bank account and discovering a new world of music with David Crosby and Stephen Stills, new love (Joni Mitchell) and a new bank account in the USA. The text which tells his story is bracketed by two sentences. He begins “It always comes down to the music,” and concludes, some 345 pages later, “it all comes down to the music.” And that is pretty much Graham Nash’s philosophy.

The Best in Music for 2012

Dave Grohl and Paul McCartney perform at the 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief

For me, this past year in music marked the last stand for the old guard of rock ‘n roll, the consistency of pop and the evolving world of jazz. The old guard for the 12-12-12 benefit concert where Mick Jagger exclaimed “This has got to be the largest collection of old English musicians ever assembled,” signified the so-called staying power of The Rolling Stones, Roger Waters, Paul McCartney and The Who whose connection with the victims of Hurricane Sandy was as thin as Chinese paper. Even though they played well, I was struck by how disconnected their music was from the event. For instance, it was a rather poor choice for McCartney to include a full-on, pyrotechnical presentation of “Live and Let Die” to an audience who just came through a devastating natural disaster. But that didn’t seem to bother the 40-plus-years-of-age audience or deter people from donating their hard earned money.

Pop music continued on its merry way with Canadian’s Carly Rae Jepsen and Justin Bieber racing up the single’s charts. Yet the big seller of 2012 was Gotye’s “Someone That I Used To Know” which spent 24 weeks in the Billboard Top 10. Maroon 5, Fun and Rhiana also made some noise, but this year didn’t have the standout voice of Adele until the end of the year when she released the James Bond movie song, “Skyfall.”

Jazz still lingered large in 2012 with significant records from Ravi Coltrane, Branford Marsalis and Kurt Elling who are now becoming the seasoned veterans of the new generation of younger musicians. Students! The faculty is in great form.

Finally, 2012 saw the passing of one of pop’s biggest stars, Whitney Houston, someone who could hold a candle to the fabulous Etta James (she died in January). But we also lost Dave Brubeck, Johnny Otis and Ravi Shankar, Doc Watson and the late-great Levon Helm: musicians who invested their lives in an art form of which we are all the more richer.

The albums I've listed below stood out for interpretation, sound quality, thoughtfulness and the element of surprise. All of them have been previously reviewed in Critics At Large:

Williamstown Season Openers: Off the Main Road and Legacy

Kyra Sedgwick and Howard W. Overshown in Off the Main Road. (All photos by T .Charles Erickson)

William Inge had four Broadway hits in the 1950s and won an Academy Award for his 1961 screenplay Splendor in the Grass. But then his star faded, and when he killed himself in 1973 his contributions to the American theatre had been relegated to second-tier status. Over the past decade, though, there has been a renewal of interest in his work. Picnic, Bus Stop and Come Back, Little Sheba are now revived with relative regularity, and one of his last plays, Natural Affection, got a fine production off Broadway a couple of seasons ago. And now the Williamstown Theatre Festival has chosen for its mainstage season opener a previously unproduced Inge drama called Off the Main Road from the early sixties. (Reconfigured for television in 1964 under the title Out on the Outskirts of Town, it co-starred Anne Bancroft and Jack Warden.)

Deviation From the Norm: Irwin Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z (2000)

"You can't have progress without deviation from the norm," composer Frank Zappa once wrote. Glancing back on the history of popular music, it shouldn't come as any surprise that it contains a long list of deviators. Out of their time, and breaking and remaking all the rules, these innovators dauntlessly set out to change history. While gleefully altering our perceptions of the world, these artists deviate most from the norms we take for granted. American outsiders are the most compelling to watch since they tend to transform themselves along with their work.

In 1925, Louis Armstrong, already a major jazz performer, decided to turn the music on its ear with a series of masterful recordings with the Hot Five and Seven. By reconstructing jazz into a soloist's art form, Armstrong was conveying a secret to all Americans: It's more exciting to stand out from the crowd than it is to join it. A few decades later, a young saxophone player from Kansas City named Charlie Parker decided to answer Armstrong's invitation by breaking the rules of standard harmony. While riffing at lightning speed, Parker ingeniously played within the chords themselves. Soon after, a young truck driver named Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studios in Memphis and made the cocky claim that he sounded like nobody else. Within a few years, he effortlessly altered the face of American music.

When Dreams Come True: Joseph O'Connor's The Thrill of It All

Joseph O’Connor is Sinead O’Connor’s brother. It’s true. I just discovered this yesterday when I was nearly finished reading his new book, The Thrill of It All. It’s about an ‘80s rock band called Ships in the Night and it has nothing to do with Sinead O’Connor, except that her name shows up in a later chapter as one of the contemporary rock stars the reunited Ships are hanging with. Why do I mention this at all? Not sure, really. Interest? I’ve read three of Joseph O’Connor’s books now. I picked up Star of the Sea on a whim in a Dublin bookshop because I just loved the cover, and it was written by an Irishman, and there I was in Ireland, so… I thought it somehow appropriate. It was a stunning and totally engaging read. Remarkable. I couldn’t wait to get to a Canadian bookshop and pick up another of his books. Trouble was… no one had any. A couple of years later Redemption Road appeared, to great reviews. I couldn’t really get into it. A disappointment. I’ll try it again now, after finishing The Thrill of It All.

Named after a Roxy Music song from their 1974 album Country Life, The Thrill of It All tells the story of this band of misfits. (Why is it named after that Roxy Music song? You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.) Robbie Goulding is an Irish-born teenager who picks up a guitar, and forms a band with Vietnamese orphan Francis Xavier Mulvey (more about him later). They enlist the beautiful cellist Sarah-Therese Sherlock and her brother Sean, a tradesman who plays the drums. Together they are the Ships. This is their story. The book is structured like one of those rock star biographies that are appearing everywhere these days. Before Christmas, we’ll see Mick Fleetwood, Jerry Lee Lewis, another volume of Neil Young’s ramblings, and more. So why would anyone who cared about the rock’n’roll life read a fictional book over the real thing? Well, because O’Connor is a good writer, and I’m not so sure about Mick Fleetwood. Keith Richards turned out to be a great story-teller, as did Ray Davies and Pete Townshend. If you were in the right mindset Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace was fascinating, and Bob Dylan? Well, I can’t wait for Volume Two of his Chronicles, but sometimes these books are a complete waste of time. The Thrill of It All is somewhere in the middle of this milieu. Well written, the tales are completely believable. The inner workings of a band are, hmmm, shall we say labyrinthine A band is put together in much the way O’Connor describes it. Two like-minded guitar strummers jam together in one or the other’s living room until their parents kick them into the garage, or the basement, or better yet the other fellow’s house! They recruit a bass player and a drummer and then they start playing little gigs at the school, or the local pub. I’ve done it and so have hundreds of thousands of other teachers, accountants, and other used-to-wanna be rock stars.

Understatement: Jason Schneider's Whispering Pines

The Band

“There is no music that you can say, ‘Oh, that’s Canadian – know what I mean? It’s North American music – different countries, but you hear the exact same music, from blues to cowboy. So rather than talking about Calgary or Montreal, we talked about places that we played in."
– Robbie Robertson quoted in Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music.

It’s been commonly held for years that Canadian musical performers only achieve their due recognition when they go south of the border. While that remains something of a simplification, there are still many examples to choose from – Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, just to name a few. Fortunately, in his recent book Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music…From Hank Snow to The Band (ECW Press, 2009), author Jason Schneider develops a more substantial rendering of this phenomenon. By examining the Canadian songwriting tradition as a national narrative, he’s able to illustrate how our musical artists subtly permeate the American experience rather than seek out our neighbour’s validation. In a series of essays that chart the careers of Hank Snow, Wilf Carter, Ian & Sylvia and Leonard Cohen, Schneider (Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance) draws a delicate map of our cultural influence in popular music. He doesn’t so much examine how our identity as Canadians is felt in American music, but rather how American popular music has been enriched by our Canadian sensibilities.

The Monkees: The Revenge and Resurrection of Tin Pan Alley

There was a time when it was seen as cool, and definitely hip, to disparage The Monkees. Perceived by some as the Justin Biebers of their time, they were even called "The Pre-Fab Four," cheap imitations of The Beatles and defined as teeny-bopper fodder. Yet despite the crass commercial packaging and their faux A Hard Day's Night-style TV show, The Monkees (who early on had seasoned session men playing their instruments) were more than just a marketing executive's idea of a wet dream. They were used essentially as a volley shot, a cannon blast that reached back to the American Revolution and aimed towards a series of British Invasion bands, led by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Were they simply a fad? Maybe they were conceived that way. But The Monkees turned out to be the revenge and resurrection of Tin Pan Alley.

Tin Pan Alley

Tin Pan Alley was the name given to a publishing company located on West 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. From 1880 to 1953, this block became something of an epicenter for both songwriting and music publishing in America; and it provided the foundation for what became the standards in American song penned by composers like Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Frank Loesser and Yip Harburg. Composers and lyricists were hired on a permanent basis to provide an industry for popular music. For until the emergence of Tin Pan Alley, European operettas had been the predominant norm and influence on American songs.