The albums Neil Young used as a middle finger to his record company: “I knew no boundaries”
The creative life and body of work behind Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young have been guided by a staunch, unwavering commitment to his gut intuition. Wherever his artistic antenna is firing, Heaven and Earth will be moved to honour whatever direction his creative instincts are pulling him to.
Naturally, this can cause chaos for those in his orbit, dropping touring plans with his Crazy Horse band without any plan B and perennially in-out of the West Coast Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young supergroup. “I only care about the music,” he told the BBC in 2009. “Sometimes people are damaged by it, but if they understand me, they can understand what that is”.
Chasing his musical callings, while testing his bandmates’ patience, yielded a successful solo career that eclipsed most of the Woodstock generation with a run of albums bristling with vitality. Reaching a confounding apex with 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, Young channelled punk’s fury and blasted a down-tuned proto-grunge ripper radically miles above anything CSN were cutting, as a trio or solo. Off the back of ‘Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)‘s chart-topping raw power, Young more than any of his peers entered the 1980s as one of music’s most vital artists.
After 1981’s Re·ac·tor, Young signed to Geffen Records after having been on Reprise’s roster since 1968’s eponymous debut. Punk’s spirit was still burning away inside, pushing him to disregard his legacy and jump into the new sounds that made him tick.
Inspired by the non-verbal relationship with his son Ben, born with cerebral palsy, and the emerging synthpop dominating charts, Young swapped guitars for synthesisers on 1983’s Trans and cut a fully-fledged electronic album embracing techno futurism over the lauded folk rock of Hold. While personally satisfying—utilising the Sennheiser vocoder VSM 201 in a novel way to communicate with his son—label boss David Geffen began to regret ever signing the perennial wildcard.
Having already cut a country album the previous Autumn, Geffen rejected Old Ways as the next album and demanded some more rock ‘n’ roll. Geffen was going to get exactly what he asked for. Ignoring the implicit demand—deliver another Rust Never Sleeps—Young corralled the Shocking Pinks backing band, adorned rockabilly garb on its cover, and cut an affectionate pastiche of 1950s rock numbers from his youth. Lead by the ‘Wonderin” single—a song that had been floated around since After the Gold Rush—Everybody’s Rockin’ landed on Geffen’s desk with contrarian glee.
Geffen didn’t find the funny side. Suing Young for over $3.3 million on the grounds that his synthpop and rock ‘n’ roll albums were “not commercial” and “musically uncharacteristic of previous recordings.” Young fired a countersuit to the tune of $21million, arguing no such breach of contract had occurred as no creative promises had been made, and he’d been assured zero top-down interference on his work. Young won, returning to reprise in 1988 and later delivering the “rock ‘n’ roll” album Geffen was desperate for with 1989’s Freedom, his biggest hit in years and echoing the career rejuvenation he enjoyed with Rust Never Sleeps a decade earlier.
Legal wrangling and haphazard creative ventures may not have yielded material that matched Young’s 1970s heyday, but proved an essential period in tearing down his own mythos, reigniting his artistry, and building it all up again. “The ’80s were really good. The ’80s were like, artistically, very strong for me, because I knew no boundaries and was experimenting with everything that I could come across, sometimes with great success, sometimes with terrible results, but nonetheless I was able to do this, and I was able to realize that I wasn’t in a box, and I wanted to establish that”.
