The 1980s genre Neil Young never wanted to hear again: “It doesn’t grab me”
The number one rule when listening to Neil Young is never question Neil Young.
His entire MO was about making the music that he wanted to make, and if his label had a problem with that, that was their problem once he turned one of his records into their offices. He was never looking to make absolute crap by any stretch, but he knew that it would be a cold day in hell before he decided to follow along with trends every single time he approached a new album.
Because if you know anything about Young, he can get more than a little bit testy when someone tells him how his music should be played. David Geffen already made that mistake when telling Young that he wanted to make a rock and roll album and got Everybody’s Rockin’ instead, but even when Young did latch onto new trends, it was never about him trying to make something to fit in with the new crowd.
Landing on Water is still one of the most lacklustre albums that he ever made, but even when he made a dramatic swerve as he did on Trans, his heart was in the right place when thinking about how to communicate with his son. Not everything that he played was perfect, but that was part of the beauty of his music whenever he performed alongside Crazy Horse, whenever they played live.
Any live venue meant going out onto a musical battlefield half the time, and there are more than a few gigs where Young almost didn’t make it out in one piece. He was always in a street fight with his guitar and barely winning half the time, and even if a lot of his solos sounded like one of the most vicious assaults on the senses that anyone has ever heard, it was a lot more fun for him than watching someone play everything precisely every time they picked up their instrument.
Sure, there were people like Jimi Hendrix who could make everything sound absolutely perfect whenever he made a record, but the era that Eddie Van Halen started was a bit too alien to him. Eddie didn’t envision becoming one of the biggest guitarists in the world when he started, but once every single other guitar player started copying his style, Young understood that he needed to stay as far away from the virtuoso style of playing as he possibly could.
There’s a lot of merit that goes into practising your instrument until everything sounds perfect, but Young couldn’t get his head around someone who was playing so many notes and not saying anything, saying, “Nobody gives a shit if you have good technique or not. It’s whether you have feelings that you want to express with music, that’s what counts, really. The technical aspect is absolute hogwash as far as I’m concerned. It bores me to tears. I’m very impressed by those metal groups with their scale guitarists. When I see that, I go ‘Holy shit, that’s really something’. But it doesn’t really grab me.”
And the perfect example of something like that is someone like Yngwie Malmsteen. There are a ton of guitarists who would absolutely drool over every single one of those licks whenever he plays, but after going through all of the neo-classical scales that anyone has ever heard of, the idea of playing that fast isn’t going to make any sense unless there’s an actual song behind it at the end of the day.
Young could still appreciate someone who could play that fast, but there’s a fine line between impressing someone and becoming a bit too much for most artists. Technical proficiency should never be frowned upon by any stretch, but when looking at the other hair metal bands that adopted this kind of style, it was almost as if they were too focused on sounding completely perfect that the tunes started to suffer.
