“The mistakes and misfires”: the song Neil Young thought he had ruined
Rock and roll isn’t designed to sound perfect. There are a lot of musicians who are born into a world based on click tracks that make all songs sound seamless in Pro Tools now, but the magic behind the biggest names in the 1970s was that it often sounded like everything could break down at any moment. Neil Young normally prefers his music to be a little bit ramshackle than most, but he admitted that his performance on ‘Like a Hurricane’ was probably a lot less precise than he probably wanted.
But Young was never one big on editing all that much. While he certainly had quality control over everything that he was working on, there were just as many moments where it felt like he was just winging it half the time, including albums that were designed to piss people off, like Everybody’s Rockin’.
When working on American Stars ‘n Bars, though, Young was still in the golden age of what Eddie Vedder would call his “mountain funk” era. Despite coming out with the heaviest of the 1970s on Rust Never Sleeps, projects like Zuma took what he was doing on Harvest and brought it back to Earth, almost like you were peeking in on a jam session rather than getting the full experience of a studio album.
It’s easy to get that same energy on this album, with Young working off of Crazy Horse every time he plays a tune. Although ‘Like a Hurricane’ has all the makings of a great Neil Young song and even has his signature black guitar that he used on Rust Never Sleeps, he thought that the whole thing was mangled by letting him take a solo.
Young has his own unique vocabulary when it comes to taking a lead break, but he admitted that it was a bit too rough around the edges on ‘Like A Hurricane’, saying in Waging Heavy Peace, “‘Like a Hurricane’ is probably the best example of Old Black’s tone, although if you listen too closely, it is all but ruined by all the mistakes and misfires in my playing. That was a memorable recording, though, for the feeling that comes out of our instrumental passages.”
Then again, it’s hard to really call what Young did hear a “failure” in the truest sense. Are the notes always precise? Not really, but that’s not really the point. A recording like this is supposed to document emotion as well as instruments, and even if not everything is perfectly in tune, it still sounds like a band at their wit’s end trying to get the best out of each other.
Granted, it’s also hard to tell when Young’s style stops and sheer chaos begins. Take a song like ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’, for instance. That tune is probably one of the most enduring statements that any rock and roll artist has ever made, and yet the lead break veers halfway between a strange improvised solo and that kind of freakout that a guitarist would pull out of themselves after having one too many drinks.
It’s nice that Young can at least look at the few mistakes left in his classic tracks, but this is far from a botched take. It’s just another example of an artist being human, and since the rest of the world would be drifting towards technical guitar players after this record came out, it’s refreshing to hear someone play like they’re teetering on the edge of chaos every now and again.
