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[ed. note: This piece was written before I got started on the Prog Stories project, but not long before.]
Neil wrote most of the story in one tidily sustained wave of inspiration, a new song/chapter arriving each day, as he drove his car to the studio for recording sessions with a Crazy Horse stripped to a skeleton of its rhythm section, second guitarist Poncho Sampedro having been asked, for aesthetic purposes, to sit the album out. After Grandpa died, the whole band, who loved him, was bummed out, and the vein of inspiration ran out. The way I remember Neil telling it, he thought that might be the end of the album (already too long to fit on a single LP). But then it occurred to him: what about Grandma? And so he wrote Bringin' Down Dinner, and in its wake came the final pieces, Sun Green and Be the Rain.
I love Bringin' Down Dinner. Acoustic live, the way I first experienced Greendale, it didn't add up to much, musically, but when Crazy Horse backs Neil's ragged, soulful pump organ on the album version, it sounds fantastic. But otherwise I'm no friend of the ghost that helped Neil finish Greendale. Sun Green, while developing the story in the unique main-character-shifting manner that drives the narrative, is less clever, less cutting, and less cool than all the songs before it. And finally, when Bernard Shakey's camera zooms out to show the "bigger picture" in closer Be the Rain, I disconnect completely. Don't get me wrong, both songs have great band grooves, but what makes me love Greendale as much as I do is the combination of phenomenal performances with a captivating story. When the tale dries up, though the performances remain, half the greatness is gone. Which amounts to a disorienting anticlimax. I just can't square with Be the Rain at all. It provides a sense of closure, yes, but I'd have preferred a cut-off (touching, if abrupt) after Bringin' Down Dinner, or even an awkward hobble to a close after Sun Green. Anything instead of the big-screen credits-roll here's-the-moral Be the Rain.
But most of Greendale is absolutely killer stuff. I love when Neil gets out-there. Actually, he's almost always out-there; it's just a matter of which kind of out-there you're getting—smeary heart-on-sleeve love songs? numbskull rock and roll? jokes and non-sequiturs? the shouting of big dumb slogans? idiosyncratic, or even perverse storytelling? I love them all but my favorite is the last, and that's what Greendale is, a single story told across ten (or nine, because does Be the Rain even count as part of the story?) songs. It has a setting, characters with names, plenty of dialogue, free indirect discourse, and a few fantastic blows of a battering ram against the third wall. It has a story you can summarize.
Albums like this are bizarrely rare. I'm not sure why rock and folk music have generally avoided the "story album" or "novel album," to coin two clunky phrases. An aversion to opera? Or to musical theater? I have no ear for opera and detest musical theater, but I'm fascinated by the possibilities that rock/folk/what-have-you structures present in this regard. It's a territory that's barely been explored, barely visited, even. Neil is, as so often in the mountainous, quaking land of rock and roll, part of the front vanguard. But even Neil only stopped by once and departed, classically restless. Now this part of the land lies empty. "I'm falling in love with Calliope," Dylan sang recently in Mother of Muses. "She don't belong to anyone. Why not give her to me?" I've been wondering about that ever since.
Anyway, Greendale! So good! All the songs rhyme, and the rhymes are occasionally forced, but the discomfort I felt to hear them was long ago buried under all the joy I take in how badass, audacious, weird, funny, insightful, tender, and tremendously touching the songs are. Grandpa's Interview probably wouldn't hit hard if heard out of context, but as Track 7 of Greendale (a true double-vinyl album, by the way, just structurally speaking; Neil's team made it a triple LP to keep sound quality up, I guess, but lengthwise, it's exactly four 18-21 minute sides long, and the four can be divided very cleanly), it is in my top three Neil Young songs. There's an amazing moment that makes me laugh and cry in the exact same instant. Such brilliance.
But Grandpa's Interview is only the best of them, and not by a wide margin. Each of the first eight songs is amazing, even Falling from Above, which served as midwife to the Greendale concept, but was conceived as a stand-alone track. Little did Neil know, writing his latest warmhearted country-rocker, how intense, penetrating, and sad a story was hidden in these character/role and place names: Grandpa, Cousin Jed, Edith and Earl, their "young girl" (as yet unnamed), Grandma, the Double E...
As usual for Neil in these latter years (and, fair warning, I'm a strange bird who believes that, for all its various and phenomenal peaks, Neil's 1963-1991 output pales beside what he's accomplished starting with the release of Harvest Moon in 1992, on through to now), he cloaks the song concepts in incredible music. Greendale sounds like nothing else in Neil's discography, not even other records with the Horse. Of all his "back-to-absolute-basics" albums, it seems to me the richest and most beautiful.
(Back to: A Personal Canon)
I tried desperately to get into Greendale and never never quite managed it, but I'll have to revisit it in light of this article. You might be onto something as far as Neil's '92-present output goes - I haven't heard all of it by any means, but the '90s albums, Chrome Dreams II, Le Noise and Psychadelic Pill are some of my favourites.
ReplyDeleteI treasure Chrome Dreams II as well. Le Noise and Psychedelic Pill -- likewise awesome. Neil has (obviously) always been on a singular path, but I kinda feel like early on, the path he walked was part of a wider avenue that other artists were also tramping down... as the years wore on, though, the great avenue forked—it branched off into many smaller roads—some folks kept walking, some stopped—and Neil, I'd say, has walked further down his own chosen road than almost anyone else has. So that as the years wear on he just gets more and more unlike anyone else in the business. He's never stopped being wonderful, but it has become a weirder & weirder wonderful. I think you gotta let him teach you to love him... what blew the gates wide open for me was when I once loaded his entire discography onto an iPod classic and started putting it on shuffle during my long Colorado mountain drives. Masterpieces from Harvest and On the Beach, etc etc, sounded NO BETTER than random tracks hailing from Old Ways, Mirror Ball, Prairie Wind, Living with War, what have you...
DeleteThat's a great way of describing it. One thing I like is how (unless I haven't been looking hard enough) there's often no clear trajectory from one album to another. Like with Dylan, for example, in hindsight you can see the seeds of Nashville Skyline in John Wesley Harding, or the beginnings of the songbook albums in Modern Times. But with Neil it's almost like his discography is being released out of order - only he could produce a trio like Psychedelic Pill, A Letter Home and Storytone one after the other. I love it, no one else like him for sure.
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