So I heard this at our local pizza joint the other day. I've been listening to a lot of Neil Young recently, so the opening harmonica immediately grabbed my attention, sounding as it does like an amalgamation of several different NY tunes, most especially "I Am a Child" and "Comes a Time," but shifted into the minor.
I couldn't hear very well, but enough to grok that it wasn't ol' Neil on vocals, and then some of the harmonic movement made it clear that if the song was written by Mr Young, it wasn't one I knew.
But then came the solo at the end I thought, damn, if these boys don't have the Neil Young aesthetic down pretty cold.
I've embedded this oh so pretty version of the song rather than the official video because the official video is about half the length and doesn't have the guitar searage.
Turns out Blue Rodeo was founded in the early 1980s and I'm only listening to them now. Seems about par for the course.
Interesting thing, aural proof. It's taken as a truism that Stephen Stills is not only the dominant personality of Crosby, Stills and Nash but the most accomplished musician by a comfortable margin, as well it should be. And that while he may not quite the artist Neil Young is—which, hey, how many artists are, really? A small handful?—he's probably a better singer in a traditional sense and a seriously underrated (if, again, more traditional) guitarist.
What's more, the famously aborted tour Stills and Young attempted together in 1976 ended in typical Young fashion, with ol' Neil simply disappearing and letting his long-time some-time collaborator know their latest collaboration was at an end via telegram:
"Dear Stephen, funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach. Neil."
which is both awesome and such a dick move.
And other than the wonderful song "Long May You Run," and the fact that they erased David Crosby's and Graham Nash's vocals from the album shortly before release, that's pretty much all you know about The Stills-Young Band.
But then oh so many years later, thanks to Al Gore inventing the internet, you get a chance to actually hear one of the handful of concerts they actually managed to play before it all fell apart. And at first you're struck by just how kickass their electric version of "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" sounds. Secondly, you're so curious to hear how Neil is going to possibly replace Crosby's and Nash's vocals and delighted to find he does so remarkably well, with his high keening voice taking their places more than admirably. And then as the song goes on and the initial excitement wears off you start to realize that Stills sounds...not good. In places, he sounds fine, even better than just fine, perhaps. And in places, especially towards the end, he sounds, well, like shit.
And you start to wonder if maybe Neil left not because he's difficult—he is—but because he knew the shows simply weren't up to his lofty if at times confusing standards and you wonder how much other stuff you've gotten wrong over the years.
This is from one of the Vote for Change shows in 2004. But I'd love to know just how this came about. "Hey, Neil, wanna come out and play?" "Sure! Can we do a deep cut off one of your two least known and liked LPs?"
However it happened, I'm just glad it did. (And keep an ear out for the couple times Neil seems to quote "Cinnamon Girl" at the end of phrases.)
[Here is a g]enerally useful map, from the Nixon Administration’s investigation, of the ground on which the Kent State shootings took place. Bill Schroeder’s body is placed a long way from where he fell, perhaps to give some validity to the one truly wry element, which is the caption placed next to Step 6 that reads “GUARD HEADED BACK UP HILL–STUDENTS FOLLOW.” Never mind that none of the hundreds of photographs taken show students meeting any rational definition of the word “follow.” One only needs to note the distance to the Prentice Hall parking lot, where the fire was heavily concentrated and where, in fact, all of the dead and most of the wounded actually fell. The parking lot is a hundred yards away and fifty feet downhill. I suppose a fully accurate map might have risked representing what a true “threat” the “rioting” students at Kent State University represented to men who were armed with high-powered rifles and literally a few paces away from the safety of no longer being offended by people yelling insults and giving them the finger.
When the least extraordinary thing about this performance is the glass armonica solo—seriously, a damn glass armonica solo!—you know something serious is going down. Dave nails it when he says, "this is gonna be very good."
Check out—no, revel in—the slightly ragged opening. That could have been an ominous precursor, a sign that one or more of them were (improbably but not impossibly) off this night, or that there were technical problems. Instead, they snap together almost immediately, and the roughness smooths out, making the perfection that follows all the sweeter for its more earthly origins.
I tend to get irritated whenever someone talks about music today sucks, and how much better it used to be and yadda yadda yadda. That's, of course, exactly what people said in 1956 about the golden days before Elvis, Chuck, Buddy and Little Richard appeared, and it's what Elvis said when the Beatles appeared and so it goes.
On the other hand, you run across information like just some of the albums released in the final few months of 1968 and it kinda staggers.
September 1968
The Who—Magic Bus
Miles Davis—Miles in the Sky
October 1968
The Jimi Hendrix Experience—Electric Ladyland
Traffic—Traffic
November 1968
Neil Young—Neil Young
The Beatles—The Beatles (The White Album)
The Kinks—The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
Van Morrison—Astral Weeks
Elvis Presley—Elvis (soundtrack to his comeback special)
December 1968
The Rolling Stones—Beggars Banquet
...okay. Okay, sure. BUT.
Yeah, I got nothin', except maybe to point out that just November alone would have made 1968 a damn good year. When you can list five out of the dozen plus major releases and Neil Young's solo debut is the weak spot by far? That's, uh...that's a pretty list. And, again, that's just from the final third of the year, so not even talking about, say, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, White Light/White Heat or Lady Soul, all of which came out in the month of January 1968. Crazy.
I'm not a huge Ben Harper fan. I've nothing against him, either, I just haven't heard a whole lot of his stuff and what I have heard has been okay but hasn't really grabbed me.
But this. This is something else. Here Harper not only taps solidly into the anguish—frankly, any musician should be able to do at the very least a half-decent job of that, given the source material (meaning both the song and the horrific history behind it)—but finds places to go with the melody and harmony that even Crosby, Still, Nash and Young missed...and that ain't no easy task.
So Nils Lofgren is one of the great electric guitarists, with a style unlike anyone else. So the idea of him doing an acoustic album is interesting but seems like something of a wasted opportunity, perhaps, even if him covering his original mentor Neil Young is cool.
But then you listen to it and realize it's a match damn near made in heaven.
I wonder he found himself singing the "oh Caroline no" bit in his head.
In which the amazing "Gimme Shelter" vocalist takes one of Neil Young's greatest songs, if possible, to an even higher height.
We all know the feud between Lynyrnd Skynyrd and ol' Neil wasn't real. Many haven't seemed to notice or grok the background singers in "Sweet Home Alabama"—including, yes, a certain Merry Clayton—catcalling "boo! boo! boo!" to the very mention of Alabama Governor George Wallace's name. "Sweet Home Alabama" is a far more nuanced song than generally acknowledged. Meanwhile, Mr. Young's song can be criticized as something of a carpetbagging attack on a culture of which he, as a Canadian living in California, couldn't really understand or have any sort of in-depth knowledge, even as he appropriated many of its artistic hallmarks. [And, yes, I know they were probably responding to "Alabama" and not "Southern Man."]
Even were any of that true, however, having an African-American gospel singer from Louisiana cover Neil Young's song blows any such criticisms into dust. If there's anything at all disappointing about this version, it's that it's not twice as long.
Given the enormous amount of competition, it's not easy to even be in the running for fiercest version of "All Along the Watchtower" ever...and yet dadgum if Neil Young and Pearl Jam don't do a pretty swell job of grabbing one of those coveted spots.
So. As previously mentioned, Mark Kozelek has a new album, his second collaboration with Desertshore. And there's more than one song named after a boxer—a Kozelek trademark—but unlike "Tavoris Cloud," this one, with lyrics perhaps nearly as autobiographical, isn't heartbreaking. Rather, it's maybe the best smack-talking song ever about the pantheon of great guitarists. (Admittedly, there isn't a whole lot of competition.) I mean, how can you beat:
I can play like Fripp or Johnny Marr And I can play circles 'round Jay Farrar I like Jeff Beck and Page just fine But I hate Derek Trucks and Nels Cline I hate Nels Cline
followed by a parody of Cline's trademark wiggity-wiggity-woo. (Of which I'm very much a fan, incidentally.)
(I love the idea of Jay Farrar looking up and saying, in a McNutty voice, "what'd I do?!")
But is Kozelek done? Not even close. He hasn't gone after the big daddy yet.
I can play like Malcolm and Neil Young And I can play circles 'round most anyone I like Kirk Hammett and Steve Vai But I hate Eric Clapton and Nels Cline I hate Nels Cline
Listen, I love Mark Kozelek, and although he mainly plays nylon-string acoustic these days, he is indeed one hell of an electric guitarist. But Eric Clapton, now...now you're playing with fire. And if you're gonna come at the king, you best not...ah, the hell with it. Slowhand's a big boy and Kozelek's laconic rumble gives the impression of either utter assurance that his absurd assertions are indisputable or he's taking the piss and doesn't really care much that you know it's not true and at the end of the day the point is that this is awesome.
So you were probably wondering—as most people do on a Thursday afternoon—"say, what would it sound like if Neil Young and Crazy Horse had covered Wings on their Live Rust Tour?"
I am staggered to discover that maybe my favorite version ever of "Down by the River"—a Neil Young song I've probably heard at least a dozen versions of, which, I know, makes me a piker compared to true blue Shakey fanatics—is with Phish as his backing band.
Phish. The jam band which inherited the Grateful Dead's throne—two bands I've tried hard to like over the years without ever succeeding. I want to like them. I should like them. I just don't.
And yet. And yet there's this. 20 minutes of noodling and shredding and yowling and it's absolutely, to my ears, magnificent.
So I’m watching Hard Rock Calling 2012 and I’m hit all over again, as I am not infrequently, with the thought: how great is John Fogerty?
I mean, pretty much any way you slice it, the guy was the real deal, the complete package: phenomenal writer, great guitarist, distinctive and effective singer, rock-solid producer, and prolific as few others have ever been. How great was John Fogerty? So great that this boy from the Bay Area made most folks really and truly believe, without even trying, that he was from the deep south. How great was John Fogerty? This great: he not only wrote a song with the word “chooglin’” in the title, he then went on to sing the word in the song nearly seventeen thousand times—and he almost made it work, even. Oh, and in his spare time, he casually invented the grunge look 20+ years ahead of schedule.
Creedence Clearwater Revival released a stunning seven albums in under four years—but even that’s deceptive, as the final album was a thrown together mess released after what was, for them, a crazy long quiet period of nearly a year and a half. In other words, just looking at what could be considered their middle period, CCR released great five albums in two years. That is, to quote the great Luke Skywalker, highly unlikely. And yet.
From CCR’s first (of three!) 1969 album, Bayou Country, with “Proud Mary” and “Born on the Bayou” to their second 1970 album, Pendulum, with “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” Creedence’s run is virtually unsurpassed. And with Fogerty writing and singing the overwhelming majority of the band’s output—as well as producing, playing the guitar solos, the keyboards and even the damn horns—this was very clearly his band.
And then it was over. CCR broke up acrimoniously in 1972. John Fogerty released a pair of solo albums that were pleasant enough and then he disappeared, reemerging with a new album in the 80s, a record that at the time seemed like a glorious return to form but which hasn’t aged terribly well. He’s released a few things since then, but nothing that can even approach his glory days.
And it’s an incredible shame. A shame of almost unparalleled proportions in rock and roll.
Is that overstating the situation a bit? Well, let’s put it like this: consider another rocker, almost exactly the same age and who came up at very nearly the same time.
In a bit over five years, from very late 1966 to early 1972, Neil Young released seven albums: three with Buffalo Springfield, ranging from okay to great—and on which he wrote only about a third of the songs—and then four solo records, ranging from good to great. Like Fogerty, Young wrote, sang, played and produced. Unlike Fogerty, Young was in not one, but two bands, and left both because he was too strong a presence and too determined to do his own thing to fit comfortably within the confines of a band, an organization which by design requires a certain amount of compromise.
Think about the solo career Neil Young has had. From the commercial success of Harvest to the dark night of the soul that is Tonight’s the Night. From the apocalyptic scenarios of On the Beach to the gentle country-rock of Comes a Time. From the gutbusting crunch of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere to the more subtle explorations of After the Gold Rush. From the I’ll-see-your-punk-and-raise-you blistering of Rust Never Sleeps to the live exploration of his back catalog with the same focus of Live Rust. And that’s just his output of the 70s.
Since then he’s gone on to release records which, improbably yet really do, equal his best work, albums such as Freedom and Ragged Glory. He’s had more than his fair share of failures, but to be sure, but most of those came from a surfeit of ambition, and if you’re reading Reason to Believe, there’s a better than even chance you’re as big a fan of the noble failure as we are.
So. Two guys with similar musical background come up at the same time with the same skill set and find roughly equal commercial and critical and artistic success. One of them goes on to hit even higher heights while the other just sorta…fades away. Sure, he still tours and he still sounds pretty darn good and from time to time he'll even release a new album. But compared to his initial four year burst of supernova-like power, well, to misquote the great Stevie Wonder, he hasn’t done nothin’.
That’s harsh but it’s also unfortunately true. And don’t get me wrong: anyone who created “Green River,” “Fortunate Son,” “Bad Moon Risin'” and “Who’ll Stop the Rain” can rest with complete and total comfort on any laurels they want—that’s an oeuvre right there of which anyone could and should be insanely proud, the kind of catalog most very good artists would sell their souls to be able to claim after a lifetime of hard work. That Fogerty did that at all means he’s earned every right to consider his work here done. That he’s got twice that many again that could easily have been named is just mind-boggling.
And yet clearly he himself doesn’t feel that way, otherwise he wouldn’t have released as many solo albums as he has over the years. He’s tried to equal or top his best work, and good on 'im for doing so. And the result is that he hasn’t even made it out of base camp, much less summited again the very peaks he used to scale so effortlessly.
Why not? Who can say? People are complex and people are a mystery. Some just burn incredibly brightly and then are done, like (to switch to sports) Bo Jackson. Some artists are good but have one truly monumental work in them, like Roger Maris in 1961. (Hello Matthew Sweet!) Sometimes artists just get on a hot streak and, as they say, the baseball looks like it’s the size of a basketball. Fogerty has said that the legal issues around CCR, both with the label and his former bandmates, caused enormous problems for him, emotionally, and surely that’s much, maybe even most, of it. It also seems as though Fogerty had a sort of hip-hop like immediacy to his stuff, reacting to and commenting on his times, and once he hopped off that merry-go-round, he found it hard, if not impossible, to get back in the groove—another thing he has in common with even the greatest of athletes and coaches.
But what I think it comes down to is this: the auteur theory started to gain traction in the late 60s with the rock press. And it certainly does seem to make more sense in rock and roll than in film, at least to me. Someone like John Fogerty or Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen or Paul Westerberg writes, sings, plays and produces their own music and at least two of those three artists have produced full band recordings all on their own, playing all the instruments themselves, with some terrific results.
But judged in the context of their careers, those recordings can be seen for what they are: wonderful anomalies. Because rock and roll is about many things—for a pleasant diversion, google “rock and roll is about” and see just how many things it’s apparently about—but two of those things come down to the seemingly mutually exclusive but actually inherently intertwined individualism and community. It’s about finding a community where you can be yourself, and finding people who can help you find yourself and your own voice, and who care what you have to say.
If a great artist like Fogerty or Young writes a song and brings it to ten different bands, it’s going to sound recognizably the same yet very different, depending upon whether the drummer is Al Jackson or Ringo Starr or Keith Moon or Stewart Copeland or Manu Katché. And if that great artist has been writing songs for that same drummer for ten years, well, that drummer is going to be part of the song the artist hears in his head as he’s first writing, before he ever brings it to the studio. John Lennon may not—couldn’t possibly—have known what Ringo was going to play on “Come Together,” but the sound of Ringo’s drums, the feel he was going to bring, if not the exact pattern, was already in John’s mind, already ingrained in his DNA.
That’s what the rest of Creedence Clearwater Revival did for John Fogerty. They gave him a sounding board, a launching pad from which he could and did for a brief while go almost anywhere: blues, country, R&B, pure rock and roll. And without them, it turns out, he was lost.
Neil Young was never part of a band anywhere near as long as CCR was together—Fogerty met Stu Cook and Doug Clifford when they were all in high school, nine years before their debut album finally came out—bouncing from group to group as a kid. And Buffalo Springfield was only together for just over two years, and even then the band was less a reality than a creatively fruitful business arrangement. Instead, Young has always been a solo artist, albeit one who sometimes finds it interesting to be part of a theoretical group dynamic.
Yet even Neil Young, classic solo artist, has found himself drawn back, again and again, to the somewhat ham-handed ragged glory that is Crazy Horse. Why? Because while there’s never the slightest doubt who the creative shot caller is, Young understands that there are certain times you need the magic brought about by the bone deep familiarity playing with certain musicians over a long period of time will generate, and that for the most part there’s no equal for that spark when it comes to creating the very greatest rock and roll. No one is ever going to confuse Crazy Horse bassist Billy Talbot with the late, great Donald "Duck" Dunn, with whom Young also worked, or Jack Bruce or Stanley Clarke or Paul McCartney. And Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina is almost certainly the least good drummer Neil Young ever chose to record with, by a very, very long shot. And yet ol' Neil just can't quit them—time and again he goes back to them, to these less than technically stunning musicians, clearly recognizing that they give him something no one else can or does, and that he at least sometimes needs in order to create the very best music he can, to bring out the best he has to offer and make it sound just the way he hears it in his head.
Creedence Clearwater Revival was a great band. Stu Cook, Doug Clifford and Tom Fogerty were a great rhythm section—an unusual rhythm section, but a great one. But more than that, they were the right rhythm section, the right band, the perfect foundation for Fogerty to build his masterpieces upon, and the spark that helped Fogerty conceive those masterpieces in the first place. That’s why John Fogerty created a remarkably large, diverse and powerful body of work in the brief period Creedence Clearwater Revival was a recording band, and why in the thirty years since Fogerty's done nothing that even approaches it, not even close. Because clichéd though it may be, it's nonetheless true: sometimes the whole is ever so much greater than the sum of the parts and because, as Pete Townshend wrote but didn’t sing, sometimes it really is the singer and not the song—and that applies to the band as well.
