Johnny One-Song

For Neil Young, dumb can be cosmic

by Brett Milano

Whenever someone asks Neil Young about meanings and subtexts in the music he makes with Crazy Horse, the answer is invariably something like, "I dunno, we just like playing loud." After all these years, I'm starting to believe him. The sound Crazy Horse make is something of a blank slate. You can hear it as a celebration of the American independent spirit, or you can hear it as a bunch of boneheads playing three-chord rock. And, to get to the point, you can figure that those two things aren't too far apart.

Until fairly recently, Crazy Horse just happened to be a band who played loud. But lately Young's started building a mythology around them as noble primitives. It started on a tour in the late '80s, when they billed themselves as the "Third Best Garage Band in the World" and played on a garage-like set complete with parked car and mechanical bugs. In recent albums with Crazy Horse, he's accented their most boneheaded tendencies: the long squalls of feedback; the tendency to record songs before fully learning them, and to carry them past the 10-minute mark. As music, it's worked fine. The first half of last year's Broken Arrow, chunks of 1993's Sleeps with Angels, and all of 1990's Ragged Glory rank with the best electric music Young's made. And you get a sense that he's claiming the garage as his own lost frontier. He's decided that rock's perfect expression wasn't Woodstock, it was the kids playing "Louie, Louie" in the next suburb. Thus the louder and more basic you play, the more you're getting back to the garden.

So it is that the new double CD The Year of the Horse (Reprise) -- his third double live album with the band and a companion to the forthcoming Jim Jarmusch-directed concert film -- opens with its own best review. "They all sound the same," shouts someone in the audience. "It's all one song," Young fires back. What follows is a two-disc celebration of the band's boneheaded glory. The opening "When You Dance I Can Really Love" used to be a three-minute overloud love song; now it's a seven-minute overloud love song. And its second half is devoted to a pummeling of its original two-chord fadeout. Likewise, the finale, "Sedan Delivery," closes with some proudly dumb feedback that ends only when the disc cuts off.

Just as Broken Arrow was a weirder version of Ragged Glory, The Year of the Horse is a weirder version of Ragged Glory's live follow-up, Arc/Weld. The song list is heavy on obscure album tracks, including none of the usual barnstormers -- no "Hey Hey, My My," no "Like a Hurricane," no "Tonight's the Night," and no "Cortez the Killer," since all four songs were already on both Arc/Weld and Live Rust. (I'm sorry to report that "Change Your Mind" -- the guitar-jam standout from Sleeps with Angels that cries out for a live version -- isn't here either.) As a result, the album isn't faithful to Young's recent live shows. Although it was recorded last summer, hardly anything on it was in the set list at Great Woods, and there are a few odd choices. Nine minutes of "Barstool Blues" was a nice idea, but the vocal lacks the necessary venom, and the maudlin "When Your Lonely Heart Breaks" wasn't worth digging up. A much better song, "Human Highway," revives the aching sensitivity that attracted so many college students to Young in the '70s. It still works, but here it's sitting on the wrong album.

One can only guess how those sensitive fans would have reacted if he had hit them with "Prisoners of Rock 'n' Roll," a classically boneheaded anthem rescued from 1988's Life album. Set to a gung-ho three-chord riff -- yep, the chords in "Louie Louie" -- the lyric gripes that "record-company clowns" won't leave the band alone; they just want to play too loud and hang out with the local girls in their garage. And the chorus is "That's why we don't wanna be good." To prove the point, the version here ends with a solo-guitar "Star Spangled Banner" with notes flubbed all over the place. But you realize how much dumber it would sound at this point if Young had played it correctly.

Still, there's a thin line between the boneheaded and the cosmic, and Young and company cross it on the set's two longest songs. "Danger Bird" is twice as long as the original Zuma version, and about twice as slow, reviving the darker shades and the stoned-out majesty of their playing in the Tonight's the Night era. "Slip Away" goes further into the ether, with a haunting tune that builds into a substantial guitar solo -- not random feedback this time but a long release of tension -- as Ralph Molina locks into a repeating lick on his tom-toms. Even without keyboards the result has an electronic feel. Its trance-like quality can bring visions of strobe-lit jams in the '60s, or trendy raves in the '90s. And as the guy said, it's all one song.