The most misunderstood era of Neil Young’s career: “They lost me”
It’s impossible to put someone like Neil Young in a box when it comes to his music. He does have the reputation of being one of the biggest stars in the world of folk rock and has multiple classics under his belt, but he was never afraid to take a risk, either, and that normally led to moments where things either didn’t work out and fans were wondering whether their favourite artist had officially lost it. All of the records might still fit together like chapters in a book, but Young didn’t find it all that surprising when people jumped ship on a handful of his favourite records.
Granted, a lot of that has to do with the titles thrust upon Young before he even became an icon. When he was working with Buffalo Springfield, he was already being looked at as a folk rocker with a political angle, and by the time people heard what he could do on his own on albums like Harvest, they were officially sold. They knew that they had a folkie who could rock a bit more than usual, but that can also be extremely limiting.
As much as people might like the idea of playing for thousands of people doing the same songs, there comes a moment when they want to switch things up. And while many artists change like that over time, Young was never willing to play along with the system, often going for drastic tonal shifts rather than trying to cater to what the audience of his label might be expecting out of him.
That’s partly why it’s easier to respect an album like Everybody’s Rockin’ than it is to actually listen to it. The whole point behind the record was to get back at Young’s record company for making him create a rock and roll album, but hearing him do a pastiche of 1950s rock and roll songs was definitely not what people had in mind coming off of albums like Comes A Time, either.
And once he hit the 1980s, Young showed he hadn’t even begun to get weird. Albums like Trans may have had a few moments that were strange by his standards, but for an era that relied primarily on visual images and looking glamorous, records like Landing on Water were never going to find an audience, especially when he tried to make songs that go with “the sound of the times” like ‘Weight of the World.’
Even though fans were getting off his hype train at that point, Young felt that this era was grossly misunderstood in its time, saying, “When the ’80s started, I’d been making music for 15 years professionally. Now the ’80s are usually the period that people tell me they lost me or I lost them. What happened was that I just wasn’t being accessible. See, as far as I’m concerned, those records (Trans, Everybody’s Rockin’, Old Ways) are as good as any record I’ve ever made. Maybe my ’80s music should just be looked at as one record.”
But it’s easier to see what he’s talking about knowing what he was going through. An album like Trans is mystifyingly strange from the same man who wrote ‘Heart of Gold,’ but since it was all in service to him trying to communicate with his son suffering from cerebral palsy, it’s easier to see the genuine heart and love put into it than wondering what the hell he was going on about.
Outside of the fanbase not getting it, the 1980s era of Neil Young only further proves the kind of versatility he has. Not all of it is necessarily good by any stretch of the imagination, but listening to what he was able to do with every genre he could think of, he may have more in common with someone like David Bowie in terms of artistic fearlessness.
