What’s the most important album in the Neil Young catalogue?
A friend of mine used to nickname Neil Young “Neil Neil Orange Peel”, a niche reference to a scene from The Young Ones. The scene had absolutely nothing to do with Young and ostensibly more to do with A. S. Neill, whose 1972 autobiography was titled Neill Neill Orange Peel. Regardless, this nickname has stuck in my head and come to mind once more today on Young’s birthday.
Unlike orange peel, Young’s career is anything but superficial. The diversity of his seminal catalogue is perhaps only surpassed by his music’s lyrical and compositional depth. Very few solo artists can boast such a broad field of such a bountiful harvest.
On the topic of harvest, the Canadian artist has long made reference to his double life as a farmer (“I need a crowd of people, but I can’t face them day to day”). As well as being a stadium-filling rock legend, Young spent much of his life out of the spotlight on Broken Arrow Ranch near La Honda, California. He bought the property in 1970 for around $350,000 (~$2,442,202 today) and owned it until his 2014 divorce from Pegi Young.
Following his formative tenure with Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash in various combinations over the late ’60s, Young returned to a more permanent solo career with his third solo album, After the Gold Rush, in 1970, which kicked off what would be his most prolific and indisputably vital decade.
After the Gold Rush carried some of Young’s most enduring classics like ‘Southern Man’, ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ and, of course, the title track in a wonderful mix of piano, acoustic and electric guitar-driven music. Upon its release, Young had already begun laying the tracks for his 1972 follow-up, Harvest, which would bring a wholly acoustic sound.
In the classic single ‘Old Man’, Young made an artistic diary entry documenting his move to Broken Arrow Ranch. “About that time when I wrote [‘Heart of Gold’], and I was touring, I had also—just, you know, being a rich hippie for the first time—I had purchased a ranch, and I still live there today,” Young said of ‘Old Man’ in the film Heart of Gold. “And there was a couple living on it that were the caretakers, an old gentleman named Louis Avila and his wife Clara. And there was this old blue Jeep there, and Louis took me for a ride in this blue Jeep.
“He gets me up there on the top side of the place, and there’s this lake up there that fed all the pastures, and he says, ‘Well, tell me, how does a young man like yourself have enough money to buy a place like this?’ And I said, ‘Well, just lucky, Louis, just real lucky.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s the darnedest thing I ever heard.’ And I wrote this song for him.”
Harvest and After the Gold Rush remain Young’s two most beloved albums among fans, and throwing in 1974’s bluesy excursion, On the Beach, I’d say you have a fine trilogy that most artists could only dream of boasting. I’m not here, however, to pick out my favourite album of Young’s; that’s a matter of subjectivity.
In hopes of leaving the feathers of my readers unruffled, I’m instead seeking out Young’s most important album. Considering Young’s extensive oeuvre, an important album must be both creatively pioneering and timelessly seminal.
While Young’s work of the early 1970s was his most elegant and enduring, his 1980s catalogue took a step to the side and brought new ideas to the table. “The ’80s were really good,” Young remembered in the 2011 BBC Four documentary Neil Young: Don’t Be Denied. “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 realise that I wasn’t in a box, and I wanted to establish that.”
The album that, for me, marks the perfect transition between Young’s commercially dynamic phase and his latter experimental phase was 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps. The album is Young’s most important because it took a bold step into unchartered territory and laid the tracks for the progression of guitar-driven rock music over the 1980s and ’90s.
Drawing from the grit and gravel of the contemporary punk movement, Young treated his heavier guitar sounds to a beautiful barrage of distortion. It was this album, more than any other, that earned Young the nickname of ‘Godfather of Grunge’.
Bookended by the poignant acoustic number ‘My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)’ and its corresponding proto-grunge closer ‘My My, Hey Hey (Into the Black)’, Rust Never Sleeps comprises a mixture of live and studio recordings that heavily influenced a swathe of prominent alt-rock and grunge artists over the subsequent decades, most directly the likes of Pearl Jam, Pixies and Nirvana.
Kurt Cobain famously used lyrics from ‘My My, Hey Hey’ in his suicide note when he tragically took his own life in 1994, a poignant reminder of Young’s influence on the ’90s icon. The final letter to his family, friends and fans held the haunting words, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”.
Young wrote in his 2012 autobiography about how Cobain’s suicide letter scarred him. “When he died and left that note, it struck a deep chord inside of me. It fucked with me,” he wrote. “I, coincidentally, had been trying to reach him. I wanted to talk to him. Tell him only to play when he felt like it.”
Elsewhere, Pixies frontman Black Francis once hailed ‘Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)’ as the defining proto-grunge anthem. “It sounds iconic from the first moment,” he told Rolling Stone as he picked out five songs he wishes he could have written. “It’s like he’s standing on a mountain peak delivering a sermon that’s 100 years old.”
Listen to Neil Young’s ‘Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)’ below – perhaps the most important track on his most important album.
