Neil Young - Rust Never Sleeps - POLL

Pocahontas is as shower singin' classic in my house.

cf: Singing it under one's breath in the car and annoying/amusing one's wife.

this is impossible. def top 10 all time albums for me

"Pocahontas" juuuuust over "Thrasher". I can't get over the ache at the start of "Pocahontas" and I know about icy skies at night.

sedan delivery by a nose over pocahontas

What do you think "Pocahontas" is about, exactly? I mean thematically, or in terms of POV. I know it jumps around in history, etc., has that surreal turn at the end, but what's the emotional thread running through it, if there is one?

perhaps someone can explain the pocahontas-brando thing...was this after the infamous oscar acceptance speech with the native american woman?

Yeah, it was 5 or 6 years after, so that explains it in a way, but not really.

i know, i just looked at the lyrics and have no clue

i find pocahontas a lot more understandable than powderfinger. what's he going on about in that one? pocahontas, i assume, is a guy coming to grips with the past and trying to reconcile what his ancestors did three centuries ago with his own life today. he may or may not be switching point of view in the verses. maybe the first half of the song is from the POV of a 17th century native american dealing with the european invasion and the second half is from the POV of a 20th century descendant of those europeans contemplating how he got here. or maybe the entire thing is from the POV of the hippie in his second-floor apartment across the street from the bank, with his indian rug and probably beads hanging from the ceiling, and he's identifying with the natives and it's really not that much of a stretch for him to think, and say, "they killed us in our tepees." i think the emotion's the same either way.

brando was a longtime active in native american causes, and the oscar stunt made him a very public activist, so it makes sense to me that the narrator would want to invite him to his imagined meeting.

"marlon brando, pocahontas and me" is one of my all-time favorite pop-song phrases, and not because of any of the above. i just think it's a great phrase, kind of inscrutable, and kind of NOT inscrutable, a little slice of the north american psyche filtered into a haiku.

nice post!
I agree, I think Pocahontas is about Americans' weird relationship with the past -- to use the hoary Faulkner phrase "the past isn't dead, it isn't even past." that they "massacred the buffalo kitty corner from the bank" is something that lingers here. I think Neil talks about being fascinated with how the past still has a presence, even if you can't see it, like looking at a big city and trying to envision just what was there beforehand, and actually *getting* a vision, some kind of transmission.

what's remarkable about the song is how unforced and natural it is -- i barely even think about the craft that went into it. you can imagine neil spending a couple hours writing it, not laboring over it or anything. but it came out incredible.

I agree, I think Pocahontas is about Americans' weird relationship with the past -

More true than you think -- the whole album sounds like Young attempting, in his addled way, of trying to understand his place in history: America, rock and roll, his former bandmates.

you can imagine neil spending a couple hours writing it, not laboring over it or anything

he may not have labored over the melody at all; he may just have borrowed it wholesale from carole king's "he's a bad boy." even if it was an unconscious rip, that still makes it easier, i would think.

POWDERFINGER

Pocahontas. Though I prefer other versions to this album's.

love this guy so fucking much

Nice takes on Pocahontas, thanks. Part of what I've always liked about it is that it's slippery. You get a sense of all these different possibilities but there's no single voice or central point as far as I can tell. I always felt like it might contain a small critique of romanticizing Native Americans in the 3rd verse, the way the guy kitty-corner from the bank has these little tokens that on the one hand might be part of a connection but only are in a very superficial way. An "Indian rug" here sounds kitsch. Very complex song with the most simple and beautiful melody.

I so cannot find my copy of this and its not on my laptop, dammit! But I don't think another listen would sway me from voting for "Powderfinger".

There's lots that intrigues in "Pocahontas", but one thing is the reference to "the homeland we've never seen". It gives a sense that we're diaspora people, whoever "we" are, but we are going home again. A heaven, a gateway, a hope?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

i'm kinda shocked!

insanely lopsided

altho Powderfinger is one of his best epics for sure

I think this is my least favorite canon ny album

wow...yeah I voted Powderfinger, but I mean Thrasher, Pocahontas and Sedan Delivery are right up there with it...

thrasher is amazing. no ride my llama votes? ;_; prefer the acoustic over the electric on this one, except "powderfinger" obv

My sentiments exactly. And "Powderfinger" receives an extra boost for providing my favorite musical moment of the 1990s (and maybe of all-time) in The Pooh Sticks' "The Rhythm of Love."

I can see how someone would think "Welfare Mothers" is a throwaway. But "Ride My Llama?" The melody is discursive. But it starts to settle down with "It's old but it's good" and certainly locks in by "like any other primitive would." And then there's that gorgeous plunge into the ocean where you can hear even the bubbles surrounding him (is this what people mean by acoustic shoegaze?). Definitely not throwaway material. More like stand-there-dumbfounded fare.

this is the rare poll where any order of results is fine with me...i wish there were more like this

amazed powderfinger got the nod here. i love it. but "thrasher" is just an incredible song. i'm not a lyrics as poetry person at all but it blows me away, lyrically. glad to see others have said the same.

"Where the vulture glides descending
On an asphalt highway bending
Thru libraries and museums, galaxies and stars
Down the windy halls of friendship
To the rose clipped by the bullwhip
The motel of lost companions
Waits with heated pool and bar."

this verse in particular just kills me

powderfinger's lyrics are incredible too, tho. such a rich & involving story which nonetheless remains mysterious. and those sublime guitar sounds...

obv thrasher is also great, i love all these songs, incl ride my llama

This album is pretty close to perfect but Pocahontas over Sedan here is just 0_O

I don't say this often but "Thrasher" has damn good lyrics, no?

Best lyrics, yes.

been listening to thrasher five times a day for a month or two, it is one of the best songs ever imo.

or at least best of the last three to four hundred years

It still makes me laugh in “Thrasher” when the melancholy of “how I lost my friends I still don’t understand” is immediately followed by the verse about how he ditched his friends because they became boring losers.

I bought a cheap copy of Unplugged yesterday, something to play in the car once and probably shelve forever. I listened to the first half today without looking at the song listing--thought the element of surprise would help (it did)--but then looked at the listing for the rest while waiting for a stop light.

Anyway, probably the first time I've listened to "Pocahontas" in, I don't know, 30 years at least. I found myself unexpectedly moved by the perfection of that last verse:

And maybe Marlon Brando
Will be there by the fire
We'll sit and talk of Hollywood
And the good things there for hire
And the Astrodome, and the first tepee
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas, and me
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas, and me
Pocahontas...

I don't think it's meant as a bitter indictment of Marlon Brando--who, in his own way, was fighting the good fight when he hired Sacheen Littlefeather in 1972 (and had a long record of activism before that)--but felt more like wide-eyed wonder at just how strange and inexplicable the world is. And bringing in the Astrodome--where did that come from? I think that verse might be Neil's "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" moment, something that felt just as mysterious and as wise this afternoon as it did when I loved it as a teenager in 1979.

it's no indictment, it's pure reverie. a retreat into neil's dreamspace, drawing upon centuries of americana.

the full band “pocohantas” on duma is so amazing

tying in a giant domed futuristic sheltered stadium in Texas w/a small animal hide shelter from centuries past is prime Neil.

love "pocahantas" and its cosmic absurdism. i worried for years that it was rife with toxic masculinity but it feels more like a very self-aware neil letting his mind wander into a sarcastic fantasy world, then realizing what's happening and decides to simply observe with plenty of wryness. like sure: why the hell not.

wonderful post, clemenza. have probably mentioned it before but the "transformer man" on unplugged is a personal favorite. that's really the only thing i go back to from that album, even though i think of it as a very satisfying listen.

Appreciate that. Letting his mind wander/pure reverie/dreamscape/why-the-hell-not, agree with all of that. It's also--basically restating the same idea--the kind of art that most leaves me awestruck: juxtapositions and connections that are at such an intuitive level, I can puzzle over them forever. Another thing that links it to "Mrs. Robinson," I think, is that when those two songs come out, both Brando and DiMaggio are like ghosts of the monumental figures they once were. I guess that depends in part how you feel about Apocalypse Now, which comes out the same year as "Pocahantas"--the Sacheen Littlefeather episode was, if nothing else, widely ridiculed, and Brando was now a just name who collected a huge cheque for a week or two of work. DiMaggio was doing Mr. Coffee commercials when "Mrs. Robinson" came out. Yet Neil and Paul Simon were able to make them vivid again.

Thought some of the song choices on Unplugged were unexpected--"Look Out for My Love," "The Old Laughing Lady," "World on a String"--and all in all, it made for a good driving CD.

pump organ version of "Like A Hurricane" on Unplugged is all-time-great as well

seconding

You can hear the audience gasp when he starts "Transformer Man."

i think the difference between “pocahontas” and “mrs. robinson” is that in the latter, joltin joe is the symbol of a certain all-American masculine archetype fading away as the hippie generation rose to prominence, while in “pocahontas,” marlon brando is just marlon brando

I don't know if there's "just Marlon Brando," though: there's Vito Corleone, there's Kurtz, there's Last Tango Brando, there's Stanley Kowalski, and for me, they're all very different. That's the connection I get: "Mrs. Robinson" rescues hit-streak DiMaggio, the DiMaggio you describe, from Mr. Coffee DiMaggio, and when I listen to "Pochaontas," I'm seeing young Terry Malloy sitting by the fire, smiling like he does when he's walking in the park with Edie, and definitely not shadowy, heavy-handed Kurtz. I'm not saying everyone will hear the song the same, though.

"Pocahontas" was written and first recorded in the mid-'70s, possibly before the public met Fat Brando in The Missouri Breaks, which came out in May '76.

Didn't know that--good point. I just watched The Offer, and the Brando there is pretty spacey.

There's a similar thought-association in John Prine's "Picture Show," from 1991, with its refrain of "James Dean went out to Hollywood, put his picture in a picture show," and then the last verse:

A local man, in a wigwam, sitting on a reservation
With a big black hole in the belly of his soul
Waiting on an explanation
While the white man sits on his fat can
and takes pictures of the Navajo
Every time he clicks his Kodak pics
He steals a little bit of soul

The funny thing too is that Fat Brando in Missouri Breaks really isn't <that> fat... certainly compared to what came next, but it apparently was shocking to see him like that three years after Last Tango.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N48pqpyyeHA

what i mean is that neil describes brando not as any of his famous roles, or whatever of the various roles he plays in the cultural imagination, but as marlon brando the actor and human being

he’d be an interesting fireside companion