Neil Young once picked his best live film: “It’s dark as hell”
Following his collaborative success alongside Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash in the late 1960s, Neil Young returned to a more permanent and impactful solo career, his seminal album After the Gold Rush proving to be the vital first step in 1970. This ballad-packed gem set a precedent for the Canadian singer-songwriter’s most prolific and indisputably crucial decade, but it wasn’t without its rough patches.
As an intrepid creative testing the laws of convention, Young made a couple of wrong turns in his career that he owns with admirable integrity. His self-proclaimed nadir came in 1973 with the release of Time Fades Away, a live album recorded with The Stray Gators on the supporting tour for the 1972 album Harvest.
During a British radio interview with Dave Ferrin in 1987, Young discussed the release. “My least favourite record is Time Fades Away,” he said. “I think it’s the worst record I ever made – but as a documentary of what was happening to me, it was a great record.”
“I was onstage, and I was playing all these songs that nobody had heard before, recording them, and I didn’t have the right band,” Young explained. “It was just an uncomfortable tour. It was supposed to be this big deal – I just had Harvest out, and they booked me into 90 cities. I felt like a product, and I had this band of all-star musicians that couldn’t even look at each other. It was a total joke.” And it was a perfect portrait of rock ‘n’ roll in the era.
Young addressed the calamitous tour in a 1999 interview with Q. “The whole tour was a nervous experience,” he noted. “It wasn’t really a lot of fun. I kind of got into documenting that vibe. It’s not something I want to listen to a lot, and when I listen to it, I’m not that impressed.”
A close contender for Young’s career low point was his 1987 tour of Europe with Crazy Horse. “It was fuckin’ terrible,” as Young described it. Ticket sales were worse than expected, and those who did turn up beheld shoddy performances fraught with alcoholic excess. During some of the shows, riots broke out, and in the end, Young vowed never to work with Crazy Horse again. Naturally, he never kept this promise either.
Despite his self-disgust, Young found artistic value in the chaotic tour and produced a fittingly frenetic documentary film called Muddy Track. The movie documented the band’s obstreperous trip across Europe, capturing the band’s stereotypical rock ‘n’ roll experience. The feature remained under wraps for many years because would-be distributors felt it might damage their reputation. Thankfully, the footage was finally uncovered in Jim Jarmusch’s Year of the Horse in 1997.
When discussing his documentary films with Mojo in 1995, Young professed his love for Muddy Track despite the hard times it showcased. “Muddy Track is really my favourite of all of them, though,” he said in relation to his concert films. “It’s dark as hell, God, it’s a heavy one! [laughs] But it’s funky.”
“Muddy Track is not a documentary,” Young added on another occasion. “I don’t know what the fuck it is.” And this typically appealed to him. In an era of great exploration for the star, dabbling in vocoders and getting highly conceptual, Muddy Track is a perfectly artistic trainwreck.
Watch the trailer for Year of the Horse below.
