It's Not You It's Me

Breaking Up With Neil Young

BY WILLIAM BOSTWICK

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Neil Young is 60, newly fatherless and recovering from a brain aneurism. I am 20, living away from home and have no idea what to do with my life. If the gulf of time and space that separates the two of us was Neil's recording career, I'd be the beginning and he'd be the end.

Neil Young's newest album, Prairie Wind, is a gross departure from the sounds of youthful anger and confusion I fell in love with in high school and still, to an extent, embody. Young has gotten old, and his music has lost its vitality - Prairie Wind is sentimental at best, trite and boring at worst.

It's hard to admit this. Neil Young has played a major role in my life for the past few years and part of me wants to believe that Prairie Wind is just a rough patch. Every relationship has them. The other part —the bigger part—feels betrayed. Young has changed, and he's left me behind. They say writing is cathartic. Here goes.

Catharsis

My relationship with Neil Young began right where it should have. I was 17—18 for the sake of narrative—and in high school. Half in and half out the door, really. I heard Neil Young and Buffalo Springfield's "Broken Arrow" late one night while driving around: That was it.

Recorded in 1967, with a band as talented and as troubled as I thought I was, "Broken Arrow" is a collage of recorded snippets—heartbeats, a circus organ tune, a live version of Young's "Mr. Soul"—strung together by equally surreal lyrics. He sings about success, fame and the loneliness that never seemed far behind. In the opening verse, he pushes his way through a crowd after a Springfield show and peels off in a black limo, alone. I listened to him sing ".18 years of American dream." as I drove myself home from late-night-parties-left-early in a rusting blue Volvo, he was talking right to me.

I was famous. A wallflower, maybe. A face in the crowd even, but in my mind the only face that mattered. I was young, confused, and awash in college applications. I was standing on the threshold of a great unknown, and all I knew was that I wanted to step through the door. High school began to matter less and less—it was the senior slump, except I had Neil Young to guide me through. And guide me he did. Lyrics like "now you say you're leaving home, 'cause you want to be alone" guided me right out the door.

I stopped staying out late. Friendships suffered, would-be high school flings fizzled out. I didn't need anyone. I didn't need sex, I didn't need parties. Just my burned CDs and my Volvo's $25 aftermarket speakers spitting Rust Never Sleeps so loud I couldn't tell where the guitar feedback ended and the buzzing from the cones' cheap plastic housing began. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before Rust Never Sleeps came On the Beach.

Sex On The Beach

1974's On the Beach is Neil's crowning achievement. A perfect transition from the subdued, confused loneliness of "Broken Arrow" to the aggressive slap-in-the-face anger of Young's middle "rust" period (the late 70's). The album opens with the quintessential angry song, "Walk On," in which Young holds his middle finger high to everyone from critics of Tonight's the Night (a moody album already recorded but not released until a year later) to Lynyrd Skynyrd (who's "Sweet Home Alabama" all but challenged Young to a good 'ol southern duel for his comments on racism in "Alabama"). The album closes with "Ambulance Blues." Its warning, "it's easy to get buried in the past," bookends Young's masterpiece with the idea of leaving. A year later, on Decade, he would sing, "you can't be 20 on Sugar Mountain," and there was no way in hell I could be 18 in Cleveland, Ohio.

If On the Beach was the build up of Neil Young's restless bitterness, Rust Never Sleeps (1979) was its culmination. Instead of walking away from negative critics, he stands and fights, spewing a barrage of guitar riffs so drenched in feedback they make it hard even to breathe. The violence of his music manifested itself lyrically in "My My Hey Hey," the punk rock anthem Kurt Cobain quoted in his suicide note. Engrossed in my own delusions of grandeur, not even I could help but agree with Neil when he said "it's better to burn out than to fade away." That's what college is for, right? With Neil urging me on, I couldn't have been more ready to go.

The loud, distorted sound introduced in Rust carried Young through the 80's. With the garage band Crazy Horse, long, rambling, feedback-laced explorations at high volume became the norm. It sounded like Neil was self-destructing, and in a sense he was. This was the decade that burned him out. Breathless, he capped the 80s with the appropriately-named Ragged Glory, an album that, though loud, aggressive and bitter, introduced the reminiscing that would ultimately destroy my relationship with Neil Young.

I was barely in college when I heard "Days that Used to Be." The last thing I was interested in was reconnecting with my friends from home, but if I had to, I figured I could follow Neil's lead: "Talk to me my long lost friend. Tell me how you are. Are you happy with your circumstance, are you driving a new car? Does it get you where you want to go, with its seven-year warranty?" Young was hinting at nostalgia, but in such a way that preserved the confident, challenging tones of his earlier work. I thought this was just a phase. I was wrong.

Three albums dominated the decade following Ragged Glory, each one more maudlin than the next. First was 1992's Harvest Moon. Young continues reminiscing here, but this time the bitterness that made it bearable to me is gone. I had been following Neil's advice pretty well up to this point - I had left home, I was practicing looking like a loner, I played my music loudly. If I had to associate with my past I did it with a grimace. But here was Neil saying "one of these days I'm gonna sit down and write a long letter, to all the good friends I've known. I'm gonna try to thank them all for the good times together." The loner, the guy who didn't need anyone is now pining for home, while I was still trying to leave it behind? I wasn't ready for this.

Silver and Gold made the shift even more pronounced. The difference between this album's opening track and that of On the Beach couldn't be more jarring. Here, in "Good to See You," Neil looks backwards to the security of the past, to the "good friends [he's] known." He seems grateful that someone is actually listening to his album. Here he starts by begging to be taken back while in On the Beach, "Walk On" begins by distancing Young from everything and everyone. It's ironic that Silver and Gold only pushed the two of us farther apart.

Uncertainties Of Youth And Fame

So here we are, Prairie Wind. Before I talk about the album, I should probably mention the circumstances of its creation. Young's father had just died, and Neil had just had his own brush with death when he was diagnosed with a brain aneurism. It would be understandable, then, if Young wrote a somber, introspective look at death and old age. He had done similar things before - Tonight's the Night was a response to a friend's lethal heroin overdose. But while Tonight's the Night is a rough, emotional and gripping work, Prairie Wind is polished, cheesy sentimentality.

The album, and especially the track "Falling Off the Face of the Earth," can be seen as the thank you letter Young promised in Harvest Moon. There's no undercurrent of bitterness or anger or, for that matter, any emotion at all. Like "Good to See You," the song is one of almost deafeningly boring simplicity: "I'd just like to say thank you for all the things you've done.that's my message of love for all the things you did. I can never thank you enough."

The rest of the album continues in this vein - from painfully obvious metaphors of death and time passing ("tick tock the clock on the wall") to obsessively repetitive references to Young's family farmhouse. Young is, again I think, looking back to the security of his home and his past instead of forward to the uncertainties of youth and fame. 25 years earlier, in "Thrasher," the prairie was characterized by two-lane wide farm machines that seemed to chase Young violently away from his family and friends. "They were just dead weight to me," he said. "I had my own row left to hoe." In Prairie Wind, grain - a symbol for Young's home - gives him a place to hide. In contrast to the guy who, in "Walk On" or Rust Never Sleeps challenged critics and friends alike with scathing lyrics and a barrage of feedback, Prairie Wind's Young seems almost cowardly. In "It's a Dream," he hides in his bed, apathetic and oblivious: "I try to ignore what the paper says, and I try to not read all the news. it's a dream, it's only a dream."

The confusion of Broken Arrow that I identified with in high school is gone. Distorted guitars have been replaced by whispered lyrics and soothing acoustic chords. Neil Young turned 60 on November 12, and he might be looking back on and making sense of his life after almost losing it, but I'm not. I'm still living in the lyrics he once sang, "20, leaving Sugar Mountain, not yet 22, but still wondering what to do." Neil Young said, "You gotta keep changing. Shirts, old ladies, whatever," and maybe he's living more by his words than I thought I was. Young's grown old without me.

Growing old seems synonymous with fading away and being "buried in the past" - just what Young warned me against in his early work. He strengthened my position as a loner only to turn his back on me.

But there's a fine line between loner and asshole - or maybe no line at all. I guess I can't really blame Neil for writing songs about his past when his future was almost snuffed out, but he can't blame me for snuffing out ours.

William Bostwick B'07 is a bit of a loner.

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