Neil Young's "Ditch Trilogy" Poll

How does Zuma fit into this discussion? It rocks a little harder, but still has the same burned out vibe as Tonight's the Night and On the Beach.

Zuma is the I'm-single-and-loving-it album. He's over the malaise.

i love Zuma, and it's patchwork nature, with CSNY harmonies and Crazy Horse jams on the same record. wonder if that bugged crosby.

Zuma is my favourite NY album

was just talking to friend who thought that Zuma should be grouped in with the previous three albums. I think the main difference is in the guitar playing -- Zuma's where we get our first real glimpse of what "Neil Young" guitar playing would be. Not that he hadn't played plenty of lead guitar beforehand, but Zuma's got those big wind-blown solos that would become his trademark.

And those chunk-a-chunk chords.

yeah, totally -- but lyrically, it is as "down" as many of those ditch records ...

He was hardly Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky before that

true

isn't Zuma the only one with just Crazy Horse?

(out of the four I mean)

Tonight's The Night is Crazy Horse

yeah but it's got Nils and stuff on it. . . I dunno. Zuma seems like a separate thing to me!

Zuma is Crazy Horse. TTN has Nils Lofgren, Ben Keith, David Briggs on it?

Zuma is the first with Frank Sampredo

Zuma's the only one credited to Crazy Horse ... and even that has CSNY and a recording from previous sessions ... It's funny - most of the Crazy Horse records are actually hodgepodges ...

they're all hodgepodges

time fades away has stuff from '71 on it, "l.a." was written in the late 60s

the TTN acetate from '73 has "winterlong", "walk on" and "for the turnstiles" on it

"don't cry no tears" from zuma had been kicking around for a decade, and he played "pardon my heart" at the 74 bottom line show, which is mostly TTN and OTB material

the 3 proper ditch albums are as different from each other as they are from zuma, so the demarcations aren't really clear, and are in fact pretty artificial

it's almost like neil would just record and record and record, making compilations of his own stuff, trying out different arrangements of things, rather than go into the studio with a set of songs to record and release

"walk on" sounds like it could fit right on TTN

it was actually from the Harvest era, right?

wiki says "see the sky about to rain" was harvest-era, not sure about "walk on"

that's what i was thinking of.

"walk on" sounds like it could fit right on TTN
So does "For the Turnstiles."

the TTN acetate from '73 has "winterlong", "walk on" and "for the turnstiles" on it

The three records, along with Zuma, are in a class of their own.
But can anyone suggest artists or albums that approximate the same burned out vibe?

townes van zandt and skip spence?

Big Star Third/Sister Lovers

david crosby - "if i could only remember my name"

See this thread.

Those are all good. No Other, and to my ears, Aja, embody it, as well.

What about contemporary artists? Jeff Tweedy tries too hard. Jason Molina comes a little closer, but his work can be a slog. Will Oldham?

Oakley Hall are worth a look. Kurt Vile, My Morning Jacket's early stuff always gets these comparisons. I kinda like the Tennessee Fire, I guess.
mmmm not a whole lot, really.

If you're broad enough in your sonic palette, you can follow Tim F and others' suggestions in the thread on exhaustion I linked to, and find contemporary suggestions from dance music broadly understood.

my morning jacket is so muppety and barfy

Yeah, I don't have any of their records, I don't know.

i think Wilco's Being There is a pretty transparent attempt to do a Tonight's The Night/Exile on Main St. kinda thing. And it's good! Not as great as those records obviously. I guess Being There is like 13 years old now, isn't it.

i love MMJ (esp At Dawn and It Still Moves) but i think they're more everybody knows-era than ditch.

Cool turn of direction for a cool thread...

And to briefly turn it back to a previous direction...

(no tunes? really?

I'm not saying TTN doesn't have "good tunes" -- just that none of them ranks up there with his best. But the point is, the record isn't about tunes, per se -- it's about the overall vibe and aesthetic. I mean, you can hear the guy who did Gold Rush on there pretty clearly, skills intact -- but on the whole, it literally sounds like he passed out or sank into a brutal depression in the middle of writing these songs.

All that said, song-for-song, I find On the Beach (to which Marsh, btw, gives two stars in the Rolling Stone Record Guide) a more rewarding listen.

Tuneless? Not with "Tonight's the Night," "Speakin' Out," "Borrowed Tune," "World on a String," and "Downtown" one after the other.

q, for this thread i guess: has anyone else written lyrics that so explicitly engage their contemporaries? NY seems to explicitly name-check so many other artists and his own life and times, in a way that seems totally unlike any other songwriter i can think of

am i wrong?

whaddaya mean, like, talking about Woodstock on Tonight's The Night?

no, like actual song lyrics!

i was talking about song lyrics -- "I'm not going back to Woodstock for a while" -- from "Roll Another Number."

oh ha.

i mean, he talks explicitly about CSNY, Bob Dylan, roadies that died, etc.

or "I'm singing this borrowed tune, I took from the Rolling Stones"

also, anyone who thinks TTN is "tuneless" needs to get this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51iX2JgAEyL._SS500_.jpg

and learn how to play "Mellow My Mind" and "Speakin' Out"

...although, holy fuck, I had no idea those things had finally gone out of print. seems like they've been around forever, and what prices!

yeah, i've always loved the melody of "Speakin' Out" -- how it sort of tricks you into thinking it's a straight-up blues progression, but then throws in some really lovely little accents.

Who called TTN "tuneless"?

re. other albums with this same "burned out vibe": one reason I think the contemporary rootsy albums listed (e.g. Wilco) fail to reach that same vibe is that none of their authors/performers are as good as Neil Young. But more interesting to me is that the other artists listed fail to understand TTN's vibe. To burn out you must have burned in the first place. Neil's burn out is in response to his fame (with CSN, with Harvest) and the 1973 tour. It's easy enough to be mopey and take a bunch of drugs and declare yourself burned out and ready to write a burned-out album. But that's not why Neil was burned out.

This comes together for me when I think of "Borrowed Tune". Neil sings that he's singing a borrowed tune because he's too wasted to write his own. Implicit is that if he weren't wasted, he could write a tune as good as the Rolling Stones (as they did in 1967, no less). That's a bold claim! But what sells the song as burnout is that you know he could write such a tune. Could Jeff Tweedy or Jason Molina sell such a boast? Listen to Tweedy on "Somebody Else's Song", on Being There, an album mentioned as a contender above: "I sound like what's-his-name". Tweedy sells what he can sell: at best a vague boast, at worst self-deprecation. Whereas Neil, even in his waste, is selling a star.

^think that this warrants an otm.

yeah booming post!