I was introduced to the music of Neil Young at a time when I was quite vulnerable. I had just recently made the jump from AM radio to FM. These days that doesn’t really mean anything, but at the time it was the equivalent of learning to ride a bike without training wheels. Very much the musical neophyte, in other words, and not really sure as to what was what. I mean I probably would have worked things out on my own eventually, but I would have wasted a lot more time thinking that The Eagles were worth listening to. Yes, that’s right – a fate worse than death. Fortunately, I fell in with some people who (mostly) steered me in the right direction. So I’d like take this opportunity to thank Patty Frink for setting me on the righteous path, to Neil and beyond. (Also, I’m sorry I walked in on you in the bathroom that one time. Honestly, I didn’t mean to stare.)

The album that the song is from, American Stars and Bars, came out in 1977, which was more or less the time I was busy working out the lay of the land. It has my all-time favorite Young cover illustration, a floorboard’s-eye view of a shitfaced Young passed out next to a spittoon, with a pink-polka-dot-pantied floozy (portrayed by the girlfriend of Young’s manager) down for the count on the bar itself, a half-empty bottle of (what else?) Canadian whisky about to slip from her hand. And above them both, the moon and stars in all their glory.

The album itself is a mish-mash of goofy country-tinged tunes (“Saddle Up the Palomino”, “Bite The Bullet”, “Homegrown”), some more straight-ahead country numbers (“The Old Country Waltz”, “Hold Back the Tears” and the absolutely gorgeous duet with Emmylou Harris, “Star of Bethlehem”), “Hey Babe”, which falls somewhere in between, and the amazing anomalous “Will To Love”, with its vibes, acoustic guitar, piano, crackling fire and distorted underwater vocals telling the story of, among other things, a migrating salmon – it’s all metaphorical, I’m reasonably sure – which contains what might as well be Young’s motto, “I can’t and won’t be tamed”.

And then there’s “Like A Hurricane”, 8:20 of desire and unfulfilled longing that comes out of nowhere. It comes out of the gate already running at full speed, no warm-up, no lengthy “Cortez the Killer” intro. Just a quick statement of theme and zoom into the first verse:

Once I thought I saw you in a crowded hazy bar,
Dancing on the light from star to star.
Far across the moonbeams I know that's who you are,
I saw your brown eyes turning once to fire.

We go from the murkiness of Once I thought I saw you in a crowded hazy bar to the relative clarity of I know that's who you are. But how much can you know about someone seen once – and across a crowded, hazy bar at that? Seems more likely that whatever is “known" is actually being projected. And who among us is innocent of that? Surely at some point in life you’ve been attracted to someone and just jumped to the assumption that they share your ideals and tastes, only to have been taken by surprise when they espouse the exact polar opposite. It’s a rude awakening when you find out that “pretty" doesn’t always mean “nice”. Some people figure that out fairly early in life. Others never do.

What is it that turns those brown eyes to fire? Lust? Anger? Jealousy? Excitement? We’ll never really know, and neither will the song’s protagonist.

Chorus time:

You are like a hurricane –
There's calm in your eye.
And I'm gettin' blown away
To somewhere safer where the feeling stays.
I want to love you but I'm getting blown away.

There’s never any gender attached to whoever “you” might actually be; I’ve always seen it to be “her”, which I suppose shows my own bias. Young is pretty firmly on record as being straight, and in fact the song was inspired by a woman he saw while out cruising the bars of Santa Cruz one night, but that’s no reason why someone couldn’t interpret it otherwise. I think we’ve all had those moments where we’ve seen someone and fallen hopelessly, irrevocably in love with them (or at least with the false image we had of them), only to never see them again.

I am just a dreamer, but you are just a dream,
You could have been anyone to me.
Before that moment you touched my lips
That perfect feeling when time just slips
Away between us and our foggy trip.

Again, things are hazy and dreamlike. If you want to squint a little, we could take this to refer to the state of interpersonal communication. I think I know what you’re about, but it could just be my interpretation superimposed on what you’re actually trying to put across. Nothing is ever completely clear, nothing is ever certain.

Back to the chorus, and thence on into the first of two gloriously unhinged solos. They tell the story more fully, more deeply and with more emotional veracity than mere words could ever hope to accomplish. This one starts out as if it’s just gonna be another “Cowgirl In The Sand” one-note deal, but then it swoops off into a flurry of half-realized notes, bent strings and aching, unrealized longing. I’m always a bit leery of solos described as “soaring”, but in this case it really does apply. I will grant that some of Young’s longer solos can be a bit, um, noodly. I dig the interplay of his guitar with that of the late Danny Whitten’s on “Cowgirl”, for example, but if I’m not in the right mood it can seem a bit wanky. I mean, let’s face it – entire civilizations could rise, fall and fade completely from memory over the course of, say, “Down By The River”, and there’d still be another 48 bars to go. Here, though, economy is the watchword. Relatively speaking, of course. Yes, it’s a long solo, as is the one still to come. The difference is that it’s all tightly focused on the subject at hand: an unbearable desire for the unattainable.

As we drop back out of the first solo into the sing proper, Young does a couple of lyrical flips:

You are just a dreamer, and I am just a dream.
You could have been anyone to me.
Before that moment you touched my lips
That perfect feeling when time just slips
Away between us on our foggy trip.

Now you are the dreamer and I am the dream. My potential misinterpretation of your motives could easily go both ways. Also, time just slips away between us on our foggy trip. I don’t know that I’d read too much into this last one, though; personally, I think Neil just fucked it up first time around. It’s not like that’s unprecedented, y’know.

Another chorus, and another breathtaking solo. If the first solo tells the story of the meeting of unrequited lovers (and since I’m the one writing this, let’s say that it does), solo number two is all about the realization that that which is desired can/will never be. There are moments when it seems as if the guitar is playing Young, wringing from him every last bit of frustration and longing. And yes, I realize just how breathless that sounds. All I can do is point you back to the song. Give it another listen. Maybe you’ll hear what I’m describing, and maybe you’ll just hear another gnarly Neil Young solo – which is fine, as far as it goes, and a perfectly valid interpretation. It is very much the gnarly workout – but if you look beyond the surface, there’s so much more to it.

Without the backdrop provided by Crazy Horse, I don’t think the solos would have the resonance they do. Drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot keep the bottom end spare and simple, while second guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro lays out on the six string but provides the crucial ingredient. According to a quote from Jimmy McDonough’s biography of Young, Shakey, the band had been hacking away at the song with the standard line-up for about ten days, all to no avail:

We kept playing it two guitars, bass, drums, but it wasn’t in the pocket. Neil didn’t didn’t have enough room to solo. He didn’t like the rhythm I was playing on guitar. One day we were done recording and the Stringman was sitting there. I started diddling with it, just playing the chords simply, and Neil said, “Y’know, maybe that’s the way to do it – let’s try it.” If you listen to the take on the record, there’s no beginning, no count-off, it just goes vroom! They just turned on the machines when they heard us playing again, ‘cause we were done for the day. Neil goes, “Yeah, I think that’s how it goes. Just like that.” And that was the take. That’s the only time we ever played it that way.

It’s that Stringman that adds that extra bit of wistful yearning, pushing Young’s guitar while simultaneously leaving room for it. I don’t think anything else would have worked as well.

Those who dismiss Crazy Horse as “untalented” are, by and large, the same people who had no clue as to what punk rock was about. Rock & Roll is at its best when it sounds as if the wheels are about to come off. That’s where the excitement comes from. Crazy Horse, so loose that they sound as if they could fall apart at any moment, are the college of cardinals in the Church of the Happy Accident, and Young is its pope. Which means that Young’s erstwhile compatriots in CSNY, those coked-out lameasses who should have been set adrift on an ice floe back in 1968, are Satan incarnate. “It’s getting to the point where I’m no fun anymore”? Dude, that point was about five feet from the starting gate.

If I may be allowed to quote myself, from another context: “The weakest part of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, as far as I’m concerned, was Crosby, Stills, and Nash… CSN always struck me as being simultaneously incredibly slick and hopelessly lame. The prime example of this ickyness would be the cat chow commercial known as “Our House”. (Now that I think of it - somebody really did use it in a commercial, didn’t they?) “I’ll light the fire / you put the flowers in the vase that you bought today” is a call to violence, people. You just want to see the 18-wheeler come barreling through the front yard and through the kitchen, or maybe the gas main could burst at the same moment he lights the fire, or a worn-out Soviet satellite could fall on the godamned house, obliterating the smug, self-satisfied proto-yuppies within while miraculously sparing the two cats in the yard. Something, anything, to cut the sickly sweetness of the song.”

In other words, all the polish in the world ain’t gonna make what you do any more relevant if you haven’t got the huevos to delve beneath the surface. CSN is all glossy sheen, while Young at his shiniest and most commercially acceptable was still a miner for a heart of gold. (From the liner notes to Decade, regarding “Heart of Gold”: “This song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw some more interesting people there.”) So go ahead and sail those wooden ships on the water and straight up your own ass if you want to, but you’re never gonna find one tenth of the emotional veracity Young, with or without the Horse, can provide.

Why do I like Neil Young? Well, it’s a lot of things. There’s the voice, of course, that plaintively wasted falsetto that is surely the dividing line for a lot of people. There’s the fact that he does what he wants to, when he wants to. I don’t like everything he’s done – some of it is outright crap – but I do like the fact that he’s out there doing it.

Mostly, though, I think it’s the mixture of intensity and melancholy that draws me in. Life is weird and often dark in his world. Mine too. And yet there’s also often a sense of humor there. “When You Dance” and “Cinnamon Girl” never fail to bring a smile to my face, for example, and both “Welfare Mothers” and “Fuckin’ Up” (my personal theme song) are pretty funny, in an intense kind of way. But for every lascivious “Bite the Bullet” there’s a “Cortez the Killer” waiting in the wings. Overall, it is brooding and introspective music, very personal, yet open-ended enough to not be solipsistic. You might have to be Neil himself to decipher the exact reference he’s making, but the rest of us can still find ourselves reflected in it.

Young turned sixty this past Saturday. His newest album, Prairie Wind, was written and recorded during his treatment for an aneurysm and the subsequent complications from his surgery. The lyrics are those of a man who hears the clock ticking, messages to loved ones (and possibly fans, too) and, more than anything else, a look back at where he came from and how it made him what he’s become. There’s no self-pity, no boo-hooing, just a look into his state of mind. The songs written and recorded post-setback, when it was pretty clear that things were gonna work out, are much lighter in tone, but there’s still that sense of self-examination without diving into the navel.

And that, my friends, is why Neil Young is right up at the top of the quality lyric game, as far as I’m concerned. Even if you expand the scope beyond the Aging Boomer category, there aren’t a whole hell of a lot of songwriters that can stand on the same coffee table with him. He may not be The Best or The Greatest… anything, but he is my personal favorite.

Oh, here's the song. That link is only good for seven days or 25 downloads, whichever comes first.