David Geffen, Neil Young, and the 1983 album that his label “buried”
Despite having had one of the most illustrious careers of any classic rock musician in the world, Neil Young hasn’t always been immune to making questionable decisions regarding his output.
This is something that can be true of most artists – they’re all fallible and can’t be perfect all the time, so they’re bound to slip up from time to time, but considering just how celebrated Young is for his consistency and constant ability to express his creative flair, one would expect these missteps to be few and far between, if not completely absent from his work.
Young went on a rather impeccable run of studio albums throughout the 1970s, with all of his records presenting a different side to him as an artist, and all of which are still regarded as highly impactful releases in the pantheon of rock music. However, when the creative well ran dry in this sense, and he found these novel ideas harder to come by, he began to dip his toes into areas where he didn’t feel entirely comfortable, resulting in some frankly disastrous and detrimental offerings.
Despite this downturn in quality, it wasn’t just a creative blip that caused his career to de-escalate in terms of his fortunes in the 1980s, and the interference of higher powers was also getting in the way of him doing exactly as he wished.
It was the first of his 1983 albums, Trans, that was the first of five that he released for Geffen, having decided to part company with Warner Bros subsidiary Reprise at the start of the decade, and this much maligned record saw Young boldly attempt to venture into an electronic-inspired sound. However, despite the bravery in attempting something new, the attempt felt impotent and lacking in many of the senses that Young had previously flourished.
When asked during a 1988 interview with Rolling Stone what he made of the five albums he had released for Geffen, with the deal having finally come to an end, he noted that it wasn’t just Trans that felt like a disappointment to him, but the entire spell under the label’s guidance. “It’s hard for me to disassociate the frustrations that I had during that period from the actual works I was able to create,” he said, immediately looking for an opportunity to hurl the label under the bus.
“I really tried to do my best during that period, but I felt that I was working under duress.”
“In all my time at Warner Bros, they never cancelled a session. For any reason. And it happened several times at Geffen. It was blatant manipulation. It was just so different from anything I’d ever experienced.”
Neil Young
His frustrations didn’t end there, however, and he also accused them of trying to sabotage the release of one of the albums he put out with them, much to his chagrin.
“They buried Everybody’s Rockin’,” Young asserted, speaking about the confusing rockabilly album released a mere six months after Trans. “They did less than nothing. They decided, ‘That record’s not gonna get noticed. We’re gonna press as few of those as possible and not do anything.’”
He may have felt as though he was under the thumb of the executives at Geffen, but if we’re being completely honest, most people wouldn’t really want an album like Everybody’s Rockin’ to be anything but buried so that their career could remain without any blemishes on it.
Young still insists that the record was not a result of his own wrongdoing, but nobody else has really forgiven him for having made it in the first place.
