1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 194. Neil Young – After The Gold Rush (1970)

 

The albums for this year are really jumping back and forth between hard and soft, aren’t they? Back around 1968 it was All Psychedelia, All The Time (or so it felt). But this time we’ve gone from The Carpenters to Black Sabbath, and now to Neil Young in his folky mode (Young basically has two modes – folky and grungy).

I don’t remember who unearthed them, but I do remember this album and Harvest doing the rounds among my friends back in college, so it was fun to revisit again. It’s a very lo-fi affair, some tracks being just Young with acoustic guitar (Tell Me Why) or piano (After The Gold Rush, which also features a bit of flugelhorn). The title track is for me one of the best on the album a three verse reverie set in the past (“I dreamed I saw the knights in armour”), present (“I was lying in a burned-out basement”) and future (“I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships”), ending with mankind setting off to colonise new worlds in a track reminiscent of Queen’s ’39. It was quite nicely covered by both Prelude and the Trio of country legends.

There’s the slow Only Love Can Break Your Heart (written for Stills after his break-up with Joan Baez) and the more stomping When You Can Dance I Can Really Love, but it’s probably the polemical Southern Man that tops the album, one of only a handful of tracks where Young gets out his electric guitar and gives us some trademark acid soloing. This song attacks the racism of the Deep South, with its mention of burning crosses. At the time this came out, the Jim Crow laws had only been repealed 5 years ago; I can well imagine that it remained in practice if not in law, and attitudes aren’t suddenly going to change in five years. Despite popular conception, this is not the song that drive Lynyrd Skynyrd to mention Neil Young in Sweet Home Alabama, and what’s nice is that Lynyrd Skynyrd and Neil Young actually get on quite well.

His falsetto voice is perhaps not for everyone, nor the largely downbeat lo-fi feel (come back in a couple of decades for REM’s Automatic For The People for more of the same kind of thing). Hearing it again was more of a nostalgia trip than anything, it hasn’t stayed with me since college although I did hear After The Gold Rush on the radio not so long ago and remembered that it is a pretty good song.