Discover Top Posts Tagged with #david briggs

Shakey Sundays #48:

Harvest

Perhaps you’re wondering why it’s taken me well over a year and a half to dedicate a Shakey Sunday to Neil Young‘s most famous record.

I’ve avoided the album this long for one simple reason: Harvest is boring.

My cat confirms this: she did not even wake up when I plopped the thing down beside her just now. Read on if you are not yet convinced...

Don’t get me wrong. Young has plenty, perhaps dozens, of dumber records. Landing on Water? Dumb. Life? Dumber. The Monsanto years? Dumbest.

But at least those records are entertainingly infuriating. Harvest's songs are dull. Its mixing/engineering is murky. Its cover is drab. The footage of a drug addled Nash and Crosby seeking to ruin Alabama makes me satisfyingly furious. But said footage does not appear on the record itself. And so the whole thing just puts me to sleep.

Consider the record's overblown Jack Nitzsche tracks, There’s a World and A Man Needs a Maid. The later is a sublime piece of Young's art. Whether he's singing it solo with bizarre keyboard interludes during his 76 acoustic tour or with its original, primal chorus in the days before and after the original record's release, A Man Needs a Maid always terrifies me in all the right ways. But the song needs a full orchestra like I need Paula Abdul and Donald Jr. hanging out together in my house getting friendly with a monkey and a platypus: not on any level.

Sufjan Stevens recently demonstrated that There’s a World is actually an incredible song. But it took 50 years and the death of Stevens' beloved partner for anyone to uncover the depths and sweetness hiding behind Nitzsche's gongs, flatulence and oboes.

And then there’s the record's two boring, ubiquitous hits. Old Man and Heart of Gold are just about the only songs you'll ever hear played in a public space by Neil Young. When I hear Neil welcome Linda in for the choruses while hunting through Abba records at my local Thrift mart or while I'm fighting my way through hordes of teeny bopper, cute-bag-seeking, Trader Joe’s types I feel simultaneously bored and pissed: why can’t they play any other Neil Young song? The dude has a few thousand of them!

I mean, wouldn’t it be wonderful to consider whether you want your potato chips dill pickle flavored or jalapeño dusted while listening to Sample and Hold? Life would be so much better if Homegrown kept us company while working our way through airport security and Sedan Delivery bounced around the DMV.

It took the Massey Hall piano version of Heart of Gold in which the song merges with and answers the questions asked by A Man Need A Maid and that same show's forlorn, shaggy dog, intro for Old Man to make each song interesting all over again for the first time since 1972.

I admit it: both songs are great pieces of music. Kenny Buttrey's cymbal work alone, which finally emerged from the original pressings' sonic murk via the Archives project, makes each of them worth your three minutes. But hearing them today is still like eating my father's homemade, stuffed-with-stale-breakfast-cereal meatloaf: they’re sustenance, of a sort. I guess. But I'd rather just spoon Dijon into my mouth unsaddled. No offense dad!

And then there’s The Needle and the Damage Done. That song, with its cryptic setting and deft balance of terror, loss, and warning, totally blew me away the first, second and maybe even the fifth time I heard it. But when Young busted out yet another paint-by-numbers rendition of the thing during MTV Unplugged instead of any other song in his entire oeuvre I permanently unplugged all my interest in the track. And that was 33 years ago.

And don’t even get me started on Are You Ready for the Country. The song might be satisfyingly Shakey if Young didn’t take it so seriously; he really thinks he's got something good going on in the track, and that's embarrassing. And, the song would be totally GREAT if it had different lyrics, a different melody, different time signatures, different musicians, a slightly different title and was performed by Sandy Denny. Until I hear that version I never want to hear Are you Ready for the Country ever again.

Come to think of it, that dream version almost exists. Let's wake ourselves up by listening to it:

Out on the Weekend, however, is pretty damn good. I’ll grant you that. I, too, would like to pack it in and buy a pick up. And I'll tip my hat here to my famous brother's affection for the person standing beside their mother at the top of the stairs, screaming in the rain on the record's otherwise dull title track.

You'll note that I actively refuse to paste any of these far-too-well-known songs into this post. It bores me to tears just to think about googling them. Go bore yourself, if that’s your thing. I'm still listening to Karen Dalton.

My criticisms are not unique. Young’s terrifying, mad scientist and cocaine fiend of a producer famously argued that he should have issued the record straight to dumpster bins rather than putting it out at all. David Briggs felt that Young's reckless soul was better revealed on the uncut, untouched and unblemished Massey Hall show and so he pushed for that concert's release in place of Harvest. Obviously that didn't happen.

But imagine a world run by David Briggs, a world in which no one even heard Havest's Nashville studio cuts until the Archives series 50 years later.

I love that world! I’d like to live in it. We’d all have free, perfectly accessible, healthcare. I'd have a full head of hair and look like Charles Atlas. There would be no wars, little free libraries would stand beside little free record bins on every street corner and Neil Young would be busy enforcing environmental, economic and social justice through his role on the US Supreme Court as we speak, instead of dedicating his summer to playing dull tracks from Harvest for the highest bidder with The Chrome Farts.

Now that's a harvest worth reaping!

#neil young #shakey sundays #jack nitzsche #David briggs #a man needs a maid #heart of gold #the chrome farts #Youtube