Neil Young, a Profile in Music #13

This one does him justice by sticking to just one year: 1975.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall,“ and the recent “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” His film “Atomic Cover-up” just debuted on PBS and you can watch here. And “Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried" remains free on the PBS site. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free here:

Over the past couple of years here, I have compiled a number of what I call “profiles in music,” collecting a dozen or more favorite songs by favored artists, usually spanning most of their careers and with a little biographical material as captions. (I’ve collected links to some of them here.) For some, whose careers were short-circuited by self-destruction (see: Gram Parsons, Sandy Denny), it was easy to do justice to their creative output. This posed quite a challenge, however, for others who seemed to go on forever (Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris and so on).

Few top the longevity of Neil “Forever” Young. I’ve been a big fan since, oh, 1966, going back to the first Springfield album. And he’s still going strong, if not quite as active as his first four decades of recording and touring….So how to tackle his output and legacy?

As I have noted here before, I started returning to vinyl over a year ago, which has led to ordering some new albums, buying others second hand, but also re-discovering some that had been gathering dust in my collection, most of it dating back to my Crawdaddy “free records” era of 1971-1979. Among the latter: one of Neil’s lesser-known albums, from 1975, "Zuma,” which I recalled loving at the time. The only cut on it he’s ever played live much or put out in any Best Of collection is “Cortez the Killer.” But on listening to it for the first time in maybe 40 years I found that nearly every song clicked (the exception is “Stupid Girl”) and the record taken as a whole was a perfect display of the many Neil stylings: from ballads and country-rock to godfather-of-grunge guitar workouts, with and without Crazy Horse. It’s all there in wonderful balance. So you can sample seven of the nine tracks below.

But, hey, hey, my, my, this was back in the era when, believe it or not, rock stars (and even non-stars) often put out two albums in a single year! Imagine that! And earlier in 1975, Neil had produced what many (but not me) consider his greatest album, the drunken, death-soaked, often out-of-tune ‘Tonight’s the Night.” Much of the material was sparked by, or commented on, the deaths of two men close to Neil, including former Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten (who OD’d right after Neil kicked him out of the band when drugs made him unreliable). So before we get to “Zuma,” I’m giving you four cuts from that album. Then, at the very bottom, we see Neil still rocking on a key track from that record just last autumn, live, with Crazy Horse.

And the usual cartoons at bottom. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free, or pledge a contribution if I decide to go “pay.”

Update: Adding now that I know that Neil wrote, and did acoustic demo for, one his greatest in 1975, though not released until 1979, “Powderfinger.” Here at LiveAid with me in the audience.

“Tonight’s the Night”

”Come on Baby, Let’s Go Downtown” live (Danny Whitten as lead singer)

“Borrowed Time”

“Tired Eyes”

“Don’t Cry, No Tears”

“Danger Bird”

“Pardon My Heart”

“Looking for a Lover”

“Barstool Blues”

“Cortez the Killer”

“Through My Sails”

Live with Crazy Horse last autumn in L.A., “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown”

Cartoons of the Day