The 1983 album Neil Young called his greatest work: “One of my best records”
Anything that Neil Young ever touched on needed to be done on his own terms.
There were a few moments where he tried to change with the times and make the kind of contemporary records everyone else was doing, but since that resulted in some of the worst records that he’s ever made, it’s not like he was looking back on a record like Landing on Water all that fondly. But in terms of personal enjoyment, Young felt a lot of his best work came from albums where he was sticking it to the man a little bit more than usual.
Because, in a strange way, Young was almost like the original punk rocker. Every other rock and roll band seemed to get taken down a couple of pegs the minute that Sex Pistols and The Clash became huge, but the reason why Young never did was that he always bet on himself. He knew that there was a lot that he could do by staying true to his own muse, and even if his record label didn’t like him making the same kind of record, he wasn’t going to cower to what everyone else wanted.
He could have spent his entire life making a million different versions of Harvest, but by the time that he was working with Geffen, he was much more interested in making more laid-back music. Country wasn’t that far off for him, and albums like Comes A Time are beautiful for what they were, but for someone who released records like Rust Never Sleeps, the label was a little bit shocked that they weren’t getting that kind of record.
They needed a return to form, and the minute that they demanded that they wanted a straight ahead was when the monkey’s paw curled a little bit. Sure, they were going to get a rock and roll album, but Everybody’s Rockin’ is one of the most hilarious pranks Young could have pulled. Because, yes, he did give them a rock and roll album, but making an entire record of songs that sounded like they belonged in 1958 was one of the most expert-level trolls anyone has ever pulled.
And even if Young knows that the record is terrible to a certain degree, he did put it up there with some of his best records, saying, “I think Everybody’s Rockin is one of my best records and I know it’s real hard for a lot of my listeners to accept the fact that I could act and sing, do and be a character, have a soul doing it.” You might think that Young needs professional help after saying that, but that ‘playing a character’ line isn’t there by accident.
He was never going to pull off other disguises like David Bowie did throughout his career, but he could at the very least make tunes that had a bit of attitude to them. There are definitely moments where the band are cutting loose and making a handful of decent tunes, but when you look at any of the promotion that Young did for the album, he was clearly grinning up his sleeve at how pissed off his label was that he pulled something like this.
In fact, Everybody’s Rockin’ might have actually been a little bit more prophetic in a certain way. Young always came by it honest as a singer-songwriter, but he could also be really goddamn funny, and if this was him making a goofy record about old-time rock and roll, it wasn’t out of the question for him to make a song like ‘This Note’s For You’ a few years later, after seeing so many people do beer commercials.
Whereas records like After the Gold Rush and Rust Never Sleeps are still some of the greatest records that Young ever produced, Everybody’s Rockin’ is perfect for an entirely different reason. The whole thing was meant to be one big pile of shit to a certain degree, but even when Young was intentionally shooting himself in the foot, that didn’t mean that he couldn’t get a few cheap laughs out of it.
