![]() ![]() ![]() The Rebellious Neil Young: Cameron Crowe's 1975 Rolling Stone Interview.Whatever it's about, only Young could write a song so bizarre and brilliant. They've been through many tragedies, and now the authorities are moving in on them – explaining why the approaching boat has "numbers on the side." The 22-year-old son has been forced to deal with the situation because "Daddy's gone," "brother's out hunting in the mountains" and "Big John's been drinking since the river took Emmy-Lou." The young man is standing on the dock with a rifle in his hand when the boat begins firing, so he raises the gun to return fire – but it backfires and blows his head off. Neil has never explained the song in detail, but here's the general interpretation: It's about a family of bootleggers (or some other kind of backwoods criminals) somewhere up in the mountains. (Only "Cinnamon Girl" has been performed more). Young must agree, because he's played it 666 times. Nobody disputes that it's one of his best songs. "They had to go to special effects people who developed what they called a 'traveling booger matte' that sanitized Neil's nostrils and put 'Helpless' in the movie."įor 33 years Neil Young fans have been arguing over what exactly "Powderfinger" is about. "Neil had delivered a good version of 'Helpless' with a good-size rock of cocaine stuck in his nostril," Band drummer Levon Helm wrote in his book This Wheel's On Fire. That's probably why he didn't notice what was in his nose when he walked on stage. The night before the show Young played back-to-back shows at Atlanta's Fox Theater before catching a flight to San Francisco to appear at the farewell gig. The most famous performance of the song comes from The Last Waltz in 1976. It's where I first went to school and spent my 'formative' years." "It's not literally a specific town so much as a feeling," he said. ![]() In a 1995 interview with Mojo, Young explained that the "town in North Ontario" wasn't referring to one single place. But, being Neil Young, he did what Neil Young does: change, again.Neil Young's most memorable contribution to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's 1970 classic Deja Vu looks back at his childhood in Canada. It must’ve been nice, being on the edge of 50 and lionized by people half your age. At the time, Young was coming off some of the noisiest, most radical shows of Crazy Horse’s career (captured on Weld) and had been recast as the progenitor of a generation of underground bands like Nirvana and Sonic Youth-a distinction you couldn’t quite give to David Crosby, all due respect. The connection to Harvest is explicit, but the album also fits in a set of what you could call Gentle Neil: Comes a Time, Old Ways, Prairie Wind, Homegrown. The album’s most touching moment is on “Old King,” where, in the course of eulogizing a beloved dog, Young mentions having kicked him when he was bad: a moment of violence neutralized by time and made strangely beautiful by the fact that Young knows it won’t ever happen again. The effect is like looking at a hologram, or a trick image that changes when you tilt the card back and forth: The object is fixed, but what you see in it flickers-and both feel equally real. The poignancy isn’t just in the latter album’s tenderness-the string sections, the country lilt, the pedal steel guitar-but in the way that Young slips between past and present: how a memory of then becomes a vision of now (“Unknown Legend”), how circular time stirs feelings we think we’ve forgotten (“Harvest Moon”). So, while the feel of the albums is similar-gentle, plaintive, romantic-the experience is different: one, a catalog of romance according to youth, and the other according to the reflections of middle age. The same person, maybe, but separated by a Rubicon of experience. But Harvest was made by a recently divorced 26-year-old still negotiating his creative path, and Harvest Moon by a multiplatinum legend who’d secured the privilege of doing more or less whatever he wanted. One way to hear Harvest Moon is as an echo of 1972’s Harvest-a leap made easier by the fact that many of the same musicians played on both. ![]()
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