Why Neil Young is proud of one of his career low points
After his formative tenure with Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash in the late 1960s, Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young returned to a more permanent solo career with his game-changing third solo album, After the Gold Rush, in 1970. This slice of magic would ignite the star’s most prolific and indisputably vital decade, but it wasn’t without its ups and downs.
As with any intrepid creative testing the laws of convention, Young made a couple of wrong turns in his career that he owns with stylish integrity. Young’s 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 1972’s Harvest.
In a 1987 British radio interview with Dave Ferrin, Neil 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. It was just an uncomfortable tour. It was supposed to be this big deal – I just had Harvest out, and they booked me into ninety 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.”
Young added in a 1999 conversation with Q, “The whole tour was a nervous experience. 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 nadir was his 1987 tour of Europe with Crazy Horse. “It was fuckin’ terrible,” as Young once 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.
However, all was not lost. Young somehow saw artistic value in the chaotic tour and produced a calamitous, ramshackle documentary film titled Muddy Track, which documented the band’s ill-disciplined trip across Europe. The film remained under wraps for many years because distributors had a reputation to uphold, but 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 documented. “Muddy Track is really my favourite of all of them, though,” he said. “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.”
Watch Neil Young and Crazy Horse perform in Milan, Italy, in 1987 below.
