May You Live in Inneresting Times: The Neil Young Voting Thread (deadline July 8)

Joan Baez trotting out her best Shindig! moves at 3:15--priceless. (I think it's her, anyway.)

I like CSN and I like Neil, but, for the most part, I don't like them combined.

ah, but

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kg0v0Er8Ak

yeah, that's awesome. As is the Down By The River clip from around the same time where Neil is on fire.

I've seen that! That rules!

love when crosby realizes his band is ROCKING and he's like YEAH LET'S DO THIS BROS!

I just remembered this odd record. In an election year I might throw it a low vote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBhAUr-8zDc

I was amazed when I heard "War Song" on Archives (no recollection of it on the radio at the time)--it's "Ocean Girl."

As mentioned earlier, no YouTube of "Ocean Girl" (except a homemade cover), but this should work.

http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Ocean+Girl/2BQlaS?src=5

war song is kind of mysterious -- you'd think that it would be more well-known? recorded right after Harvest, featuring one of CSNY...not that it's an amazing song, but it seems to have just been put out and forgotten about.

Amazingly, his fifth-biggest single on Billboard.

http://www.billboard.com/artist/neil-young/chart-history/6076#/artist/neil-young/chart-history/6076

I should qualify that "amazingly"...that he's had so few, that he's made Top 30 exactly once, that #61 would rank fifth.

tied for fifth with Four Strong Winds!

and in seventh at #69 is "Walk On", which always trips me out considering how long it took On the Beach to be released on CD

"Walk On" made it onto Decade tho. I imagine "War Song" would be better remembered today if it had been too. AFAIK, prior to the Archives, the only album it appeared on was a various artists "Rarities" comp Warners put out on vinyl in I think the mid '80s.

Just about finished with my ballot, I think this is my first ILM artist poll, couldn't not participate. Feels like a good time of year for Neil too, I was playing him yesterday and imagine I would've been poll or no poll.

I've never heard "War Song."

Song about George Wallace getting shot in not exactly burning up AM radio in '72 SHOCKAH!

Neil actually is a 4th July thing?! xps I have misunderstood this holiday.

Ah shit, I had a weird bootleg that had "War Song" on it (taped onto cassete for me by a friend). I never new what it was called, or where it came from! Thanks for posting. That just might get me to finish my ballot (and put this song on it, I always loved it). Wish I had that bootleg still, lots of other good rarities on it (that I also don't know the names of).

Maybe most people wouldn't be surprised that Neil's had virtually no hit singles. It's not that I would expect his Hot 100 history to look like Mariah Carey's, but there were a number of singer-songwriters from the early '70s and beyond--the category that Neil most sensibly fits into, even though rarely comfortably--who had two or more high-charting singles. A few: Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, Nilsson, Cat Stevens, Gordon Lightfoot, Carly Simon, Harry Chapin, Don McLean, etc. I know, I know--apples and oranges. On the other hand, he beats Leonard Cohen (0) and ties Randy Newman (1).

Surprise, did better here in Toronto--three Top 10s, four Top 30s on CHUM, the station I grew up listening to:

http://wp1050chumto.blogspot.ca/2012/03/neil-young-on-1050-chum-charts-songs.html

Paul and Carly Simon by far the biggest singles artists on that list.

I thought Joni would have been bigger than Carly in the '70s (even on the singles chart), but you're right, and it's not even close: Joni had no #1s, one Top 10, and another three Top 40 hits; Carly had a #1, a #2, three other Top 10s, and five other Top 40 hits. I thought the Court and Spark singles were bigger than they were.

wasn't it pretty typical for a lot of the big canonical '70s rock acts to be 'album' artists who didn't necessarily impact the Hot 100 very often?

what IS surprising to me is that i just glanced at some spreadsheets i pulled a while back of the 500 most played songs on classic rock radio and Neil is virtually absent from it, only "Rockin' In The Free World." my local classic rock station plays stuff like "Southern Man" and "Cinnamon Girl" and "Ohio" all the time.

I have this imaginary dream-team supergroup in my head consisting of Neil, Daniel Fichelscher from Popol Vuh on 2nd guitar, Danny Thompson on double bass and Levon Helm on drums. Not gonna happen now eh, not that it was ever going to.

In part because of Canadian content rules--I'd like to think it would be true anyway--Neil's easily one of the ten most-played artists on classic-rock radio here. The songs you mention, also "Mr. Soul," "Helpless," "Hey Hey, My My," all the Harvest singles, other Gold Rush tracks, "The Loner," and longer tracks occasionally: "Cowgirl," "Down by the River," and I think I've heard "Like a Hurricane," too. These songs get shuffled around constantly. Nothing from the Ditch albums, not even "Cortez."

wasn't it pretty typical for a lot of the big canonical '70s rock acts to be 'album' artists who didn't necessarily impact the Hot 100 very often?

True, but to me the most salient fact about the early-'70s singer-songwriters wasn't that there was this wave of confessional songwriting--that probably came in with Dylan, and was well established by then--but that artists who were supposed to be so solemn and so whiny (cf. National Lampoon) had this sudden capacity to write catchy hit singles. "Heart of Gold" typified this, I'd say; "Old Man," less so.

A confession: I didn't know 'Horse With No Name' wasn't by Neil until I read your piece, Clemenza. I'd just assumed it was from a soundtrack or something that I'd never happened to hear.

Wikipedia: The song's resemblance to some of Neil Young's work aroused some controversy. "I know that virtually everyone, on first hearing, assumed it was Neil", Bunnell says. "I never fully shied away from the fact that I was inspired by him. I think it's in the structure of the song as much as in the tone of his voice. It did hurt a little, because we got some pretty bad backlash. I've always attributed it more to people protecting their own heroes more than attacking me." By coincidence, it was "A Horse with No Name" that replaced Young's "Heart of Gold" at the #1 spot on the U.S. pop chart.

No recollection at all if I conflated the two in my mind at the time. "A Horse with No Name" was actually released two weeks before Harvest.

I thought it was a CSNY song for a long time, especially with the La, la la la la's

I never noticed the (slight) NY resemblance until now. Listening to the song for what must be the first time in 15 years

Can't remember if I linked to this on another Neil thread or on an SCTV thread (Dave Thomas's brother), but this fits in too, though I'm not sure if he's imitating Neil or imitating America imitating Neil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRvY-I9pNpI&feature=related

like the funky, proto-disco bass line

the Santana hit "Hold On" is an Ian Thomas cover

America got more US chart hits than Neil right? That's messed up.

We're patriotic chumps at heart.

it's not like neil was trying, though

and neil's way more likely to be at the kennedy center honors in the next decade so hey

meanwhile i think i saw two guys from america in a time-life infomercial hawking the smooth 70s radio sound

They also occasionally pop up on Low albums!

So, something I've always wondered about: how does Neil himself rate his numerous albums that either failed to connect or just plain failed? Does he ever make a case for some of that '80s stuff live? Or even, more recently, the electric car album? Or any number of seldom or never-played tracks? I'd suggest he's simply immersed in the must move forward mindset, but of course, Neil has no problem packing his sets with hits he's played a million times, mixed in with new tracks, in typical multi-decade superstar fashion. But how often does Neil ever go real deep? Like, real deep? And dust off some gem from, like, "This Note's for You" or "Time Fades Away?" He seems to conveniently overlook the same stuff everyone else ignores. Like, will we ever hear "Greendale" or "Living with War" material live again, or is it off to the glue factory for them?

year of the horse has two Life tracks, he just put out an International Harvesters live disc, and I know he started banging out "Mideast Vacation" live when it was thematically appropriate. Don't think there's an era he won't revisit - the fact that an album named Chrome Dreams II is keynoted by the Blue Notes says a lot. It's more a matter of what old stuff is appropriate to whatever vibe he's in at the moment - saw a youtube of him doing "Love/Art Blues" not too long ago.

admittedly it gets harder to cover all your bases when you've got 50 years worth of bases, but he's better than most

I'm just surprised that for a cranky iconoclast with around 50 or so albums to his name, you can generally count on not hearing anything from 40 of them, if not more. But he totally seems the type of dude who would intentionally *not* plays his hits, but he typically does.

um except when he's playing an unreleased album in full

he goes deeper in the acoustic sets -- at least on those chrome dreams ii shows. he even broke out a totally unreleased (and great) song from homegrown, 'try,' sometime in 2008.

the guy isn't above playing "cinnamon girl" between two new songs for people who pay a hundred bucks for the privilege, and his le noise tour seemed to have an exceptionally static set list, but i'm not sure what standard he's been set to where he can bust out unreleased tracks from 40 years ago and be a bore

like who's the cranky iconoclast who plays a song from each of his 50 albums on tour

I could have sworn the Le Noise tour, like the tour before it (Chrome Dreams II?) was more or less the same set night after night.

Well, I will say someone like Tom Waits, who rarely tours, also rarely simply pulls out the old songs. Springsteen and Dylan both go deep and surprise.

Pearl Jam goes deep.

But the difference is that Neil Young seems like the rare talent who could make something out of something everyone discounted or discarded. Like his acoustic "Trans" stuff he did on the Unplugged album.

did you just give an example of him doing something you said he doesn't do